Book Review – Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies was first published in 1997 and has since received many accolades and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.  Unlike some other books I’ve reviewed, you’ve probably seen Guns, Germs, and Steel (GGS) on display at your local bookstore or perhaps you’ve even read it. 

Why review such a well-known book over 10 years after its publication?  Because GSS offers a rarely taken but none-the-less valuable view of history - broad, anti-personal, and predetermined - that deserves promotion.  While most historians focus on shorter periods of time, Diamond paints broad strokes over thousands of years of human existence.  Typical histories focus on individual leaders, countries, empires, religions, economic systems, and philosophies.  Within shorter periods, the relative impact of these people, institutions, and systems of thought can be great.  The weakest portions of GSS are when Diamond tries to shrink his lens to a period of time under 500 or even 1,000 years.  When the scope of history is widened, the influence of individual actions and events is buried beneath long-term trends and underlying realities.

How Geography and Botony Determine World History

In GGS, Diamond poses a simple set of related questions: What factors allowed Europeans to colonize so much of the world?  What factors contributed to wide disparities in technology and military capabilities?  Why didn’t sub-Saharan Africans supplant the Native Europeans and bring millions of slaves from North America to work their farms? 

The book’s title gives away the proximate causes.  Europeans had suffered from plague, smallpox, measles, TB, influenza, yellow fever, typhus and other diseases for centuries.  With each wave of disease, the surviving Europeans produced a more resilient population through processes of natural selection.  At the same time, viruses that killed off their hosts too quickly or at too high a rate failed to reproduce themselves.  Diamond writes that, “why syphilis was first definitely recorded in 1495, its pustules often covered the body from the head to the knees, caused flesh to fall off of people’s faces, and led to death within a few months.”  Hosts of this STD would, therefore, encounter a great deal of trouble trying to pass it on.  “By 1546,” says Diamond, “it had evolved into the disease with the symptoms so well known to us today,” which can take years to make the victim unappealing. 

Thus, Europeans and their diseases had reached a nice equilibrium by 1492.  Native Americans, on the other hand, had virtually no diseases of their own or resistences.  As a result, infectious diseases reduced the New World’s 1491 population by approximately 90-95% within a few centuries of Columbus’ first voyage. 

Guns and steel were other technologies that enabled small numbers of Europeans (as in 168) to bring huge empires (as in those capable of fielding an army of 80,000) to their knees.  In short, soldiers equipped with stone axes and padded armor are very ineffective against steel blades, armor, and firearms – especially when wielded by soldiers mounted on animals larger than any the opposing army has ever laid eyes upon.  

But what factors allowed Europeans to acquire superior technology and diseases?  Diamond the majority of the book discussing what underlying causes led to these proximate factors that enabled conquest and domination.  He argues that the first underlying cause is geography, specifically the major axes of each of the three major continents (the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa).  The Americas, and, to a lesser extent, Africa, have major north-south axes.  By contrast, the major axis in Eurasia runs east-west, from Spain to Korea.  This fact of geography affected the rate at which crops and livestock spread. 

For example, the original package of grains and livestock domesticated in the Fertile Crescent moved thousands of miles east into Persia and ancient India (modern Pakistan/northern India) and west into southern Europe, in one to two thousand years.  Because Persia, India, and Europe all lie at similar latitudes (between 30-40 degrees), they receive similar amounts of sunlight.  As a result, these areas tended to have the same types of climate, and could therefore support the same types of crops.  By contrast, the Incan empire alone spanned a wider range of latitudes.  Sub-Saharan Africa ranges from 15 degrees north to 35 degrees south.  This fact, combined with a higher number of species in Eurasia that presented themselves as good candidates for domestication, allowed human civilizations in that continent to grow faster and larger. 

Of course, this is a vast simplification of Diamond’s argument and I present it simply to give you a taste of his approach and the type of evidence he examines.  He also addresses other factors, such as the size of seeds in native grains (the larger, the greater the chance of domestication), and the availability of large animals and their temperaments.  Combined, these factors allowed for agriculture and large population centers.  The more people a society had, the more division of labor it allowed for, which in turn led to technological advancements such as writing.

What lessons does history hold for our finite world?  First, the book argues that, over a long timeline, human achievement is in large part due to nature’s endowment and sweeping patterns of physical necessity as opposed to the actions of individual people or institutions.  A society of humans living in isolation on a small island is not going to be have a population that supports technological advancement.  Environmental degradation undermines a civilizations ability to support itself and defend against other groups.  Over the long term, human societies needs to keep these fundamentals in mind if they intend on surviving (I plan on reviewing Diamond’s book Collapse, which looks at what happens when fundamentals are ignored, in one or two months). 

Second, trade and writing is invaluable.  According to Diamond, agriculture developed independently in 6-10 locations, although individual crops or livestock were almost never domesticated more than once.  Writing developed in 2-4 places.  Today, wheat, yams, rice, potatoes, corn, millet, squash, coffee, oats, olives, bananas, and more are grown worldwide.  Cattle, chickens, and pigs are a source of protein for billions of people.  These food sources, as well as countless pieces of technology, has spread through out the world thanks to trade and, to a lesser extent, conquest.  The trade of goods and ideas is more crucial today than it ever has been.  Even though the localization movement proposes to reduce certain types of energy use, it would be a very bad thing to try and localize everything.  Today’s problems are worldwide, and they need to be dealt with on that scale.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is an eminently readable history with depth and bite.  When I first read it (I’ve now read it twice), it was a revolution.  Looking back, it should have all been obvious – but it wasn’t.  The book isn’t without its flaws.  Cramming 11,000 years of world history into 420 pages inevitably leads to some missing details and smoothed wrinkles.  Though he is careful to put most of his work into context, I don’t think Diamond does enough to delineate the limits of his approach for examining questions of history.  This said, I would unequivocally recommend GSS to anyone interested in humanity’s past or future.  It is on a relatively short list of books or articles that have changed the way I think about the world.*

*If you’re curious, some others include:  “Gandhi: An Autobiography,” “Beyond Good and Evil,” by Nietzsche, and Foucault’s essay “The Discourse on Language.”