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4.5 ★★★★★
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★★★★★ 4
Monumental Thesis, Richly Researched & Carefully Argued
Motivating this book are two questions 1) When Spanish conquistador Pizzaro encountered Inca emperor Atahualpa, how did the former, with fewer than two hundred men overwhelm the latter with over 80,000? and 2) When the Europeans set up colonies on the island of new Guinea, why was it that they had so much stuff to trade, but the natives of the island had so little?
The answer to the first question is, of course, that the Spanish had Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond does an outstanding job arguing for the pivotal importance of Germs in the equation. He clearly explains - using the idea of germs - why Europeans overran the Americas and Australia but not Africa. His agument regarding steel is notably weaker; but I think it does support his thesis adequately. I failed to detect a compelling argument for why Europeans had guns but others did not.
The book's primary focus is on how civilization got started. He looks first at the cultivation of plants and then at the domestication of animals. Examining areas in Africa, Eurasia, the Americas, and Australia, he totes up the lists of suitable flora and fauna and evaluates their merits. He notes that it was the fertile crescent that harbored the most suitable grains, legumes (or pulses), and domesticable animals. No other location comes close to having this rich combination of natural resources. He shows that this explains the very early appearance of agricutlure and therefore of writing, religion, and law in this area (and in China).
He also shows how any human advancement would spread more quickly in Eurasia than it would within the Americas and Africa. This gives Eurasia a double advantage; it can harbor more people by virtue of its agricultural practices and each person has greater access to new ideas because of strong east-west trade currents. Thus cultures in Eurasia could easily adapt ideas based on those of other societies instead of creating them from scratch.
He concludes that any person who accepts his thesis of the forces shaping civilization - at least the necessary precondition to get started - would necessarily conclude that civilization's advances must inevitably run quickest on the Eurasian continent.
A large portion of the book is focussed on the factors influencing the establishement of an agricultural system that is capable of supporting a whole large class of non-agricultural workers. The assumption, I believe, is that we already know that this is the primary requirement for the birth of a civilization. Still I was looking forward to Diamond's take on what happens after we all learn to read and write. I was hoping he might explain the ascent of the west since 1000 BC or 1500 AD. But he does not.
He does not, for instance, argue why it was the British and Spanish, not the Turks and Indians who settled Australia and the Americas. This, perhaps is a different question. Yet it seems to be linked to the idea of frontiers and access to resources. For it is always when the full set of advanced cultural practices reach populations in the richest, most uncultivated frontiers and these ideas cast anew in the light of a new environment that civilization seems to gain its greatest momentum.
He uses Polynesia as a microcosm for the world. In this laboratory, a group of people with the same genetic cross-section and same cultural practices embarked on a grand venture to settle all the islands of the Pacific some two millenia ago or so. The systems of government they set up and the level of civilization they reached were highly dependent upon the agricultual productivity of their citizens. Colonists on small islands unsuitable for agriculture became hunter-gatherers and lived in egalitarian societies. Those in productive lands organized into small states with strong chiefs or kings, each with their own little standing armies.
The book is richly researched and solidly argued as far as it goes. But there are a handful of quibbles one might raise.
1) The author tends to repeat himself. As the book progresses, the portion of prose that is a restatement of something said before becomes so high that this reader found himself skipping whole chapters.
2) The author fails to provide a compelling argument about why China lagged Europe at some point after 1500. One wonders why the author did not simply use the argument at hand. Colonialism provided to Europe the raw materials necessary for industrial production. China was closed until two or three decades ago and so did not have adequate access to the raw materials that vaulted Europe and North America to their current place. The opening of China to the world has quickly closed this gap. In other words, the cultural practice that gave frontier states the advantage was the high value they realized in trade: of getting required natural resources and finished goods from other places instead of being closed off. The book's central thesis is that the first and most necessary condition for the success of a society lies in its access to the required resources, and that transport of goods and ideas is crucial to the success of this enterprise. For this book to fail to make this connection I find to be an astonishing lapse.
3) Unless it is hidden in one of the skipped chapters, Diamond never starts to answer the second motivating question about 'stuff', even though it is a simple and direct extension of his fairly robust argument.
This book is of crucial importance in counter-balancing our Darwinian view of the world. It was not that Europeans were better people by some genetic measure. (Darwin seemed to assume a single measure of fitness. But each environmental variable provides a different metric of fitness so the whole notion of one group being generally 'more fit' is utter nonsense.) It was that they had a body of technologies, cultural practices and diseases that naturally tended to overwhelm other groups. And that these ideas and practices (and sometimes diseases) are an inevitable advantage any agrarian or post agrarian society has over a less highly organized one. Europeans simply got a head start thanks to geography.
There is much to learn, and much to contemplate in this book. Read It.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2005
★★★★★ 5
You may never see the world the same way again
Format: Hardcover
Ok I got a lot out of this book.
Like Yali, the charismatic New Guinean local politician who quizzed the author 25 years before the book was written wanting to know why Europeans developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea which had little cargo of theirs, I bought this book in a bid to understand why Africa and its inhabitants developed at a much slower pace than other continents. Was it a matter of fate? Or was the politically incorrect charge that Africans are innately inferior to their fairer skinned counterparts somewhat justified ?
Jared Diamond makes a strong case for Geography's deterministic role in the evolution of societies. In other words, the rich societies of today simply won the geographical draft lottery (in terms of who got the largest continental pie/size, who got the most ideal conditions for farming, who got the most number of wild mammals suitable for domestication, and who got the widest variety of wild plant species ideal for agriculture) played over 13,000 years ago when modern man began to settle into village life in a few parts of the world. That decisive edge, reinforced over the last 13,000 years is what led to the emergence of an indomitable Europe that eventually came to lead the world due to its development of guns, germs, and steel.
According to the Author, Eurasia got decisively lucky in more ways than one:
The Late Pleistocene extinction decimated Eurasia's competitors by felling wild mammal species of most of North and South America and those of Africa that may have facilitated intensive farming instead of the hunter-gathering lifestyle which eventually became a big impediment to the development of rapidly evolving complex societies on those continents. Those extinctions left Eurasia with many more wild candidates for domestication than the Americas and Africas offered.
Agriculture and Continental Size were huge enablers. Eurasia is twice as large as the next largest continent, Africa, and had a wide extensive landmass of fertile soil amidst a variety of wild life that were easily domesticated for animal herding and valuable crops that facilitated the development of intensive farming techniques that helped serve denser populations and formed the basis for the formation of complex organized societies. Denser populations tend to rise only under conditions of food production, populations served by food surpluses from intensive farming techniques were more likely to have non-farming specialists, technocrats, warriors and bureaucrats. In contrast, poorer societies such as hunter-gatherers without such advantages remained as hunter-gatherers living in bands which were far from ideal to produce crop surpluses available for redistribution or storage, and hence could not support and feed non-hunting craft specialists, armies, bureaucrats, and chiefs to enable them evolve complex societies.
In turn, agriculture spawned lethal germs emanating from Eurasian's long advantageous exposure to domestic Animals which was as decisive in eliminating local populations in conquest as guns and steamboats were. As illustrated by the New world's conquest of almost 95 percent of the 20million American Indians; exposing the Indians to strains of germs the Indians had never been exposed to, and against which they therefore had neither immunity nor genetic resistance to.
The development of writing was another essential agent in assisting the conquests of Eurasian Societies: by fostering the development of maps that were beneficial to sailors exploring new lands to conquer, by providing a new way of communicating and (through preserved records) inspiring later generations to conquest, writing played a crucial role in the course of civilization but could not have been possible without food production. Writing emerged independently only in the Fertile Crescent, Mexico, and China because those were precisely the first areas were food production arose in their respective hemispheres.
I already told you that what brought me to this book was to understand why as an African, we've evolved rather slowly compared to everyone else? I got my money's worth somewhere in pg 399 where the author states that "the factor behind Africa's slower rate of Post Pleistocene development compared with Eurasia's is the different orientation of the main axes of thee continents. Like that of the Americas, Africa's major axis is north-south, whereas Eurasia's is east-west. As one moves along a north south axis, one traverses zones differing greatly in climate, habitat, rainfall, day length, and diseases of crops and livestock. Hence, crops and animals domesticated in one part of Africa had great difficulty in moving to other parts. In contrast crops and animals moved easily between Eurasian societies thousands of mile apart but at the same latitude and sharing similar climate and day lengths". In a nutshell, geography, and not biology, ultimately did us in.
I found this book a bit of a slog to get through due to the author's interdisciplinary approach ( history, archaeology, evolutionary biology, sociology, cultural anthropology etc) which mirrors his career trajectory so far. One of the few bones I have to pick with the book, as so many other reviewers have already mentioned, is its lack of sources. I also thought the author strove, quite frequently, a bit too hard for political correctness in for example, sounding a bit patronizing to the plight of poor societies like mine. I admit it may amount to career suicide for a tenured professor to have done otherwise; but to my mind any reader who can't handle a little intellectual honesty no matter how inconvenient isn't ready to address the fundamental questions about the human condition. For some reason, the kindle version I purchased didn't have images due to copyright issues. A bit of a setback because I didn't have any maps handy to make sense of the strange locations that pop up at various points in this read and no thanks, I like to read with an internet connection as far from me as possible. Then lastly, there was the glossy treatment of why different parts within Eurasia developed differently which he addresses scantly in a later edition of the book.
But GGS ultimately proved to be a great read for me, and highly recommended for anyone who wants a keener appreciation of the world we live in today. But be forewarned, you may never see the world the same way again which surely is a good thing.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2012
★★★★★ 5
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Format: Hardcover
Recently, I finished this great, broad, historical, and significant endeavor. Let me begin by expressing my appreciation of Jared Diamond’s wonderful ability to simplify a very complex topic and related ideas. This alone, makes this read a great one. Too, there a few gems of humor and wit within the pages which caught my eye and mind. Don’t get me wrong though. The pages are filled with complex data, examples, and comparisons. Upon more than one occasion, my understanding necessitated the rereading of paragraphs and pages.
Before I proceed into deeper thoughts, I must admit the duration of this read as being conducted well over an extended timeframe. I began reading it years ago, stopped, and then started again. Over the course of the last several months, I recommitted and achieved.
In thoughtful detail, Diamond seeks to explain why certain groups of people have been successful over the course of human events and history, while others, in comparison, are not. It should be noted, the idea of “success” is very subjective. So, success in this case, is related to Western ideas of technological development, exploration, and conquest - generally described as one group of people gaining control or influence over another. An effective description of this is the Spanish conquest and colonization of the “New World,” especially the Aztecs and Incas. This example, though quite large in scope, and as pointed out by Diamond, has occurred throughout human history in large and small ways involving a multitude of others groups of people, both known and unknown.
In short, I believe Diamond does well in addressing the impact and luck of geography and resources, as well as, the influences of more innate human characteristics and variety. The debate of nature versus nurture is here too contained. In the past, and not only in recent history, humans have expressed understandings of success in terms of innate differences which must exist between people - obviously though, those in power and dominate are able to define and express such ideas. However, Diamond looks beyond this and recognizes the complexity, and ultimately more profound influence of reality, nurture. In this sense though, it is not simply human nurturing and choice, it is the opportunities presented to humans, in difference places, at different times, to take advantage of their earthly surroundings and the ability to nurture developments, or not.
This read is filled with a plethora of well detailed examples which come to show how access, or not, to certain elements leads to the success and superiority which has been described and known by those in power, throughout history. So, today, when certain people look down upon others and their lack of some qualities or characteristics, Diamond’s historical analysis provides engaging insight beyond and through the bias.
Who we are presently is the result of all the past experiences of the human ancestors who preceded us, and furthermore, our development and success, in comparison to other humans, is simply more so the result of the access we have had to a confluence of resources and circumstances which allowed us to dominate other groups of humans with less access to the same. As groups of humans defined through sociological processes, we are no more intelligent, healthy, or physiologically better than the whole of humanity understood to exist through anthropology, biology, and any other area of study.
“We all know that history has proceeded very differently for peoples from different parts of the globe...Those historical inequalities have cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies. While those differences constitute the most basic fact of world history, the reasons for them remain uncertain and controversial.” In this work, Diamond splendidly explains how, “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”
Please give the ideas of these pages the opportunity to share with you a detailed perspective of human experience which reaches far into the depths of history, beyond even the earliest written language. Diamond’s words will likely cause you to become lost in thoughts of the past. However, at the same time, he’ll take you to definitive places of demonstrable purpose leading to a better future understood through the context(s) of human experience.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2016
★★★★★ 5
Brilliant, eclectic panorama of the past 13,000 years
This intriguing and expansive book gathers knowledge from a number of fields (archaeology, anthropology, ecology, evolutionary biology, horticulture, and more). Its novelty is not in the details, any of which can be found in other books, but in the synthesis of 13,000 years' worth of human history. Diamond argues that many (but not all) of "the striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the people themselves but to differences in their environments."
Diamond covers so much material that any attempt at summary would be imprecise. The sections I found most compelling dealt with agriculture and animal husbandry--two topics that would have probably induced sleep if covered by another author. For example, he presents the fascinating background that the dominant five "large" domesticated mammals--sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, and horses--originated in central Eurasia (and that no easily domesticated, large mammals were available, for example, to North Americans or Australians); that these animals include the world's only widespread "beasts of burden," giving their human handlers additional advantages in mobility and farming; and that most of the world's lethal diseases resulted from proximity to the barnyard, gradually providing Eurasians with immunity to illnesses that later wiped out entire societies upon first exposure. The minor mammals (camels, llamas, reindeer) were too limited by geography and climate to affect the course of history outside their confines. As for zebras, bears, giraffes, tigers, hippos--to this day, nobody has been able to domesticate them. While this seems intuitively obvious, no writer has so clearly and irrefutably connected the dots, showing how access to these animals gave early chiefdoms an insurmountable advantage over those human societies without them and allowed them to develop surpluses and commerce that supported the world's most enduring civilizations.
Comments made by the author's critics, while few in number, nearly prevented me from reading this book and need to be addressed so other readers won't be similarly discouraged. A few readers seem offended by Diamond's self-mocking and somewhat tongue-in-cheek assertion (in the Introduction) that the natives of New Guinea have certain advantages that make them arguably more "intelligent." Yet these commentators are willfully ignoring the context: Diamond admits that "New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood," yet he is quite aware of how "stupid I look to New Guineans when I'm with them in the jungle." That is, if one defines "intelligence" not as the knowledge needed to use a computer or write a book review but, rather, as the ability to survive in the wild ("following a jungle trail" or identifying poisonous mushrooms, to cite two of the author's examples), then the New Guineans win hands down. To make a similarly lighthearted argument: when the house of cards we call "civilization" is threatened by the least misfortune (economic recession, power blackout, bad weather, the death of a British princess), a frightening number of otherwise "intelligent" people, instead of relying on their wits and survival skills, rush straight for their therapists.
Likewise, anyone who accuses Diamond of "geographic determinism" cannot have read the epilogue, in which he clearly rejects such an extreme position. He admits that individuals and cultures--and, for that matter, pure chance--can also influence history, but "that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, then do other environments." The author's argument is unambiguous: while culture, as well as individual inventors and rulers, certainly influence history on a microcosmic level (during spans of centuries or millennia), there are larger factors, such as geography and ecology, at play when human history is considered as a whole over the last 13,000 years. Diamond is looking at the forest rather than the trees; thus, to fault the author for ignoring such factors as religion and politics is off the mark, since such belief systems didn't exist in anything remotely resembling their present form for most of the period under discussion. Furthermore, to identify human advances in terms of culture still fails to explain how differing cultures arose in the first place.
Finally, and more easily dismissed, are those hecklers who howl "political correctness." Such critics seldom identify flaws in the author's arguments or even tell us what they insinuate by this increasingly meaningless term.
Since the book's span is so sweeping and since many of Diamond's hypotheses are offered tentatively (as suggestions for a new "science" of history), there are bound to be statements or implications that may eventually prove inaccurate or too simplistic. I strongly suspect, however, that his overarching thesis will withstand the test of time; at the very least, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" will inspire open-minded thinkers to consider human history--in its broadest sense--in a whole new light.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2003
★★★★★ 4
Great scope and central thesis, but tries too hard
[Strong 3.5 stars for its scope and development of the central thesis, but loses points for trying too hard to explain away non-European cultural failures.]
The first line of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning opus is: "This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years." His central thesis is that luck of genetic distribution of domesticable plants and animals, particularly cereals and large mammals, gave a tremendous leg up to western Eurasia in the development of civilization. In other words, it wasn't poor choices or innate inferiority that caused most of the world to be dominated by European culture -- just luck.
In a book with greatly wider scope than most nonfiction Pulitzer winners, Diamond pulls together long-term threads of farming, herding, languages, disease, technology, government, and religion. He attempts to explain how trends in all these disparate areas rather inexorably led to the cultural and economic state of the world today. While many of the author's arguments are subject to debate, the writing is lucid; it's easy to see why the Pulitzer committee gave Diamon the prize.
To take to task all the debatable points in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" would be a huge undertaking. I'll try to highlight a few.
Diamond argues that the temperate Mediterranean climate (featuring wet winters and dry summers) of southwest Asia aided greatly in early development, then has to explain why similar climates in California, Chile, and southwest Australia didn't spur development in those places. Human actions (particularly deforestation and overgrazing) have turned what used to be called the "Fertile Crescent" into a wasteland, whereas this didn't happen in the similar southern European area. Thus southwestern Asia possessed the seeds of human development, but the locals squandered their head start. At that point Europe and eastern Asia had an equal chance of pulling ahead, and Diamond proposes that the geographical fragmentation of Europe gave it a competitive advantage over China's cohesiveness. But because he earlier claims that easy movement (for the spread of domesticable species) gave Europe a competitive advantage over America and Africa, this argument is not compelling.
Diamond thinks that the different parts of the world were on a developmental par about 13,000 years ago. At that time there were many more potentially domesticable large mammals in the Americas than there are now. The evidence as to what the human presence at that time is mixed, but Diamond pushes hard to dispute evidence of any prior human occupation. He favors the "Clovis first" theory, which has humans first entering from Siberia across the ice age Bering land bridge not more than 13,000 years ago, carrying stone "Clovis point" weapons. Clovis points have been found in large numbers in mammoth carcasses in North America, and Diamond thinks they were developed in Asia and transported across Beringia. Mammoths are one of the many now-extinct large mammals. From the mammoth kill evidence, Diamond assumes hunting by immigrants from Siberia caused the extinction of not just mammoths but horses, elephants, lions, and all the other megafauna. But there are several problems with this argument. Firstly, there are more recent findings than those Diamond disputes to back up the earlier human occupation theory. Secondly, there are no Clovis points north of British Columbia, which would mean these genocidal immigrants fasted all through Alaska. And thirdly, while there are thousands of Clovis points in mammoth skeletons, to date we've found just ONE clovis point in an American horse carcass, and NONE in elephants, lions, or giraffes -- all at one time widely found in North America.
All of this debate for later occupation of the Americas appears designed to buttress a secondary argument that American development got started too late to catch up with the Eurasians. But ironically, the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis, linked to a single overwhelming swarm of human invaders, argues against Jared Diamond's central thesis. If he's right, it WAS the Native Americans' own fault that they were later overrun by Europeans on horses, becaused they killed and ate all the existing horses on arrival.
Diamond also has to resort to some hand-waving to explain why independent Mesoamerican invention of writing and wheels (used only in toys, rather than tools like wheelbarrows) never went anywhere. Similar weak arguments are used to explain why China went into cultural stagnation centuries ago. Ultimately, the author tries too hard to make all of history fit his model.
In trying to explain why superior technology isn't necessarily accepted, Diamond trots out the old myth about the Dvorak keyboard being superior to the standard QWERTY layout, yet never finding much demand. However, Diamond's book came out in 1997, and the Dvorak myth had been debunked 7 years previously (Journal of Law & Economics vol. XXXIII (April 1990)). Diamond is left with no argument other than cultural superiority to explain why societies that adopt better technology succeed, and he rejects that position a priori.
In his professional career the author has spent much time working in New Guinea. He thinks constant local warfare has made the average surviving New Guinea tribesman superior to the average descendant of European culture, and wants to explain why the people of New Guinea have so little "cargo" (wealth). But Diamond's focus on New Guinea as a model for global development is more elucidating to the author than to his readers.
There are some problems with the book layout itself, including a surprisingly poor index. For instance, trying to look up horse extinctions in the Americas, I found references to horses under "Americas, animal extinctions in" that didn't appear under "horses, in Americas". Also, there are a variety of different maps with different levels of detail to show the migrations of peoples, languages, and domestic species. It's necessary to flip back and forth between the maps to follow the narrative thread.
This is a good book to read, but a skeptical perspective is necessary while doing so.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2003
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