cesimpson

Last night I finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond. It’s a ten year old book and I should have read it ten years ago. I finally got around to it, and it was good.

Mr. Diamond uses the book to describe how and why it is that some societies/cultures/peoples/civilizations have managed to become dominant and why some have not.

Of course, the easy answer is in the title of the book. Those people who have dominated have had better guns (or other weapons), nastier germs, and better steel (or other tools). But Mr. Diamond takes the question a step further and asks, “Why did those peoples develop ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’, while others did not?”

Relying upon a wide range of studies - biology, geography, demography, physiology, anthropology, ecology, linguistics, genetics, archeology - Diamond asserts the reason for EuroAsian hegemony is largely environmental and geographical. That is:

• A good collection of wild flora and fauna that were simple and productive to domesticate led to agriculture.
• That agriculture led to sedentary societies that then had a reason to invent and use writing and sophisticated forms of government
• …and more sophisticated tools.
• Those agricultural animals and higher population densities encouraged the development of (and resistance to) nastier germs.
• And the large east-west axis of EuroAsia meant (and means) there were (and are) large areas of similar climates, across which people and agriculture can comfortably move.

I found that last point to be especially important. For, even in the Americas and Africa where plants and animals were domesticated, and agriculture was implemented, and sophisticated civilizations were created; the long north-south axis, and the resulting variances in climate, made it difficult or impossible for those people to spread that agriculture. Those crops which grow well in North Africa could not easily cross the Sahara. Those crops which the Aztecs domesticated, could not easily cross the desert to the north (what is modern day northern Mexico, Texas, Southern California), to establish larger empires in the (presently) fruitful Great Plains or Northern California.

While I generally think any argument that compresses a topic as complex as the entirety of human history down to less than a half dozen points is probably being overly-simplistic, Mr. Diamond brings to the table an intriguing, well-written, well-researched, and well-documented point of view missing from the too-often-found ethnocentric analysis of civilizational power.