Review of Guns, Germs, and Steel

CityReadsVol.84

Review of Guns,Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond argues that both geography and the environment played major roles in determining the shape of the modern world.

Diamond,Jared M. 2005. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 2^ndedition. New York: Norton.

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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book on why Eurasiancivilization became hegemonic by Jared Diamond, professor of geography andphysiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), became an international best-seller, and was translated into 33 languages. In 1998, itwon the Pulitzer Prize, a prestigious award for achievements in newspaper andonline journalism, literature, and musical composition in the United States,for general nonfiction; and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book, an awardfor outstanding popular science books from around the world by the RoyalSociety. The book was so well received that a documentary based on the book,and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS (thePublic Broadcasting Service, an American public broadcaster and televisionprogram distributor) in July 2005 (Wikipedia).

The author, Jared Diamond, is a polymath,and specialized in physiology, ornithology and ecology, and environmentalhistory. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society(Wikipedia). Dr. Diamond has conducted fieldwork in New Guinea for over 33years, and published scholarly journal articles and popular science books onsubjects as diverse as human sexuality and the evolution of tropical birds, and he also speaks twelve languages (Fenigsohn, 2011).

Guns, Germs, and Steel asks why Eurasian peoples conquered or displaced Native Americans, Australians,and Africans, instead of vice versa. It argues that this outcome was not due tobiological advantages of Eurasian peoples themselves but instead to features ofthe Eurasian continent, in particular, its high diversity of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication and its east/west major axis that favored the spread of those domesticates, people, and technologies for longdistances with little change in latitude. This book provided solid examples tosupport environmental determinism (the study of how the physical environment predisposes societies and states towards particular development trajectories).

Dr. Diamond denies that powerful weapons(guns), infectious diseases, (germs), and heavy metal (steel), caused Eurasian hegemony. Instead, he argues that "guns, germs, and steel" were themeans but not the "ultimate causes" of European and Asian domination.By emphasizing the incalculable advantages gained by those living in geographicareas most favorable to an agrarian life style, Dr. Diamond believes that theavailability of wild plants and animals suitable for domestication is the prerequisite for an agrarian life style which no longer compelled to forage forfood, nomads settled down in stable communities that would later become citieswith literacy, and technology. However, of the many plant species on earth,relatively few can be cultivated and "In all, of the world's 148 big wild terrestrial herbivorous mammals-the candidates for domestication-only 14 passedthe test" (page 168). Drawing from archeological findings, Dr. Diamondpoints out that originated at more or less the same time, no one group ofhunter-gathers had a head start over the other in developing their societies.However, at the end of the Ice Age around 11,000 BC, groups in fertile areas ofChina and in especially arable river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates (the Fertile Crescent) learned that certain wild plants could be cultivated andcertain wild animals domesticated. The Chinese first began, for instance, tocultivate rice and soy and Fertile Crescent societies, wheat and barley.Similarly, the Chinese first learned how to domesticate water buffalo and teaand the Fertile Crescent societies, cows and sheep. Only much later, othergroups around the world learned these techniques from the earliest discovers,or developed them on their own. However, some societies, e.g. Australianaborigines, remained hunter-gathers for 40,000 years, their isolation and barren land both a product of their geographic location (Fenigsohn, 2011).

Dr. Diamond also shows how environmentalconditions discouraged agriculture on other continents and resulted inpreventing those societies from advancing, while Eurasians developed literate,urban societies. For example, the reason why the Indians of what is now the American southwest lacked both a written language and metallurgy was that theirenvironment allowing little time for anything but food production. He concludes that it may have taken thousands of years for the Indians to evolve wildteosinte into maize, one of the rare plant species available for them tocultivate. With few animals to domesticate, compelled to remain hunters, theIndians were eventually overcome by the guns and steel of the European invaders(Fenigsohn, 2011).

For Chinese readers, a chapter on how Chinabecame Chinese might be of one of the most interests. Dr. Diamond states that the early cultural and political unification of China was largely due to China’s geographic factors: “China’s long east-west (the Yellow River in thenorth, the Yangtze River in the south) facilitated diffusion of crops andtechnology between coast and inland, while its broad east-west expanse andrelatively gentle terrain, which eventually permitted those two river systemsto be joined by canals, facilitated north-south exchanges” (page 331).  Western Europe, even with a similar area, but a more rugged terrain and no such unifying rivers, has resisted cultural and political unification to this day.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is an ambitious and highly important book which expands multipledisciplines, including anthropology, archeology, plant genetics, epidemiologyand social, military and technological history. Nevertheless, each of the disciplines into which Dr. Diamond delves to further his argument is filledwith uncertainties, differing interpretations and opposing viewpoints.

References:

Diamond, Jared M. 2005. Guns, Germs, andSteel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton.

"Jared Diamond." Wikipedia.Wikipedia.org. n.p. Web. 9 June 2016.

“Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of HumanSocieties.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia.org. n.p. Web. 9 June 2016

Fenigsohn, Harvey, "Guns, Germs, andSteel: The Fates of Human Societies (Book Review)" (2011). OMHA BookReviews. Paper 4.

http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/omha_book_reviews/4

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