Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” begins with a question posed by a New Guinea politician named Yali: “Why do white men have so much cargo [i.e., steel tools and other products of civilization], and we New Guineans have so little?” The book attempts to answer this question by uncovering the historical and evolutionary reasons for the vast wealth disparities between nations. Diamond’s answer to the question is summarized as follows: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”
In the book, a dramatic encounter occurs between Incan emperor Atahuallpa and the Spanish conquistadors led by Francisco Pizarro in 1532. At that time, Atahuallpa was the absolute monarch of the largest and most advanced state in the New World, surrounded by his 80,000 soldiers, while Pizarro led a small group of 168 Spanish adventurers. Despite being vastly outnumbered and far from reinforcements, the Spanish were able to capture Atahuallpa.
The Spanish used their cannons to create a panic among the Incan troops who trampled over each other in an attempt to flee. The Incan armaments were no match for Spanish steel, turning the engagement into a slaughter. The Spanish were able to extract a king’s ransom and subsequently murdered the king anyway. Their eventual defeat of the Incans allowed them to dominate Peru.
Engagements such as this were so one-sided due to several factors, including technological superiority, immunity to diseases, and political organization. The Spanish had steel weapons, gunpowder, and horses, while the Incans had bronze weapons and no horses. The Spanish were also immune to diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza, while the Incans had no immunity to these diseases. The Spanish were also able to exploit the political divisions between the Incans and their neighbors. What led to such disparities in technology, immunity, and political organization?
A significant turning point in human history was the shift from hunting and gathering to farming. Farming allowed for the production of a surplus food supply, which enabled certain classes of people such as rulers, politicians, and professionals to spend time on activities other than gathering food all day. In contrast, hunting and gathering cultures tended to be more egalitarian since everyone had to collect their own food, leaving little time for other activities. Although hunter-gatherers traded with farming cultures, they did not adopt farming due to various reasons. Ironically, farmers themselves tended to have less freedom and food compared to their hunter-gatherer counterparts.
Several factors made it feasible for farming civilizations to flourish, one of which was the availability of large, domesticable mammals. These provided numerous benefits, such as meat and milk for consumption, land transport, military uses, and assistance with farming and cultivation.
As the largest contiguous landmass, Eurasia has the largest collection of domesticable mammals. Out of the world’s 148 large herbivorous mammals, only 14 have been proven to be domesticable. The five major domesticable mammals are cows, sheep, goats, pigs, and horses. All of these mammals could be found natively in Eurasia, but only a few were in the Americas and Africa, and none in places like New Guinea. For a mammal to be domesticable, it needs to have certain traits, such as the willingness to live in close proximity to other members of its species, the ability to breed in captivity, and a disposition that makes it easy to tame.
Africa has a variety of large mammals, so why weren’t more of them domesticated? Cheetahs cannot be domesticated due to their courtship ritual, which involves the female being chased by a pack of brothers; without this, the female does not ovulate. Zebras are not domesticable due to their sour disposition and tendency to bite their captors. Rhinos are not domesticable because they are unwilling to accept humans as the head of their herd. If Africans had managed to domesticate rhinos, rhino-mounted shock troops could have overwhelmed even Roman legionnaires. While all of these animals had been tamed at some point, domestication also requires that they can be bred in captivity.
Civilizations also varied in their access to domesticable crops. The wild versions of crops like barley and peas were already edible and had high yields prior to domestication. They were also much easier to plant using the simple tools available to early humans and could be stored and eaten during winter months. Regions such as Australia, California, and the Argentine Pampas lacked domesticable plants and so did not develop indigenous food production. Conversely, regions like the Fertile Crescent and China, both in Eurasia, had a much larger share of domesticable crops, making them the earliest centers of food production.
Farming cultures also tended to be much more densely populated and had herds of animals living in close proximity. This increased the likelihood of germs spreading between animals and, eventually, evolving to infect humans. Over time, farming cultures developed immunity to these diseases, but other cultures that had not been exposed to them remained vulnerable.
Until World War 1, germs were the biggest killers in human history. According to Diamond, the winners of past wars were often those with the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies. More Native Americans were killed by the germs that the Spanish brought with them than were slaughtered with guns or steel weapons. It is estimated that 95% of pre-Columbian Native Americans were killed by diseases. Around 20 million Indians lived in the Americas, most of whom were killed by a host of diseases they had never before encountered. The key infectious diseases included smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, malaria, and others. The reason that Native Americans were wiped out by Spanish diseases and not the other way around was that the Spanish came from farming civilizations with dense populations.
Another key factor in the differences between civilizations is the development and transmission of technology. There have been several cases where a culture adopts a technology, only to abandon it later on. For example, after being introduced to firearm technology by the Portuguese, the Japanese had perfected it, but their samurai class eventually banned them. Similarly, Aboriginal Australians abandoned such killer apps as the bow and arrow, and Aboriginal Tasmanians abandoned bone tools and fishing.
Why do some civilizations abandon technologies while others improve and innovate upon them? Diamond theorizes that the level of isolation of the civilization plays a major role. Some civilizations were isolated due to geography, such as Aboriginal Australians, who were cut off from Eurasia by water barriers in the Indonesian Archipelago. The orientation of continents also determined the level of isolation. Eurasia, with its east-west major axis, benefited from the fact that crops from the far east could thrive as easily in the west, since they share the same latitude and roughly the same climatic and ecological conditions. Africa and the Americas have a north-south major axis, making diffusion more difficult.
The Aboriginal Australians, Japanese, and Chinese all experienced the luxury and curse of isolation from other civilizations, which meant they didn’t have to compete with neighbors, but also couldn’t learn from them. Failing to innovate when surrounded by rival powers often spelled doom for the lagging civilizations, but isolated states didn’t face such pressure.
Isolation also reduced the likelihood of civilizations encountering new technologies. It is often more difficult to invent a technology independently than to replicate something that already works. Written language was only independently invented by a few civilizations, including the Sumerians around 3000 BC, early Mesoamericans around 600 BC, and possibly Egypt and China (which is still debated). It was then adopted by neighboring civilizations through cultural exchange and trade.
Civilizations such as the Polynesian Tonga, societies in subequatorial Africa and sub-Saharan West Africa before the arrival of Islam, and the largest native North American societies did not develop writing. These civilizations were more isolated, either by oceans in the case of the Tonga, or by north-south axes that slowed the diffusion in the case of Africa and North American Indians, who were otherwise connected by land to civilizations that had writing.
For most of human history, Western Europe was a technological backwater, receiving most of its technologies from China and Islamic nations. The region consisted of a large number of rival states, often at war with one another. However, this balkanization turned out to be a blessing. Failure to adopt a particular innovation might mean falling behind economically or militarily, so technologies were adopted rapidly and rarely abandoned.
When Columbus pitched his plans to explore a new route to the Indies, he was able to present them to numerous princes before finally securing funds from the King and Queen of Spain. Once rivals saw the wealth that the Spanish were bringing back, they quickly jumped on the bandwagon.
China has been a center of innovation throughout most of human civilization, with a long list of inventions that includes gunpowder, cast iron, deep drilling, magnetic compasses, movable type, and printing, among others. The country was politically unified by 221 BC, which was facilitated by the many large rivers that flow through the country and connect the north and south.
However, China’s unity became a disadvantage in contrast to Europe. It did not face the same pressure to continue innovating, and was able to close itself off from other cultures.
Several decades before Columbus’s voyages, China had large ocean-going fleets, each consisting of hundreds of ships, some measuring up to 400 feet long. However, China abandoned these fleets after A.D. 1433, due to a power struggle between two political factions. The faction that had been sending the fleets lost power, and the fleets were stopped, shipyards dismantled, and oceangoing shipping was forbidden. When the political climate changed, shipbuilding couldn’t resume where it left off, as the shipyards were no longer available and no one could rebuild them. This scenario could not have occurred in Western Europe, where a rival nation would have continued shipbuilding.
Another interesting question is the outsized impact of idiosyncratic individuals, known as the “Great Man” theory of history. Why did certain cultures produce Einsteins, Guttenbergs, and Alexander the Greats, while others did not? Diamond’s theory is that these individuals benefited from environmental differences between cultures that enabled them to flourish. Diamond believes that the average Aboriginal person is more intelligent than the average Westerner, but Aboriginals do not have the benefit of a massive cultural and technological endowment. However, these “Stone Age” peoples can and do master industrial technologies when given the opportunity. If Einstein were born in New Guinea instead of the industrial era, he likely would not have discovered the special theory of relativity.
Diamond concludes his book by defending the study of history. Despite its reputation as a less scientific field than physics, history is vital. It is not, as the saying goes, “just one damn fact after another.” Unlike the “hard” sciences, there is no way to rerun experiments and observe changes by controlling a single variable. However, Diamond notes that we can predict broad patterns and trends based on historical precedents, even if we can’t predict the outcome of near-term outcomes like elections. By studying history, we can gain insight into the possible development of societal structures or cultural norms under certain conditions.
As a history buff, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is packed with nuggets of historical insight woven together skillfully to answer a profound question. At times, it can be dry, such as when Diamond spends several chapters on the obscure farming and animal husbandry practices of long-lost civilizations, but all these details serve to back up his claims. Interestingly, the author spends much more time discussing seeds than steel, though “Guns, Germs, and Seeds” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. Some might argue that the book is an exquisite exercise in conjecture, with examples cherry-picked to support Diamond’s claims. While I agree with the author’s general conclusion, those who oppose it might have a rougher time with the book.