Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (Finished: Jan 23 2016)
Rating: 4/5
Difficulty: 3.5/5
Read if: You’re interested in studying ultimate causes of income and power discrepancies between countries, you enjoy overviews of Big History, you would like to read a non Euro-centric depiction of global history, you enjoy learning interesting tidbits about many different countries.
Why did countries evolve so differently? Why did Europe come to dominate the world order? Why was the New World conquered by the Old, and not vice versa? These are difficult questions, and many of us know the proximate answers to such problems. When the Old World came to the New, it had superior weapons, more potent diseases and better technology, all three of which encouraged Europe’s era of colonization. However the problem underlying all such proximate answers is the ultimate question: Why did such benefits come to Eurasia and not the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Australasia? This ultimate question is the one Diamond tackles with remarkable comprehension, intelligence and broadness of knowledge in “Guns, Germs and Steel”. His answer ultimately comes down to one of geography – that some regions were endowed with geographical advantages that led them to acquire guns, germs and steel faster than other regions, facilitating their ultimate success.
To grossly overgeneralize, Diamond’s argument is that some regions (particularly Eurasia, which effectively encompasses all of Asia, the Middle East, Northern Africa and Europe) were endowed with more easily domesticable plants and animals, which gave them a huge head start in building complex societies. Such regions also had more access to the fruits of neighboring regions through trade, migration and war. For instance, one of the most interesting ideas within the book is that since domesticated plants adapt to the biome they are most commonly grown in, such plants travel much more easily in an East-West direction, within a single biome, than in a North-South direction, across many different biomes. Hence Eurasian countries, which existed primarily on a East-West axis, were able to quickly capitalize on the fruits of their neighbors. This initial spread of food production also came to determine the size and complexity of a community, the rate of technological innovation, the rate of technological spread and the level of herd immunity against plague diseases. All these factors endowed some regions and not others with massive head starts in the process of acquiring guns, germs and steel.
This is a whomping motherload of a book. The existence of this book by itself is a remarkable feat. As Diamond notes, a person attempting to find the ultimate causes of income and power discrepancies must be a historian, anthropologist, geographer, linguist and biologist all at once. Diamond demonstrates a remarkable grasp of many different disciplines, and shows a keen understanding of many different geographic regions (although perhaps some better than others). Noting the tendency of narratives that explain European world domination to be incredibly Euro-centric, Diamond travels extensively across the globe, paying close detail to a very diverse set of geographic regions. For instance, Diamond spends a chapter or two extensively comparing Australian and New Guinean geography, thereby explaining why indigenous life evolved so differently in the two island communities.
Diamond also starts his narrative in fixed opposition to the tenuous and prejudiced accounts of global history that stress the neurobiological differences between different Peoples that allowed the proliferation of some over others. These narratives were often rooted in racism and a mistrust in the other, justifying intolerance and authoritarian rule of racial minorities. For instance, many European scholars, under the so called “Hamitic hypothesis”, justified the rule of Tutsis over Hutus on the basis that Tutsis appeared more morphologically similar to Caucasian Europeans, and thereby were of a racial descent clearly superior to Hutus. By stressing the geographic determinants of history, Diamond repeatedly engages in the notion of essential human sameness, demonstrating that different “races” have been by and large equally intelligent, innovative and resourceful over the span of human history. The fact that this book strenuously proves the essential commonality of humanity does a great service in quashing racist, pseudo-scientific narratives of human history.
Besides the few larger takeaways from this book, there are also many small fascinating details within this book that in themselves make this book worth reading. For instance, it was really interesting to learn specifically how linguists can pin down the details of which peoples domesticated certain crops first by comparing the roots of words for the same crops in different languages. Also, any readers not yet versed in broad African history may find it interesting to read an account of the Austronesian settlement in Madagascar, which Diamond describes as one of the most remarkable feats of geography.
I think there are two main caveats to Diamond’s otherwise successful and fascinating depiction of macroscopic world history. Firstly, Diamond’s tale of geographic determinism can only go so far in explaining the shape of global history. Readers should take caution that Diamond’s ultimate argument is NOT that geographic determinism has been so overwhelming of a force within global history as to wipe out the successes of individual innovators, visionaries and intellectual movements in shaping global trends. Rather, his argument is that random twists of geography set some societies up with more resources to fuel innovation and complexity. Similarly, Diamond’s argument is not that geographic determination is so great of a force that it necessarily suggests that some countries are fated to be poor for all eternity while others will inevitably prosper for many millennia to come. This book paints a broad picture of global history but leaves to the reader the difficult task of figuring out where this narrative is relevant and where it is too broad to explain the specific proximate events that have shaped civilizations.
Secondly, while Diamond does an excellent job at comparing the differences between the Americas, Eurasia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Wider Australia, he is less skilled at distinguishing the differences between different parts of the same region. In particular, he is occasionally guilty of treating Eurasia too much as a monolith. Eurasia, after all, encompasses a very large range of countries. On one hand, perhaps this lack of nuance inevitable, given that geographic determinism may be too broad a force in history to determine the fates of local political struggles. Yet one is still left wondering – Why Europe, and not the Arab world, Central Asia, China or India? In particular, Diamond does a disservice to himself in relegating his comparison between Europe and China to one page in the book’s Epilogue, where he admits this may be a discussion more suited to other historians (one gets the impression that Diamond may not be as well versed in Chinese history as he is in the history of other nations). Nevertheless, as this is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of the entirety of global history, this flaw in Diamond’s narrative can easily be remedied by further readings.
Overall, this is an incredible book that is very worth reading. As with all lengthy narratives, you should set aside some time to read this book from head to toe in a short amount of time. For anyone at all interested in history, geography, anthropology and more, this book will give you the insights to go forth and analyze global historical trends with more clarity and confidence.
52 Books or More 