Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (subtitled A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years in Britain) is a 1997 transdisciplinary nonfiction book by the American author Jared Diamond. The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority.
It received widespread recognition in the popular science market for its interdisciplinarity, combining insights from biology, geography, anthropology, and history. In 1998, it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.
Synopsis
The prologue opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a Papua New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the differences in power and technology between Papua New Guineans and the Europeans who dominated the region for two centuries, differences that neither of them considered due to European genetic superiority. Yali asked, using the local term cargo for inventions and manufactured goods, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"
Diamond realized the same question seemed to apply elsewhere: "People of Eurasian origin... dominate... the world in wealth and power." Other peoples, after having thrown off colonial domination, still lag in wealth and power. Still others, he says, "have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists."
The peoples of other continents (sub-Saharan Africans, Indigenous people of the Americas, Indigenous Australians, Papuans, and the original inhabitants (Mon people and the Negrito) of tropical Southeast Asia) have been largely conquered, displaced and in some extreme cases – referring to Native Americans, Indigenous Australians, and South Africa's indigenous Khoisan peoples – largely exterminated by farm-based societies such as Eurasians and Bantu. He believes this is due to these societies' technological and immunological advantages, stemming from the early rise of agriculture after the last ice age.
Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favoured Eurasians (for example, written language or the development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures (for example, by facilitating commerce and trade between different cultures) and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes. He also suggests that the environmental and geographical conditions of Eurasia and North Africa provided significant advantages, such as access to a greater variety of domesticable plants and animals, as well as an east–west continental axis that allowed for easier transfer of crops, livestock, and technologies, accelerating the development of agriculture, population growth, and political complexity, which in turn led to technological advancement and the spread of epidemic diseases to which Eurasian populations gradually developed resistance. By contrast, regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Oceania faced geographic isolation and ecological barriers that slowed similar developments. The book generally does not include factual evidence supporting these claims.
Title The book's title is a reference to the means by which farm-based societies conquered populations and maintained dominance though sometimes being vastly outnumbered, so that imperialism was enabled by guns, germs, and steel.
Diamond argues geographic, climatic and environmental characteristics which favored early development of stable agricultural societies ultimately led to immunity to diseases endemic in agricultural animals and the development of powerful, organized states capable of dominating others.
Summary Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity. That is, civilization is not created out of superior intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions.
The first step towards civilization is the move from nomadic hunter-gatherer to rooted agrarian society. Several conditions are necessary for this transition to occur: access to high-carbohydrate vegetation that endures storage; a climate dry enough to allow storage; and access to animals docile enough for domestication and versatile enough to survive captivity. Control of crops and livestock leads to food surpluses. Surpluses free people to specialize in activities other than sustenance and support population growth. The combination of specialization and population growth leads to the accumulation of social and technological innovations which build on each other. Large societies develop ruling classes and supporting bureaucracies, which in turn lead to the organization of nation-states and empires.
Although agriculture arose in several parts of the world, Eurasia gained an early advantage due to the greater availability of suitable plant and animal species for domestication. In particular, Eurasia has barley, two varieties of wheat, and three protein-rich pulses for food; flax for textiles; and goats, sheep, and cattle. Eurasian grains were richer in protein, easier to sow, and easier to store than American maize or tropical bananas.
As early Western Asian civilizations developed trading relationships, they found additional useful animals in adjacent territories, such as horses and donkeys for use in transport. Diamond identifies 13 species of large animals over domesticated in Eurasia, compared with just one in South America (counting the llama and alpaca as breeds within the same species) and none at all in the rest of the world. Australia and North America suffered from a lack of useful animals due to extinction, probably by human hunting, shortly after the end of the Pleistocene, and the only domesticated animals in New Guinea came from the East Asian mainland during the Austronesian settlement around 4,000–5,000 years ago. Biological relatives of the horse, including zebras and onagers, proved untameable; and although African elephants can be tamed, it is very difficult to breed them in captivity. Diamond describes the small number of domesticated species (14 out of 148 "candidates") as an instance of the Anna Karenina principle: many promising species have just one of several significant difficulties that prevent domestication. He argues that all large mammals that could be domesticated, have been.
Eurasians domesticated goats and sheep for hides, clothing, and cheese; cows for milk; bullocks for tillage of fields and transport; and benign animals such as pigs and chickens. Large domestic animals such as horses and camels offered the considerable military and economic advantages of mobile transport.
Eurasia's large landmass and long east–west distance increased these advantages. Its large area provided more plant and animal species suitable for domestication. Equally important, its east–west orientation has allowed groups of people to wander and empires to conquer from one end of the continent to the other while staying at the same latitude. This was important because similar climate and cycle of seasons let them keep the same "food production system" – they could keep growing the same crops and raising the same animals all the way from Scotland to Siberia. Doing this throughout history, they spread innovations, languages and diseases everywhere.
By contrast, the north–south orientation of the Americas and Africa created countless difficulties adapting crops domesticated at one latitude for use at other latitudes (and, in North America, adapting crops from one side of the Rocky Mountains to the other). Similarly, Africa was fragmented by its extreme variations in climate from north to south: crops and animals that flourished in one area never reached other areas where they could have flourished, because they could not survive the intervening environment. Europe was the ultimate beneficiary of Eurasia's east–west orientation: in the first millennium BCE, the Mediterranean areas of Europe adopted Southwestern Asia's animals, plants, and agricultural techniques; in the first millennium CE, the rest of Europe followed suit.
The plentiful supply of food and the dense populations that it supported made division of labor possible. The rise of non-farming specialists such as craftsmen and scribes accelerated economic growth and technological progress. These economic and technological advantages eventually enabled Europeans to conquer the peoples of the other continents in recent centuries by using guns and steel, particularly after the devastation of native populations by the epidemic diseases from germs.
Eurasia's dense populations, high levels of trade, and living in close proximity to livestock resulted in widespread transmission of diseases, including from animals to humans. Smallpox, measles, and influenza were the result of close proximity between dense populations of animals and humans. Natural selection endowed most Eurasians with genetic variations making them less susceptible to some diseases, and constant circulation of diseases meant adult individuals had developed immunity to a wide range of pathogens. When Europeans made contact with the Americas, European diseases (to which Americans had no immunity) ravaged the indigenous American population, rather than the other way around. The "trade" in diseases was a little more balanced in Africa and southern Asia, where endemic malaria and yellow fever made these regions notorious as the "white man's grave". Some researchers say syphilis was known to Hippocrates, and others think it was brought from the Americas by Columbus and his successors. The European diseases from germs obliterated indigenous populations so that relatively small numbers of Europeans could maintain dominance.
Diamond proposes geographical explanations for why western European societies, rather than other Eurasian powers such as China, have been the dominant colonizers. He said Europe's geography favored balkanization into smaller, closer nation-states, bordered by natural barriers of mountains, rivers, and coastline. Advanced civilization developed first in areas whose geography lacked these barriers, such as China, India and Mesopotamia. There, the ease of conquest meant they were dominated by large empires in which manufacturing, trade and knowledge flourished for millennia, while balkanized Europe remained more primitive.