“Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” is a seminal work by Jared Diamond published in 1997. The book seeks to explain why Eurasian civilizations, as a whole, have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority.
Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians, he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures, and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes.
The book’s title “Guns, Germs, and Steel” refers to the means by which certain civilizations have dominated others. Guns represent advanced weaponry and the ability to wage effective warfare, germs refer to the diseases that Europeans brought to the New World, which wiped out large numbers of indigenous populations who had no immunity, and steel stands for advanced technology in general.
In the book, Diamond outlines the theory of geographic determinism, the idea that the opportunities and constraints imposed by geography can shape the direction of societal development. He asserts that access to domesticable plants and animals, the orientation of continental axes, and geographic barriers all played substantial roles in shaping the world as we know it today.
Diamond begins his book by pointing out that by the year 1500 AD, advanced civilizations with metal tools and writing systems had arisen only in regions that had access to productive crops and animals suitable for domestication. These were found in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and possibly a few other places.
In a section of the book titled “From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy,” Diamond discusses how the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to settled farming communities led to an explosion of population growth, more complex political organizations, and ultimately the formation of states and empires.
“Guns, Germs, and Steel” has been widely read and has received various accolades. However, it has also been critiqued by several scholars who argue that Diamond oversimplifies complex historical processes and downplays the role of culture and human agency in the development of societies. Nevertheless, the book remains a significant contribution to our understanding of the broad patterns of human history.
Jared Diamond’s thesis in Guns Germs, and Steel is that arbitrary geographical characteristics defined the fate of civilizations. The earth moves from east to west, not from north to south. Regions with a similar latitude shared the same environmental conditions. The people of these regions transformed from hunter gatherers to farmers. Agriculture allowed humans to do two important things: gain free time, and maintain close contact with animals.
Free time, which was allotted to them because crops could be stored for long periods, allowed people to spend time on inventing technologies such as writing, that would lead to the development of culture, law, politics, and commerce. These effects made people of these regions more powerful, and at some later point during their history, they would be capable of pillaging and plundering the lands of the people of other regions of the world, who did not develop such technologies.
The second advantage from agriculture, contact with animals, exposed people to germs, which killed some and developed an immunity in others. Those who developed an immunity spread their genes. This was also to the detriment of people who lived in undeveloped areas, for they did not live in close proximity to animals, and were vulnerable to disease. Even parts of Africa that have grown more powerful than their neighbors have done so because of agricultural advantages.
Diamond starts at the very beginning of human life.
For most of human evolutionary history we lived as hunter-gatherers. The lures of civilization – sedentary living, cities, a division of labor, government, professional armies, writing, metallurgy- emerged from a recent development, farming, which was invented around ten thousand years ago.
Farming depends on plants and animals that can be tamed and exploited, and only a few species are suited to it. These species happened to be concentrated in only a few areas in the world, and these include the Fertile Crescent, China, and Central and South America.
The first civilizations emerged in those regions. From then on, the destinies of nations depended on their geography.
Eurasia, the world’s largest landmass, is a very large catchment area for local innovations. Traders, sojourners, and conquerors can discover them and spread them, and people living at the crossroads can combine them into a high-tech package.
Eurasia also runs in an east-west direction while Africa and the Americas run north-south. Crops and animals domesticated in one area can be spread to other along lines of latitude which happen to be lines of a common climate. But the spread cannot happen along lines of longitude because of climate variation which takes place even along small distances.
Horses that were domesticated in the Asian steppes could migrate west towards Europe, and east towards China, but Llamas and alpacas domesticated in the Andes could never travel north to Mexico. This allowed the Mayan and Aztec civilizations without pack animals.
And until recently, moving heavy goods across long distances could only take place by water. Europe and parts of Asia have
And until recently the transportation of heavy goods over long distances (and with them traders and their ideas) was possible only by water. Europe and parts of Asia have natural harbors and navigable rivers, while Africa and Australia do not.
Thus, Eurasia conquered the world not because their people were more intelligent but because they could take advantage of trade and the exchange of ideas. If you take a country like Britain and break down what composes its “culture” you will see that really, it is an accumulation of discoveries that have taken place over long spans of time and space. The collection includes cereal crops and the alphabet from the Middle East, gunpower and paper from China, domesticated horses from Ukraine, and others.
But the insular cultures of Australia, Africa, and the Americas (due to their geography) could not utilize innovations from other areas in the world.
Diamond refers to an extreme case, Tasmania.
The Tasmanians, who were nearly exterminated by Europeans in the nineteenth century, were the most technologically primitive people in history. Unlike the Aborigines on the Australia, the Tasmanians had no way of making fire, no boomerangs or spear throwers, no specialized stone tools, no axes with handles, no canoes, no sewing needles, and no ability to fish.
But the archeological record shows that their ancestors from the Australian mainland had arrived with these technologies ten thousand years before. But the land bridge connecting Tasmania to the mainland was submerged and the island was cut off from the rest of the world.
Diamond thinks that any technology can be lost from a culture at some point in history. A raw material could have been in short supply, which would have forced people to stop making the product that depended on that raw material. Or all the artisans were killed by a natural disaster or storm, or some prehistoric Luddite imposed a taboo on a practice for whatever reason.