Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at UCLA. In 1998 it won a Pulitzer Prize and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book was broadcast on PBS in July, 2005, produced by the National Geographic Society.

According to the author, an alternative title would be A short history about everyone for the last 13,000 years. But the book is not merely an account of the past; it attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations, as a whole, have survived and conquered others, while refuting the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, genetic or moral superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies do not reflect cultural or racial differences, but rather originate in environmental differences powerfully amplified by various positive feedback loops. He also, most explicitly in the epilogue, argues that societies with food surpluses and high-to-moderate degrees of interaction with outsiders are more likely to encourage great people to realize their full potential and to adopt new inventions.

Prologue
The prologue to the book 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?"

Diamond found that he had no good answer. He says that the same sort of question seems to apply elsewhere: "People of Eurasian origin... dominate the world in wealth and power." Other peoples, having thrown off colonial domination, lag in wealth and power. Still others, he says, "have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists." (p. 15) He says that, unable to find a satisfactory explanation from the best-known accounts of history, he decided to make his own investigation to seek the root causes of Eurasian dominance.

Before stating his main argument, Diamond considers three possible criticisms of his investigation. These are covered in detail below.

The theory outlined
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 sheer will or intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions.

In our earliest societies humans lived as hunter-gatherers. The first step towards civilization is the move from hunter-gatherer to agriculture with the domestication and farming of wild crops and animals. Agricultural production leads to food surpluses and this in turn supports sedentary societies, rapid population growth, and specialization of labor. Large societies tend to develop ruling classes and supporting bureaucracies, which leads in turn to the organization of empires. Although agriculture arose in several parts of the world, Eurasia gained an early advantage due to the availability of suitable plant and animal species for domestication. In particular, Mesopotamia had by far the best collection of plants and animals suitable for domestication, and Europe adopted Mesopotamia's animals, plants, and agricultural techniques.

(As Michael Wood points out, agriculture made cities possible, and cities made war possible.)

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. In contrast, Australia suffered from a lack of useful animals due to extinction; 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); and Africa was fragmented by its extreme variations in climate from north to south: plants and animals that flourished in one area never reached other areas where they could have flourished, because they could not survive in intervening areas.

Hence Eurasia was able to support larger, denser populations, which made trade easier and technological progress faster than in other regions. These economic and technological advantages eventually enabled Europeans to conquer the peoples of the other continents in recent centuries.

Eurasia's dense populations, high level of trade, and living in close proximity to livestock made the transmission of diseases easy, and so natural selection forced Eurasians to develop immunity to a wide range of pathogens. So when Eurasians, especially Europeans, made contact with inhabitants of other regions, especially Native Americans, European diseases ravaged the Native American population, rather than the other way around. This made it easier for relatively small numbers of Europeans to conquer much larger indigenous populations.

Guns, Germs and Steel also offers a two-page explanation of why western European culture came to dominate other large, fairly advanced cultures:
 * Other advanced cultures developed in areas whose geography was conducive to large, monolithic, isolated empires. In these conditions mistaken policies were not corrected and led to stagnation - until Europeans arrived.
 * Europe's geography favoured nation-states which competed with each other and also traded and communicated with each other. As a result, seriously mistaken policies were usually corrected relatively quickly.

Agriculture
Guns, Germs, and Steel argues that cities require an ample supply of food and thus depend on agriculture. As farmers do the work of providing food, others are free to pursue other functions, such as mining and literacy. (see Division of labor)

The crucial trigger 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 cows 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 explains how 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 in Africa, 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 explain 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.

Germs
In the later context of the European colonization of the Americas, 95 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 posits that 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.

Criticism
Some critics of the book argue that it is derivative of the work of such cultural evolutionists as Leslie White, Julian Steward, and Ester Boserup, who analyzed the relationship between agriculture and economic and political growth; and such historians as William McNeill and Alfred Crosby, who analyzed the relationship between agriculture, European expansion, and disease.

Criticism of Eurocentrism and determinism
Others have criticized the book as an example of environmental determinism in the service of Eurocentrism. Although Diamond explicitly argues against European cultural or racial superiority, he is charged with serving many of the same functions as nineteenth century European claims to cultural or racial superiority by the implication that critics see in his book - that Europeans were destined to rule the globe. Diamond anticipates this criticism in the first point of his introduction.


 * James Blaut offers what is probably the most exhaustive critique of Guns, Germs, and Steel . Blaut includes Jared Diamond as an example of a modern Eurocentric historian in his book Eight Eurocentric Historians. Blaut asserts that Diamond has merely revived an old and discredited theory called Environmentalism, having repackaged it in the language of scientism (which gives the appearance of being scientific by using scientific jargon without actually using sound science). Blaut says Diamond makes the false and simplistic claim that plant ecology determines human culture. Blaut describes Diamond's theory as “Euro-Environmentalism”, or the mistaken notion of an imagined European environmental superiority which transmits supposedly-superior traits onto European culture (which are more accurately the product of Eastern inventions and a European assimilation of those Asian/Middle Eastern inventions). Diamond himself briefly mentions that prior to 1492, Europe was not the most advanced area on the planet, but that Asia held that position (China posessed guns, germs, and steel before Europe did). Blaut rejects the notion that culture is a "feeble force" and questions Diamond’s claim that thousands of years of human cultural evolution cannot overcome environmental factors. History is replete with culture besting environment, says Blaut. James Blaut also states that Diamond makes several geographical errors about midlatitude conditions (labeled "East-West axis" by Diamond, even though "Eurasia" is almost as tall as it is wide) in order to make his theory of European environmental superiority succeed. Blaut points out that Diamond cannot explain away the fact that maize agriculture spread throughout the "North-South axis" of the Western Hemisphere, giving rise to civilizations (such as Canada/Cahokia/Mississippian civilizations, Mesoamerican civilizations, and Andean civilizations in South America) in direct contradiction to Diamond's contention that only "East-West axis" cultures can properly diffuse highly advanced culture. Many of these corn-based Western Hemisphere civiliations became extremely advanced in areas of astronomy, writing, and city-building. Diamond's "East-West axis" theory is at a loss to explain this non-Eurasian process of civilization. Blaut also documents how the Chinese possessed guns, germs, and steel before Europeans did, yet the Chinese did not impose a program of colonialism, enslavement, or genocide on peoples with whom the Chinese came into contact through the hemispheric voyages of Zheng He. Blaut contends that Diamond is trying to explain the complexities of human culture through plant ecology, which he says is “not sound science.” Blaut's critique charges Diamond with trying to project the modern results of European colonial enrichment onto the past environmental landscapes of Neolithic "Eurasia", where such traits did not exist. This is circular logic, says Blaut who charges Diamond with a triumphalist historical revision to suit his theory of European cultural superiority. Blaut points out Diamond's teleological use of environmental fatalism (Diamond's subtitle contains the phrase "The Fates of Human Societies"). Blaut also criticizes Diamond's loose use of the terms "Eurasia" and "innovative," which he says mislead the reader into presuming that Western Europe is responsible for technological inventions that actually took place in the Middle East and Asia. In fact, Blaut points out, Western Europe was a latecomer to civilization, trailing for centuries behind the richer and more advanced civilizations of The East (until after 1492 when Europeans acquired the immense natural resources of the Western Hemisphere). Europe had no role in the invention of farming, cities, writing, guns, gunpowder, crossbows, steel, windmills, the magnetic compass, modern numerals, arithmetic, geometry, or water wheels. The "invention" of farming, cities, and writing clearly does belong to Ancient Mesopotamia, however Europeans independently invented many of the societal aspects mentioned above. Ancient Greeks independently invented the crossbow, the magnetic compass was independently invented by Northern Europeans no later than AD 1190, there is no conclusive evidence for how Europeans came into possession of gunpowder, but once gunpowder was in Europe internal cannon and firearms development was purely European, while the Ancient Greeks and Romans independently created arithmetic and geometry, as well as writing. The three-field system, a revolution in agriculture, was independently invented in Northern Europe no later than AD 1200, while Ancient Celtic Iberians were more than familiar with steel of their own invention. Blaut slams Diamond's "Eurasian" terminology as being Eurocentric because it portrays Mediterranean Europe and the Fertile Crescent as a single historical unit (they are separated by deserts and high mountains), with "Europe as the presumed heir," completely ignoring the economic primacy of China up until 1492. Blaut implies that Diamond's theories are attractive and flattering to readers of European descent in that they project an aura of scientific predestination onto the colonial-enrichment activities of Europeans during the last five centuries.


 * Timothy Taylor goes further by questioning whether Hernán Cortés actually "won" in his conflict with the Aztecs in the first place. Taylor accuses Diamond of assuming that Cortés was the victor because the European culture supplanted the Aztec. He says that this is a Eurocentric analysis, because the Aztecs may have considered their "fate and chances of eternal salvation" as more promising than the conquistadors'. He writes that while the book sees environmental adaptation and resource-base expansion as self-evidently good, the Maya saw the location of cities close to subterranean caverns as self-evidently good, whatever the ecological cost. In effect, the definition of success suggested by his New Guinean friend, though conforming to the standards of European, East Asian, and Melanesian societies, is not necessarily germane to other societies, in which the problem addressed by Diamond would not exist. Taylor's views may hold on analysis of Spanish-Aztec contact generally.  However, Diamond makes clear that the question he is answering is not who won, but who died (and why).

Critics of the book argue that European ascendancy was far from inevitable, but rather a result of complex political and economic forces that cannot be reduced to simply being a result of environmental factors.

Specific criticisms
Historians have questioned some of the specific examples Diamond marshals to prove his case on grounds of fact and/or plausibility. For example:


 * Professor Joel Mokyr asks whether Northeast American Sumpweed is not a counter-example to Diamond's claim that Eurasia was endowed with the best of the world’s domesticatable crops. The book argues that although the flower is "a nutritionist's ultimate dream" it was not possible to use it in farming because it has tiny seeds, as well as causing hay fever and skin irritation and smelling bad. Mokyr says that these are unpersuasive arguments that might be applied to the ancestors of Eurasian crops.
 * Professor Victor Davis Hanson, a historian and conservative political columnist, agrees with Diamond in that he rejects a racial explanation for Western dominance, but Hanson argues that certain fundamental aspects of Western culture are responsible, specifically political freedom, capitalism, individualism, republicanism, rationalism, and open debate. Hanson has written that Diamond seems "terribly confused" about history, and that environment was "almost irrelevant" to Western success. Supporters of Diamond, however, have argued that these cultural aspects were created because of the environment and resources at Europe's disposal. Guns, Germs, and Steel contains a 2-page section that partially anticipates this objection by arguing that Europe's geography favoured the rise of competing nation-states rather than monolithic, isolated empires.
 * Diamond cites modern zoologists' inability to domesticate the zebra as evidence that it could not have been domesticated over the past forty millennia in Africa. Again; this has been challenged as not in itself a persuasive argument. It appears to these critics that modern failures to domesticate elephants and zebras are provided only as a fallbacks to Diamond's main point that since these animals have not been domesticated they could not be. (I.e. denying the antecedent, or as the Science & Society editorial puts it: "tautological reading-backwards from the present"). Supportive reviews have pointed out that Diamond produces further arguments, such as the ingenuity of native peoples in exploiting their environment as evidence of the difficulty of domesticating such animals. Surely, he writes, the native peoples who tamed elephants for use in war would have tried to breed them in captivity.  If native peoples were clever enough to selectively breed modern forms of corn from the vastly different variety that grew in the wild, surely they could have found a way to domesticate elephants. Supporters of Diamond often theorize, however, that domestication is not as simple as becoming capable to breed an animal in captivity, but is subject to the species' diet, lifespan, social structure, and other attributes. In the specific case of elephants, Diamond and his supporters often cite the elephant's long lifespan as a factor. Because of its long life span, native peoples found it less work with equivalent profit to capture from the wild and tame elephants, without breeding them.
 * Some researchers point out that Diamond’s "law of history" regarding the dominance of agricultural societies over their non-agricultural neighbors does not always hold true, such as the spread of hunting and gathering Inuits in Greenland at the expense of the agricultural Norse. While it has historically and prehistorically been the case that agricultural societies dispossess hunter gatherers Diamond's "law" highlights his oversimplification of the past. However, Diamond is careful to point out that many of his generalizations only apply to larger areas incorporating many groups of people. (Diamond's specific comment refers to the American Indians.)
 * Professor Tom Tomlinson argues in a review of Guns, Germs, and Steel that Diamond's approach ignores "much of the current literature on cultural interactions in modern history" and that Diamond omits "almost all of the standard literature on the history of imperialism and post-colonialism, world-systems, underdevelopment or socio-economic change over the last five hundred years." Though Diamond's book is a popular history that is not primarily interested in engaging in academic debates, this point exposes a failure of the book to deal sufficiently with competing hypotheses that is especially problematic in light of Diamond's calls for history to be written as a science.

Anticipation of criticism
Before stating his main argument, Diamond considers three possible criticisms of his investigation (page 17):
 * "If we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? Doesn't it seem to say that the outcome was inevitable, and that it would therefore be futile to try to change the outcome today?" : His answer is that this is a confusion of an explanation of causes with a justification of the results. "[Psychologists, social historians, and physicians] do not seek to justify murder, rape, genocide, and illness." Rather, they investigate causes to be able to stop the results.
 * Doesn't addressing the question "automatically involve a Eurocentric approach to history, a glorification of Europeans ..."? : But, according to Diamond, "most of this book will deal with peoples other than Europeans." It will, he says, describe interactions between non-European peoples. "Far from glorifying peoples of European origin, we shall see that the most basic elements of their civilization were developed by peoples living elsewhere and were then imported to Europe."
 * "Don't words such as 'civilization,' and phrases such as 'rise of civilization,' convey the false impression that civilization is good, tribal hunter-gatherers are miserable, ...?" : On the contrary, according to Diamond, civilization is a thoroughly mixed blessing, in ways that he describes.

Response to criticism of Eurocentrism and determinism
With regard to the question of whether or not there has been some sort of competition that has been "won and lost", Diamond asserts, in the third sentence of the prologue, that "the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies." It is possible that this defines the "competition" that Diamond attempts to explain, and that being conquered is a definite loss, even if not final or absolute. He says that in some cases (such as China) "absorbing the invader" is a long-term strategy for cultural survival that has proven successful, but in other cases – Aztec civilization for instance – the combination of germs and cultural shock has wiped out the colonized culture. Diamond cites analysts who predict the ‘supremacy’ of Asia in the 21st century, and says that he does not dispute the claim that the current hegemony of Europe (and its colonies) is "temporary".

With regard to changes since AD 1500 in the power of southwest Asia compared with Europe, Diamond does touch on this in his conclusion, he says for example that SW Asia's intense agriculture damaged the environment, encouraged desertification, and hurt soil fertility. He argues that because central China has fewer geographical barriers (i.e. mountain ranges or bodies of water) than Europe, China was unified relatively early in its history (see Qin Dynasty), and that political homogeneity led to stagnation. Indeed, it is a matter of historical record that, circa 1500, during the Ming Dynasty, China's naval superiority over anything Europeans could field was terminated in a single political decision; in a Europe fragmented into hundreds of kingdoms and nation-states, no such authority existed. He also says that India on the other hand may have been too fragmented for a monumental rise in power similar to Europe's. In fact, many attempts were made to ban technologies such as firearms, but only in politically unified and isolated nations (such as Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate) were such bans successful. Still, it is true that the book is mostly concerned with developments from prehistory up to about AD 1500. Furthermore, Diamond's arguments are rather broad, and mostly argue that Eurasia (as opposed to Europe) would inevitably be dominant.

Diamond has answered the critique of historical counterexamples (in differing growth rates unrelated to material endowments) by claiming that these cases represent short-term growth over (at most) fifty year time windows. In the case of rapidly expanding economies (such as the "East Asian Tigers") the rapid growth is usually explained (in economics) as one country "catching-up" to the rest, through trade and technological transfer (which would have been very difficult between continents in the pre-1500 period the book concentrates on). Instances of civilizations stagnating or being conquered despite having access to superior resources than their neighbours are mentioned several times in this book; in Professor Diamond’s view these reversals of fortune support his thesis, providing a mechanism for the spread of cultural dynamism and technology within continents but not (until the "Age of Exploration") between them. (His later work, Collapse, tied environment and the fate of individual civilizations together more closely, but in Guns, Germs, and Steel his argument is made at the continental level, rather than the level of specific societies.)

Diamond's view is undoubtedly largely "deterministic" in that it argues that Eurasian dominance was inevitable, or at least very likely (sometimes called Geographical determinism). Nevertheless, Diamond explicitly asks (on page 17) whether this inevitability would "justify the domination", and whether it renders futile modern attempts to "change the outcome". He denies that it does because the effects of proven environmental determinism could be easily nullified by contemporary transport and communication, whereas the effects of proven racial determinism might be used to justify genocide.

Finally, Diamond holds to the view that European scientific advancement and global expansion was a negative. For example, page 17, questions relating to "justify the domination" and "change the outcome." In fact Modern society was created by European advancement. Western civilization as it stands today in the arts, communication, science and technology, democracy, equality of women, agriculture, and medicine is a product of the same European/Western civilization which Diamond views in a negative light, is himself a product of, and which created the conditions which allowed him to write this very book. This speaks to a larger issue of illogical attacks on Western/European civilization by people who are themselves products of that civilization, and in fact never could've made those same attacks without the benefits they enjoy as members of that civilization.

Response to criticism of theory of history
In the epilogue Diamond discusses "The future of human history as a science", pre-empting the criticism that he fails to understand what history is about by defining what he thinks part of it should be. He contrasts various styles of historical interpretation, and compares these to the practice of other academics who call themselves "scientists". He says he is "optimistic that historical studies of human societies can be pursued as scientifically as studies of dinosaurs".