Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Why did Europeans people grabbed the world, exterminating others and/or exploiting them under their rules, and not these other people, scattered across continents and cultures (Indians, Black Africans, Australian Aboriginals...) ever reached Europe to conquer it?

We had a few clues already: their more advanced technologies; their better immune systems when faced with diseases that had easily decimated others; and, also, their political systems, based upon powerful, centralised States, as opposed to more scattered -and less organised- tribes of hunter-gatherers in some other areas of the globe. Science, germs, and society -aren't these evidences enough that Europeans (read: White people) were therefore a superior race, that evolution show more could only favour to put them at the top? Well... No and not at all!

Jumping to such a conclusion (and God knows how it's been done and is still being done among some circles!) would be a fallacy, confusing causes and consequences; a fallacy that Jared Diamond, brilliantly, exposes here by calling as witnesses from geography to prehistory, history, linguistic, genetics, and, yes, even evolutionary biology. And guess at what all of them are pointing to? The environment as a culprit! Or, rather, how differences in environments will help trigger massive disparities in societal evolution... with the impacts we all know upon the history of civilisations, and how they ultimately clashed. It started with agriculture and farming. It will end with 'guns, germs, and steel'.

Obviously, there's more to it than that. Jared Diamond, in fact, also points at how certain societal choices will contribute to filter (so to speak) such civilisations, determining those that won't make it (e.g. due to ecological suicides) or, not take it upon themselves to spread across the world (e.g. because of societal choices trapping them within their own borders).

Embracing a wide array of disciplines, dense, rich, enlightening as usual, the author smashes into tiny pieces the imbecilities that have, for so long, underpinned racism. He, above all, changes our outlook upon history, that it shows to be absolutely inseparable from geography. This is an absolute must-read! show less

Diamond posits geography (and the concomitant availability of animals and plants in certain areas, as well as geographic barriers) as the ultimate arbiter of human history. In doing so, he examines what he considers the ultimate historical roots of oppression; here, he explicitly rejects old racist theories that insist on Europeans as intellectually and/or morally superior to any of the peoples they conquered or subsumed. Ambitious in scope and conception, this is a fascinating if *slow* read. I feel like I've learned a great deal, particularly in terms of the domestication of plants and animals (squirrels and acorns, who would have thought?), and certainly the chapters where he details the geographic factors that mitigated against the show more diffusion of ideas and objects provided a lot of food for thought (e.g. the East-West axis of Eurasia as opposed to the North-West axes of Africa and the Americas). However, because the scope is so very large, inevitably there's a huge amount of glossing over of details, and the work therefore certainly sidesteps a lot of the individuality of cultures and peoples. Finally, it's more of a popular history than anything else, with a reading list but no citations, and that always makes me a little uneasy :-). show less

Terrible. This is one of those books which seems at face value as if it has an interesting and persuasive thesis, and indeed there are a couple of reasonable points in here, but by and large Guns, Germs, and Steel is a poorly written book, shoddily argued and riddled with factual errors. Jared Diamond's thesis is that the differences which one can observe in technological and economic development around the world do not result from racial differences but rather from geographical ones: the variety and nutritional value of available crops, the number of animals which could be domesticated, the geographical axes of the various continents. Diamond claims that this is an anti-racist theory because it points out that white people were just show more lucky, not inherently more deserving or more talented or more resourceful than people anywhere else in the world.

However, Diamond's intention to write an anti-racist book doesn't mean that he succeeded in doing so. There are layers of problematic assumptions and unconscious Eurocentrism underlying his writing, layers which make Guns, Germs, and Steel an uneasy read: you (for the reader whom Diamond seems to hypothesise in the book is a white Westerner--there's no sense that a PoC from, say, Malaysia or Egypt might have picked it up) should not feel a sense of accountability or responsibility or guilt for colonialism or imperialism or the ongoing exploitation of most of the world's population by those living in the developed world. It's no one's fault--it's just geography!

When it comes to assessing the reliability of Diamond's arguments, the fact that there are no footnotes and no full bibliography make that a somewhat difficult task--but I know enough about sub-Saharan African history to know that he characterises several key things incorrectly, and just enough about the history of the Americas to be very suspicious about things that Diamond claims. There are numerous minor factual errors, like saying that "oi" means "sheep" in Irish (p. 343). The Irish word for sheep is "caora", and as far as I know, there's no such word as "oi" (or even "oí") in Irish. This is admittedly minor, but if you indulge in repeated bouts of carelessness like that, you're going to make me suspicious about the factual foundations of the rest of your arguments.

And indeed, while I can't assess the validity of some of Diamond's scientific claims--though the continent axis theory falls apart the more you start to think about it, as does his failure to consider the impact of human alteration of the environment--I do know that I'd expect better historical argumentation from an undergraduate history major. For instance, when about to describe the meeting of the conquistador Pizarro with the Incan emperor Atahuallpa, he says:

What unfolded that day at Cajamarca is well known, because it was recorded in writing by many of the Spanish participants [...] by six of Pizarro's companions, including his brothers Hernando and Pedro. (pp. 68-69)

Which of course is nonsense. What we have is a record of what six individual Spanish men--and no Incans--wanted the Spanish king to think had happened on that day. A moment's thought would tell you that there are multiple problems with using their writings as a straightforward means of assessing anything about Incan culture and society. Rookie errors like that made me roll my eyes extra hard at the epilogue in which Diamond explains to historians what our discipline should look like and how we should think of it. How about no, sir--if you've repeatedly demonstrated a lack of ability to think historically, you don't get to decide what historians should do.

It's also worth pointing out that even if one accepts Diamond's thesis as persuasive, it doesn't actually answer the question he sets out to answer: why it is that European/Western societies set out to establish political and cultural hegemony over the rest of the world and were so successful at it. Just because a society is more technologically or economically complex than its neighbour doesn't mean that it automatically sets out to conquer it--that's a question you can't answer with "geography." You have to theorise power and social structure, and Diamond can't do that. Avoid. show less

Where so many authors for such a long time have spent an ungodly amount of time and dead tries writing vast histories of countless places across the globe, Jared Diamond has done something different. He doesn’t want to know what happened, he wants to know why.

Why did Europeans colonize other countries instead of other countries colonizing Europe? Why didn’t Africa become technologically superior and at a faster rate, and how did so few small groups of Europeans manage to systematically wipe out entire populations in the Americas instead of the other way around? The obvious answer is that they had better weapons and armor, but why did they have better weapons and armor? The answers are quite fascinating!

The book would be a 5-star show more read if I didn’t nearly throw the book out a window at having to read the same information over and over again. He has an obnoxious tendency to repeat himself multiple times, and not just a sentence or two but whole pages of information that just seems copy-and-pasted. The latter half of the book feels like the first half of the book, only reformatted and arranged differently. Anything interesting that was said towards the end of the book was slightly spoiled by my incessant frustration at having to read page after page of repeated paragraphs.

Overall I found the book to be incredibly enlightening, however. I don’t think I’ll forget what I read here for some time (and not just because it was pounded into me with nauseating repetition) and I think it will forever alter my perception of the history of human civilization as a whole. I can’t recommend it highly enough. show less

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond is an attempt to address the question of why Europeans conquered the Americas and Africa, and not the other way around. It analyzes the factors underlying the conquests by trying to get to ultimate causes -- why did Europeans have the particular technologies and illnesses that they did, while those they conquered were vulnerable to the diseases (which did most of the killing in North America) and the superior weaponry (including horses for cavalry).

These causes are investigated by examining the last 13,000 years of history on all of the inhabited continents, seeing what initial advantages and disadvantages they had. Diamond's argument is that in the Eurasian content there happened by chance a show more fortuitous combination of easily domesticatable plants and animals. In addition he argues that by accident of geography, the Eurasian continent has an East-West axis that makes it easy for developments to propagate across the entire landmass.

Obviously there's far more information than I could hope to summarize. I found the book really interesting as it makes a successful effort to encompass the developmental histories of all of the inhabited continents, thus providing me with a much broader perspective than I got from standard European history classes. It is very interesting to see the complexities of so many different societies, from hunter-gatherers on through to sophisticated agricultural empires. These variants of society existed all over the world, across time and space spanning thousands of years and thousands of miles. Due to different geographical circumstances and different initial combinations of plants and animals, societies all over the world reached different levels of development, so that depending on e.g. which Austronesian island you visited, you might encounter an agricultural kingdom or a small hunter-gatherer group.

One of the aims of the book is to demolish racist arguments of success and failure, and it does this very well, by showing how incredibly simplistic such ideas are, in comparison to the incredible complexity of actual societies world-wide. He makes a very conscious effort to try to set historical analysis within a rigorously scientific framework, using evidence of all types to support his conclusions. Amongst other things, it really is a fascinating overview of world history in the broadest sense, addressing the developments of societies and the movements of people on all inhabited continents.

Rather than simplistic tales of "good" hunter-gatherers versus "bad" farmers, or "good" aboriginals versus "bad" colonizers, or any of the other arbitrary dichotomies people like to put forward, it was fascinating to read the real history of conflicts amongst people. In stories about the high levels of violence in and between New Guinea tribes, and analysis indicating violent dislocations of people, such as Bantu farmers replacing Khoisan hunter-gatherers in Africa, or Maoris armed with guns conquering the Moriori people, he replaces simple generalizations about "Africa" or "Australia and New Zealand" with an appreciation of their different peoples and cultures.

Also see Ronald Wright's Stolen Continents for another angle on the Americas. show less

[guns, germs & steel] Jared Diamond (not counting this one, didn’t get past the preface)

So I read a few pages of this book then decided to throw it in the bin. Not pass it on in any way. Just Dump it.

In the first paragraph - “Why did history unfold differently on different continents? In case this question immediately makes you shudder at the thought you are about to read a racist treatise, you aren’t” As Charlie Brooker pointed out on the 10 O’clock show recently someone introducing themselves as “Not a Racist” is a bit suspicious. Still that wasn’t what made me throw this book at the wall. A few pages later we have this: “New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. European and American children spend show more much of their time being passively entertained by TV” hmm that old saw of TV rots the brain, for which evidence is ambiguous at best and many studies actually say that moderate TV viewing actually increases intelligence. But no, Mr Diamond has obviously decided the goggle box is the Devil’s device as a few sentences on he says “irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation” (the TV being an anti-stimulation device of course) and “mental abilities in New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages that most children in industrialised societies now grow up” (my italics) Oh Really? Can you say sweeping generalisation without any evidence Mr Diamond? And the reason he thinks New Guineans “may have come to be smarter than Westerners”? Well apparently it’s because they live a hand to mouth style existence struggling to find food (malnutrition in children is actually a cause of mental retardation isn’t it?) and fighting tribal wars so the stupid is killed off before it can breed and in Western society we’ve apparently conquered Maslow’s hierarchy of needs beyond the find food, find shelter level or as Mr. Diamond puts it “Europeans have for thousands of years been living in densely populated societies with central governments, police, and judiciaries where murders were relatively uncommon and a state of war was the exception rather than the rule.” Oh Really? Thousands of years you say, exactly what history books have you been reading Mr Diamond?

This book gets an average of 4.15 stars on LT?!? Most people say it is a must read (there are few thoughtful reviews (from people who actually read the book) pointing out much larger flaws than the ones I’ve highlighted above, and apparently Diamond, a non-historian, tells historians that they’ve been doing history wrong!

It was such an important book that not only is there an abridged version there is also a reading companion, a documentary series AND it won the Pulitzer? My flabber is well and truly gasted

And that’s probably the longest review I’ve done for 10 pages worth of reading! show less

When you want to write a wildly interdisciplinary book like this, you can't avoid going outside the boundary of your expertise. And Diamond certainly does cross that boundary many times. (Seriously, didn't he know a single Japanese person who could tell him about the Japanese writing system? He's grossly inaccurate about the subject.) But the thing about him is that he's not shy about making controversial claims. This is great, because the reader can dissect those claims and decide to agree or disagree with him, rather than nod in vague agreement, which involves no learning.

So I have lots of critical remarks about details in this book. But overall, I think he makes a very strong case that geographical features of Earth's continents was show more the main factor that allowed Europeans to conquer much of the rest of the world. It's probably worth your money just for the amount of interesting trivia (or not so trivia) about food production, technology, culture, etc. that are in this book. show less