Is Guns Germs and Steel Telling Real History?

An Anthropological Critique

Anthropologist Jason Antrosio critically reviews Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse.

Antrosio, Jason, 2013. Real Historyversus Guns Germs and Steel.Living  Anthropologically

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Picture source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/410038741052514280/

In 1997, ten years after calling agriculture The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, Jared Diamond came out with Guns, Germs, and Steel, a landmark book that would winthe Pulitzer Prize, become a best-seller, and be filmed by National Geographicfor PBS. It is surely the most widely read book about agriculture anyone hasever written. Jared Diamond’s ideas about human society continue to beenormously influential.

The key question is whether Diamond’s work is broadly correct about human history or adistortion of that history. I argue that although Diamond makes interestingpoints, his work from Guns, Germs, and Steel to Collapse is a distorting disservice to the real historical record. Diamond’sclaim–that the differential success of the world’s nations is due to the accidents of agriculture, except when societies “choose to fail”–not only does not withstand scrutiny, it should not be promoted or taught.

First, Diamond’s account makes all the factors of European domination a product of a distant andaccidental history: “For Diamond, guns and steel were just technologies thathappened to fall into the hands of one’s collective ancestors. And, just tomake things fair, they only marginally benefited Westerners over theirIndigenous foes in the New World because the real conquest was accomplished byother forces floating free in the cosmic lottery–submicroscopic pathogens”(Wilcox 2010:123).

What Diamond glosses over is that just because you have guns and steel does not mean youshould use them for colonial and imperial purposes. Or handing out small pox-infested blankets from sick wards.

Diamond has almost nothing to say about the political decisions made in order to pursue Europeanimperialism, to manufacture steel and guns, and to use disease as a weapon. As a results, accounts like Guns, Germs, and Steel end up supplanting the realhistorical accounts like Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History:

Europeans and Americans would never have encountered these supposed bearers of a pristinepast if they had not encountered one another, in bloody fact, as Europe reached out to seize the resources and populations of the other continents. (1982:18)

Second, Diamond’s account seriously underplays the alliances with native groups that enabled European forces to conquer and rule. After some initial victories, which Diamondlavishly describes, thousands of natives joined the tiny European garrisons,assisting Hernán Cortés in subduing the Aztec Empire and Francisco Pizarro withthe Inka. As David Cahill points out in Advanced Andeans and Backward Europeans(2010) there could be no empire without these collaborations and the pre-existing mechanisms these empires had established:

The arrival of the Spanish interlopers suddenly made independence from imperial rule a practical possibility. Accordingly, it was not a small band of gallant conquistadors whoconquered the Incas and Aztecs, but an alliance consisting of a core ofmilitarily trained Spaniards together with breakaway, populous states that sought independence from tyrannical overlords. . . .

Diamond overlooks entirely not only the crucial support from non-Incan native allies, but alsothe overwhelming degree to which any government, Andean or Spanish, depended ona functioning tier of local, regional, and interregional ruling cadres. (Cahill 2010:215,224)

Charles Mann makes a similar point in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, but it is most forcibly expressed in Matthew Restall’s book Seven Myths of theSpanish Conquest (2003).

As Restall notes,the decisions to make these alliances and compromises were not necessarily badones–some native peoples were able to live their lives in relative peace andautonomy, even after the events of the conquest, which was hardly completed inone fell swoop.

The Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs, and Steel has almost no role for human agency–the ability people have to make decisions and influence outcomes. Europeans become inadvertent, accidental conquerors. Natives succumb passively to their fate.But in 2005 out comes another book from Jared Diamond, Collapse: How SocietiesChoose to Fail or Succeed. Suddenly choice and agency are back!

In an article questioning Diamond’s treatment of Haiti, Drexel Woodson provides a generous reading of Diamond’s shifting emphasis:

Although Guns,Germs, and Steel received accolades from the media and nonspecialists, Diamond seemed uncomfortable with the book’s simplistic environmental determinism. In Collapse he attempted to rectify the excesses of determinism by investigating agency–how and why a society’s leaders and followers make choices that have positive or negative environmental and socioeconomic consequences. (Woodson,“Failed” States, Societal “Collapse,” and Ecological “Disaster”: A Haitian Lesson on Grand Theory, 2010:271)

However, I have not seen any evidence for Diamond being uncomfortable with the determinism hepreviously embraced. On the contrary, Diamond claimed Guns, Germs, and Steelwas not environmental determinism. I also do not see Collapse as investigatingagency–it is rather, for most cases, depicting how people “choose” to fail. So when Europeans “succeed” at colonialism, that was not their doing, nor theirfault; when other societies falter, that was a choice to fail. The haves prosper because of happenstance beyond their control, while the have-nots areresponsible for their own demise” (A Question of Blame When Societies Fall,Johnson 2007). Or, “note thesubtle shift (or less charitably the contradiction) between the ‘accident’ ofconquest in Guns and the ‘choice’ of success or failure among Diamond’s Anasaziin Collapse” (Wilcox 2010:124; see also the 2012 On Haiti, Jared Diamond Hasn’tDone His Homework for a very specific and powerful rebuttal).

Jared Diamond has done a huge disservice to the telling of human history. He has tremendously distorted the role of domestication and agriculture in that history.Unfortunately his story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has seduceda generation of college-educated readers. Introductory anthropology textbooks often borrow Diamond’s ideas, as if Diamond needs further popularizing.  Diamond’s usefulness is past expired. Instead, let’s consider the full range of complexities regarding domestication, agriculture, and the consequences of human agency.

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