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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 book by Jared Diamond arguing that the power and technology gaps dividing human societies developed not from cultural or racial differences but from differences in geography and resources. It won the Pulitzer Prize for 1998.

Synopsis

Premise

The premise for Guns, Germs, and Steel was to answer the question why did European civilization win out over other competing civilizations?

Diamond doesn't deal much with out of Africa theories, because he limits his scope to the last ten-thousand years. The answer it turns out is simple and has nothing to do with so-called racial differences that have been commonly believed, though ill-supported.

People clearly came from Africa, at one time or another, and the reason large civilizations never began until humans could reach north to Egypt, and Mesopotamia was due to climate, and animals.

Cities

Diamond explains that cities allow people to have free time to devise different technology (hence, guns and steel). In order to be able to stay put instead of roaming, people needed food, hence agriculture. And making the change from hunter-gatherer to city-dwelling agrarian societies depended entirely on the presence of domesticable animals.

Domesticability

If an animal is not domesticable, it cannot be used for work in agriculture. There are six criteria for domesticability. The animal must not be too dangerous. It must allow man to replace one of the group as head animal, many animals are too independent to be domesticated. The animal must be able to survive in captivity, and so on.

Of all the domesticable species in the world, only one comes from outside the temperate region of Eurasia, which extends nearly uninterrupted from eastern Europe to Asia. Only the Llama of South America is indigenous to lands outside of the temperate region of Eurasia. There are no domesticable animals native to Africa.

Geography

Diamond also explains how geography shapes human migration, not simply by making travel difficult, (particularly by longitude), but by how climates affect where domesticable animals can easily travel and where crops can ideally grow. Thus civilization developed in the fertile crescent quite naturally because the conditions were right for it.

Germs

In the context of the European American conquest of the Americas, for example 90 percent of the indigenous populations are believed to have been killed off by diseases brought by the Europeans. How was it then that diseases native to the American continents did not kill off Europeans? Diamond points out that the domestication of animals allowed Europeans to develop an immunity to these animal borne diseases.

In bringing many domesticable species to the Americas, diseases were also brought, for which Europeans had long developed resistance and the natives had not.

Criticisms

This book has been criticized as an example of environmental determinism with racist implications. The charge is not that the book claims superiority of European Civilization in the modern era, but that:

• It suggests that European civilization has "won" some competition. Human history is far from over, therefore it is impossible to say that one form of social organization has "won" over another form. To put it another way, Diamond suggests that history provides us with a natural experiment, but he is mistaken because experiments must have clear endings and the human "experiment" never ends.
• It suggests the inevitability of European ascendency.
• It overlooks or obscures the importance of non-European knowledge, technologies, and labor in European development, and the fact that Europeans forcibly appropriated much of this knowledge, technology, and labor. In other words, the "ascendency" in question is one that has primarily benefited Europeans, but is not specifically "European" in nature. For an example of this charge, see the geographer James M. Blaut's Eight Eurocentric Historians.
• It makes little attempt to explain relatively recent geographic transitions in technology, power and wealth; in particular the rise of Europe and the decline of south-west Asia since about 1500.

Responses

Resources

• ABC Radio Transcripts: Why Societies Collapse: Jared Diamond at Princeton University http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s707591.htm
• Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Company, March 1997. ISBN 0393038912
• James M. Blaut: Eight Eurocentric Historians. The Guilford Press, New York, 2000. ISBN 1572305916