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Guns, Germs, and Steel

Cover of the first edition, featuring the painting Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru by John Everett Millais
Author	Jared Diamond
Language	English
Subject	Geography, social evolution, ethnology, cultural diffusion
Published	1997 (W. W. Norton)
Publication place	United States
Media type	Hardcover, paperback, audio CD, audio cassette, audio download
Pages	480 pages (1st edition, hardcover)
ISBN	0-393-03891-2 (1st edition, hardcover)
OCLC	35792200
Dewey Decimal	303.4 21
LC Class	HM206 .D48 1997
Preceded by	Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality
Followed by	Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (also titled Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years) is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1998, Guns, Germs, and Steel 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.

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. 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 favored 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.

Synopsis

The prologue opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the obvious differences in power and technology between Yali's people and the Europeans who dominated the land for 200 years, differences that neither of them considered due to any genetic superiority of Europeans. 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?" (p. 14)

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." (p. 15)

The peoples of other continents (sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans, and the original inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia) have been largely conquered, displaced and in some extreme cases – referring to Native Americans, Aboriginal 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' technologic and immunologic advantages, stemming from the early rise of agriculture after the last Ice Age.

Title

The book's title is a reference to the means by which farm-based societies conquered populations of other areas and maintained dominance, despite sometimes being vastly outnumbered – superior weapons provided immediate military superiority (guns); Eurasian diseases weakened and reduced local populations, who had no immunity, making it easier to maintain control over them (germs); and durable means of transport (steel) enabled imperialism.

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.

Outline of theory

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 technologic 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 began to trade, they found additional useful animals in adjacent territories, most notably horses and donkeys for use in transport. Diamond identifies 13 species of large animals over 100 pounds (45 kg) 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, whilst the only domesticated animals in New Guinea came from the East Asian mainland during the Austronesian settlement some 4,000–5,000 years ago. Sub-Saharan 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.

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 it with more plant and animal species suitable for domestication, and allowed its people to exchange both innovations and diseases. Its east-west orientation allowed breeds domesticated in one part of the continent to be used elsewhere through similarities in climate and the cycle of seasons. The Americas had difficulty 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 nonfarming 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 the guns and steel of the book's title.

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 forced Eurasians to develop 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: endemic malaria and yellow fever made these regions notorious as the "white man's grave"; and syphilis may have originated in the Americas). The European diseases – the germs of the book's title – decimated indigenous populations so that relatively small numbers of Europeans could maintain their dominance.

Diamond also proposes geographical explanations for why western European societies, rather than other Eurasian powers such as China, have been the dominant colonizers, claiming Europe's geography favored balkanization into smaller, closer, nation-states, bordered by natural barriers of mountains, rivers, and coastline. Threats posed by immediate neighbours ensured governments that suppressed economic and technological progress soon corrected their mistakes or were outcompeted relatively quickly, whilst the region's leading powers changed over time. Other advanced cultures developed in areas whose geography was conducive to large, monolithic, isolated empires, without competitors that might have forced the nation to reverse mistaken policies such as China banning the building of ocean-going ships. Western Europe also benefited from a more temperate climate than Southwestern Asia where intense agriculture ultimately damaged the environment, encouraged desertification, and hurt soil fertility.

Agriculture

Guns, Germs, and Steel argues that cities require an ample supply of food, thus depend on agriculture. As farmers do the work of providing food, division of labor allows others freedom to pursue other functions, such as mining and literacy.

The crucial trap for the development of agriculture is the availability of wild edible plant species suitable for domestication. Farming arose early in the Fertile Crescent since the area had an abundance of wild wheat and pulse species that were nutritious and easy to domesticate. In contrast, American farmers had to struggle to develop corn as a useful food from its probable wild ancestor, teosinte.

Also important to the transition from hunter-gatherer to city-dwelling agrarian societies was the presence of 'large' domesticable animals, raised for meat, work, and long-distance communication. Diamond identifies a mere 14 domesticated large mammal species worldwide. The five most useful (cow, horse, sheep, goat, and pig) are all descendants of species endemic to Eurasia. Of the remaining nine, only two (the llama and alpaca both of South America) are indigenous to a land outside the temperate region of Eurasia.

Due to the Anna Karenina principle, surprisingly few animals are suitable for domestication. Diamond identifies six criteria including the animal being sufficiently docile, gregarious, willing to breed in captivity and having a social dominance hierarchy. Therefore, none of the many African mammals such as the zebra, antelope, cape buffalo, and African elephant were ever domesticated (although some can be tamed, they are not easily bred in captivity). The Holocene extinction event eliminated many of the megafauna that, had they survived, might have become candidate species, and Diamond argues that the pattern of extinction is more severe on continents where animals that had no prior experience of humans were exposed to humans who already possessed advanced hunting techniques (e.g. the Americas and Australia).

Smaller domesticable animals such as dogs, cats, chickens, and guinea pigs may be valuable in various ways to an agricultural society, but will not be adequate in themselves to sustain large-scale agrarian society. An important example is the use of larger animals such as cattle and horses in plowing land, allowing for much greater crop productivity and the ability to farm a much wider variety of land and soil types than would be possible solely by human muscle power. Large domestic animals also have an important role in the transportation of goods and people over long distances, giving the societies that possess them considerable military and economic advantages.

Geography

Diamond also argues that geography shaped human migration, not simply by making travel difficult (particularly by latitude), but by how climates affect where domesticable animals can easily travel and where crops can ideally grow easily due to the sun.

Modern humans are believed to have developed east of the Great Rift Valley of the African continent, at one time or another (see Out of Africa theory). The Sahara kept people from migrating north to the Fertile Crescent, until later when the Nile River valley became accommodating.

Diamond continues to describe the story of human development up to the modern era, through the rapid development of technology, and its dire consequences on hunter-gathering cultures around the world.

Diamond touches on why the dominant powers of the last 500 years have been West European rather than East Asian (especially Chinese). The Asian areas in which big civilizations arose had geographical features conducive to the formation of large, stable, isolated empires which faced no external pressure to change which led to stagnation. Europe's many natural barriers allowed the development of competing nation-states. Such competition forced the European nations to encourage innovation and avoid technological stagnation.

Germs

In the later context of the European colonization of the Americas, 95% of the indigenous populations are believed to have been killed off by diseases brought by the Europeans. Many were killed by infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles. Similar circumstances were observed in the History of Australia (1788-1850) and in History of South Africa. Aboriginal Australians and the Khoikhoi population were decimated by small pox, measles, influenza and other diseases.

How was it then that diseases native to the American continents did not kill off Europeans? Diamond posits that the most of these diseases were only developed and sustained in large dense populations in villages and cities; he also states most epidemic diseases evolve from similar diseases of domestic animals. The combined effect of the increased population densities supported by agriculture, and of close human proximity to domesticated animals leading to animal diseases infecting humans, resulted in European societies acquiring a much richer collection of dangerous pathogens to which European people had acquired immunity through natural selection (see the Black Death and other epidemics) during a longer time than was the case for Native American hunter-gatherers and farmers.

He mentions the tropical diseases (mainly malaria) that limited European penetration into Africa as an exception. Infectious diseases endemic were also barriers to European colonisation of South-east Asia and New Guinea.

Success and failure

Guns, Germs, and Steel focuses on why some populations succeeded. His later book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, focuses on environmental and other factors that have caused some populations to fail. It is a cautionary book.

Intellectual background

In the 1930s, the Annales School in France undertook the study of long-term historical structures by using a synthesis of geography, history, and sociology. Scholars examined the impact of geography, climate, and land use. Although geography had been nearly eliminated as an academic discipline in the United States after the 1960s, several geography-based historical theories were published in the 1990s.

In 1991, Jared Diamond already considered the question of "why is it that the Eurasians came to dominate other cultures?" in The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (part four).

Reception

Guns, Germs, and Steel won the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. In 1998, it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, in recognition of its powerful synthesis of many disciplines, and the Royal Society's Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books. The National Geographic Society produced a documentary of the same title based on the book that was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.

Academic reviews

In a review of Guns, Germs, and Steel that ultimately commended the book, historian Tom Tomlinson wrote, "Given the magnitude of the task he has set himself, it is inevitable that Professor Diamond uses very broad brush-strokes to fill in his argument."

Another historian, professor J. R. McNeill, was on the whole complimentary, but thought Diamond oversold geography as an explanation for history and underemphasized cultural autonomy.

In his last book published in 2000, the anthropologist and geographer James Morris Blaut criticized Guns, Germs, and Steel, among other reasons, for reviving the theory of environmental determinism, and described Diamond as an example of a modern Eurocentric historian. Blaut criticizes Diamond's loose use of the terms "Eurasia" and "innovative", which he believes misleads the reader into presuming that Western Europe is responsible for technological inventions that arose in the Middle East and Asia.

Harvard International Relations (IR) scholar Stephen Walt called the book "an exhilarating read" and put it on a list of the ten books every IR student should read.

Berkeley economist Brad DeLong describes the book as a "work of complete and total genius."

John Brätland is an Austrian school economist of the U.S. Department of the Interior who focuses on the study of property rights. He complained in an article on the Journal of Libertarian Studies that Guns, Germs, and Steel entirely neglects individual action, concentrating solely on the centralized state; fails to understand how societies form (assessing that societies do not exist or form without a strong government); and ignores various economical institutions, such as monetary exchange that would allow societies to "rationally reckon scarcities and the value of actions required to replace what is depleted through human use." Instead, the author concludes that because there was no sophisticated division of labor, private property rights, and monetary exchange, societies like Easter Island's one could never progress from the nomadic stage to a complex society. Those factors, according to Brätland are crucial, and at the same time neglected by Diamond.

Other critique has been made over the author’s position on the agricultural revolution.

Publication

Guns, Germs, and Steel was first published by W. W. Norton in March 1997. It was subsequently published in Great Britain under the title Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years by Vintage in 1998 (ISBN 978-0099302780). It was a selection of Book of the Month Club, History Book Club, Quality Paperback Book Club, and Newbridge Book Club.

In 2003 and 2007, the author published new English-language editions that included information collected since the previous editions. The new information did not change any of the original edition's conclusions.

See also

• Alfred W. Crosby
• James Burke (science historian)
• Malcolm Gladwell
• Marvin Harris
• Population history of American indigenous peoples
• Scramble for Africa
• Bantu expansion
• Environmental determinism
• States and Power in Africa

General:

• Climatic determinism
• Historical materialism
• Geographic determinism
• Cultural ecology
• Cultural materialism

Books and television:

• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
• Connections (TV series)
• Outliers (book)
• Ishmael (novel)
• Rise of the West
• Fates of Nations
• The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

Notes and references

1. ^ Lovgren, Stefan (July 6, 2005). ""Guns, Germs and Steel": Jared Diamond on Geography as Power". National Geographic News. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
2. ^ Diamond, J. (March 1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-03891-2.
3. ^ McNeill, J.R. (February 2001). "The World According to Jared Diamond" (PDF). The History Teacher. 34 (2). Archived from the original (PDF) on July 14, 2013. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
4. Ross, R.; MacGregor, W. (January 1903). "The Fight against Malaria: An Industrial Necessity for Our African Colonies". Journal of the Royal African Society. 2 (6). Oxford University Press: 149–160. JSTOR 714548.
5. The origin of syphilis is still debated. Some researchers think it was known to Hippocrates: Keys, David (2007). "English syphilis epidemic pre-dated European outbreaks by 150 years". Independent News and Media Limited. Retrieved September 22, 2007. Others think it was brought from the Americas by Columbus and his successors: MacKenzie, D. (January 2008). "Columbus blamed for spread of syphilis". NewScientist.com news service.
6. Diamond, J. (July 1999). "How to get rich".
7. Blainey, Geoffrey (2002). A short history of the world. Chicago: Dee. ISBN 978-1566635073.
8. "Smallpox Epidemic Strikes at the Cape". South Africa History Online. March 16, 2011.
9. Cohen, P. (March 21, 1998). "Geography Redux: Where You Live Is What You Are". The New York Times. Retrieved July 9, 2008.
10. "1997 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award". Phi Beta Kappa. Archived from the original on January 24, 2006. Retrieved February 16, 2014.
11. "The Pulitzer Prizes for 1998". Columbia University. Retrieved February 15, 2014.
12. "Prizes for Science Books previous winners and shortlists". The Royal Society.
13. Tom Tomlinson (May 1998). "Review:Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies". Institute of Historical Research. Retrieved March 14, 2008.
14. Jared Diamond; Reply by William H. McNeill (June 26, 1997). "Guns, Germs, and Steel". The New York Review of Books. 44 (11). Archived from the original on May 27, 2008. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
15. James M. Blaut (2000). Eight Eurocentric Historians (August 10, 2000 ed.). The Guilford Press. p. 228. ISBN 1-57230-591-6. Retrieved August 5, 2008.
16. Blaut, J.M. (1999). "Environmentalism and Eurocentrism". The Geographical Review. 89 (3). American Geographical Society: 391. doi:10.2307/216157. JSTOR 216157. Retrieved July 9, 2008. full text
17. Johnson, Matt (April 9, 2009). "My "top ten" books every student of International Relations should read". Foreign Policy. Archived from the original on December 25, 2014. Retrieved January 2, 2016. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |registration= ignored (|url-access= suggested) (help)
18. J. Bradford DeLong. "Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel". j-bradford-delong.net. Retrieved August 23, 2016. November 1999
19. John Brätland. "An Austrian Reexamination of Recent Thoughts on the Rise and Collapse of Societies" (PDF). mises.org. Retrieved January 9, 2017. July 2014
20. http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/06/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race.html
21. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/5604296/Is-farming-the-root-of-all-evil.html
22. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years, London: Vintage, 2005 , ISBN 0-09-930278-0
23. "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies", Publishers Weekly, December 30, 1998, retrieved October 7, 2012
24. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Retrieved September 21, 2015.

Further reading

• William McNeill (1976), Plagues and Peoples, New York: Anchor/Doubleday (ISBN 0-385-12122-9).

External links

• Guns, Germs, and Steel at Open Library
• PBS – Guns, Germs, and Steel
• ABC Radio Transcripts: Why Societies Collapse: Jared Diamond at Princeton University
• Guns, Germs, and Steel at IMDb

v t e Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
1962–1975	The Making of the President 1960 by Theodore White (1962) The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman (1963) Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter (1964) O Strange New World by Howard Mumford Jones (1965) Wandering Through Winter by Edwin Way Teale (1966) The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture by David Brion Davis (1967) Rousseau and Revolution, vol. 10 of The Story of Civilization, by Will and Ariel Durant (1968) So Human an Animal by René Dubos / The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer (1969) Gandhi's Truth by Erik Erikson (1970) The Rising Sun by John Toland (1971) Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 by Barbara W. Tuchman (1972) Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald / Children of Crisis vols. 2 and 3 by Robert Coles (1973) The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (1974) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (1975)
1976–2000	Why Survive? by Robert N. Butler (1976) Beautiful Swimmers by William W. Warner (1977) The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan (1978) On Human Nature by E. O. Wilson (1979) Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (1980) Fin-de-siècle Vienna by Carl Emil Schorske (1981) The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1982) Is There No Place on Earth for Me? by Susan Sheehan (1983) The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr (1984) The Good War by Studs Terkel (1985) Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas / Move Your Shadow by Joseph Lelyveld (1986) Arab and Jew by David K. Shipler (1987) The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1988) A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan (1989) And Their Children After Them by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson (1990) The Ants by Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson (1991) The Prize by Daniel Yergin (1992) Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills (1993) Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick (1994) The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner (1995) The Haunted Land by Tina Rosenberg (1996) Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1998) Annals of the Former World by John McPhee (1999) Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower (2000)
2001–2025	Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix (2001) Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter (2002) "A Problem from Hell" by Samantha Power (2003) Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum (2004) Ghost Wars by Steve Coll (2005) Imperial Reckoning by Caroline Elkins (2006) The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (2007) The Years of Extermination by Saul Friedländer (2008) Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon (2009) The Dead Hand by David E. Hoffman (2010) The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2011) The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt (2012) Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King (2013) Toms River by Dan Fagin (2014) The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert (2015) Black Flags by Joby Warrick (2016) Evicted by Matthew Desmond (2017) Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr. (2018) Amity and Prosperity by Eliza Griswold (2019) The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin / The Undying by Anne Boyer (2020) Wilmington's Lie by David Zucchino (2021) Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott (2022) His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (2023) A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall (2024)

• 1997 books
• Non-fiction books about indigenous peoples of the Americas
• Environmental non-fiction books
• Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction-winning works
• Theories of history
• History books about agriculture
• Eurasian history
• History books about civilization
• World history
• Works by Jared Diamond
• 20th-century history books
• Books about cultural geography
• W. W. Norton & Company books