Guns, Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond
Everyone except me has already read this Pulizter Prize-winning 1996 book, so it hardly needs me to add my comment, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.
This book addresses the question of why Europe conquered America, and not vice-versa, or more generally why certain races and continents entered the modern era with materially rich, technologically and politically advanced societies, and others did not. The central hypothesis put forward is that Eurasia had a large array of wild species suitable for domestication into productive crops and farm animals, whereas the other continents did not. The advent of food production and the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer to sedentary agricultural societies allowed the eventual development of larger, more diverse, more politically complex societies, and eventually writing and technology.
“The hand of history’s course at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us,” he writes.
The book makes this case very well. The biological evidence about the distribution of wild species suitable for farming seems particularly solid, and the arguments about resource utilization and the ability of sedentary peoples to develop material culture are equally compelling. Diamond really only needs about 100 pages to make this link clear. The rest of the book is a fascinating multidisciplinary history of all humanity worldwide, starting from 13,000 years ago. Linguistic, genetic, and archaeological evidence are used together to trace the major migrations and the spread of important innovations – such as agriculture, writing, and technology – in past millennia.
The narrative is not without some weaknesses. One recurring theme in the book is the author’s insistence that the observed differences between modern races are due to geography, not genetics. Although he provides much evidence that points to the effects of environment (such as most continents’ lack of large native mammals for domestication) he doesn’t really investigate possible genetic differences at all. This seems to be due to an adamant resistance to “racist” explanations of societal divergences. While historically reprehensible explanations such as “the natives are stupid” are clearly unhelpful, to leave the question of racial differences in human biology entirely unasked isn’t particularly good science. Also, as the author acknowledges, the central thesis of the book fails to explain why Europe, and not similarly advanced and resource-rich China, became the dominant power. For that matter, why Europe and not India, if both grew out of the agricultural innovations of the “fertile crescent” millennia before? And why did Arab civilization decline in the middle ages, when it formerly led the world in technological and political development? Diamond’s thesis is very good at explaining inter-continental differences, but falls short of a complete explanation for Europe’s dominance.
Nonetheless, it’s a remarkably good book, and a strong thesis. Perhaps the most provocative part is the epilogue, titled “The Future of Human History as a Science.” In it, Diamond argues that we must change the way we view and study history, from “just one damn fact after another” to an honest and rigorous attempt to trace the long term causal patterns of human civilization. This is difficult, of course, but the hugely diverse array methods and sources that Diamond draws upon gives us a clue as to how this has to work.
Recommended.
