Why is Guns, Germs, and Steel so Important? |
Book discussed: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (1999)
Also mentioned: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (2018)
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel was a watershed achievement when it appeared in the late 1990s. This book relates directly to a number of fields, including world history, anthropology, archaeology, economics, and geography. Very few works have attracted attention from so many distinct disciplines. Diamond earned the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1998, as well as the National Medal of Science in 1999. Why the accolades? Well, Guns, Germs, and Steel does something monumental: it attempts to explain the rise and fall of civilizations the world over through a matrix of environmental and geographic factors. Why are the Near East, China, and Mexico the centers of ancient civilizations? Well, people in those locations had, respectively, access to wheat, rice, and maize agriculture. In addition, Asian and European societies had the advantage of livestock that other places did not have due to geography. For instance, Euroasian societies had cattle, horses, and sheep, livestock not availed to peoples in the Americas.
Diamond talks about "Farmer Power." Why is it that some peoples developed cities, advanced machines, and large populations, while others remained in a hunter-gather state? This elemental question, which has been attempted by anthropology in academic settings, is brought forth and explained in a succinct, coherent, and rather elegant fashion here. Diamond shows how the wheat and barley Near East spread into North Africa and Europe; how rice agriculture powered East Asia; how maize agriculture developed in Mesoamerica. These developments, largely boun by geography, had earth-shattering consequences. Regions like the Mediterranean, China, Persia, India, and Mexico had access to thousands of years of agricultural history, meaning that these areas had ample time to develop large cities, highly-structured political administration, heavy populations, and new materials and technologies. In addition, the geographic distribution of cattle, sheep, oxen, and horses gave Europe and Asia another significant advantage. The development of agriculture and cattle domestication gave birth to civilization. Diamond argues that geography is a primary driver for the rise of powerful empires and cultures. However, he is also aware that the hunter-gather way has its own advantages. Namely, the amount of daily work hours required to sustain a hunter-gather society is much lower than a farming society. Also, the backbreaking work of agriculture was likely a hard sell. In a particularly keen example, Diamond discusses how a hunter-gatherer society in the Pacific islands has an encyclopedic knowledge of local botanical resources, and the gatherers can identify safe mushrooms from poisonous mushrooms, a feat reserved only for specialists in the West.
These environmental and geographic factors impacted world history. Europeans accustomed to diseases from livestock--such as small pox and influenza--decimated populations that had no exposure during the colonial era. As the world became interconnected over the past few centuries, some societies became more powerful and others were terribly damaged. Guns, Germs, and Steel remains a classic of nonfiction. The influence from this book is still dramatic, and the ripples are obvious in more recent works such as Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Some have stated that Guns, Germs, and Steel is too simplistic in its account of world history, relying to much on a "determinist" perspective; that is, the environment alone does not determine the fate of human societies. Many argue that politics and religion are left out of Diamond's narrative. For instance, can environmental factors account for the Protestant Reformation or the American Revolution? Despite the charge of determinism, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a great introduction to global human history in five hundred pages. Updated August 2019 Back to the top of the page