Review of Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
J. Bradford DeLong
delong@econ.berkeley.edu
j-bradford-delong.net
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton: 0393038912).
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I put this book on my website as book-of-the-month a while ago, but I never wrote up why I thought it was worth reading. I think it is very much worth reading: it may well be the best book I read in the 1990s. It is truly a work of complete and total genius.
Let me explain why.
Why is English becoming the default world language? Why did people from Europe conquer the people on the other continents--in the Americas, in Oceana, in Australasia, in Africa, and even in large chunks of Asia. Over all the globe only China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Ethiopia avoided a permanent European conquest that destroyed their previous political regime. (Moreover, Ethiopia was occupied by Italy for five years; Taiwan and Korea were conquered and occupied by Japan; and for the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century Chinese independence was a near-run thing.)
Why? Why did Europeans conquer Peru, Mexico, Ghana, and Australia? Why didn't Incas, Aztecs, Ashanti, or Australians conquer Eurasians. That is the question that Jared Diamond answers--largely successfully--in this book. And his answer can be summed up in one phrase: "seeds, germs, size, and guns." (Note that the answer is not "guns, germs, and steel"--a phrase that is more euphonious but less meaningful.)
Eurasian societies acquired a key advantage relative to other societies because of seeds.
Eurasian societies acquired a key advantage (relative to other societies) in their resistance to germs.
The relatively advantageous biological endowment of Eurasian societies was then reinforced because of the size of Eurasia.
And the relative edge possessed by European societies was then amplified to overwhelming proportions by guns.
Begin with seeds. Over the past twelve thousand years--roughly since the end of the last Ice Age--agriculture has been invented at least six times around the globe: in New Guinea, in China, in the Middle East, in North America, in Mexico, in the Andes, and in all probability in other places as well. But those humans who lived in the Middle East were lucky. The plants they had available to domesticate were the easiest to tame, grew the fastest, and had the largest seeds. Thus Middle Eastern agriculture--based on wheat and its cousins--had the potential to support higher population densities.
Those who invented agriculture in the Middle East were fortunate in another area. Eurasia had lots of large animals, and lots of large animals--aurochs, boar, ancestral sheep and goats, horses--that could be domesticated. Successful domestication of large animals gave a further boost to Middle Eastern productivity, and allowed still higher population densities. Moreover, living in close proximity to animals gave Eurasians both the epidemic diseases that were to devastate the populations of the Americas, Oceana, and Australia when contact came, and the resistance to those diseases.
Technologies invented in the Middle East (and elsewhere in Asia) then diffused over the entire great continent. Moving east or west from the Middle East one encounters roughly similar climates for long distances. Thus a pattern of agricultural technology that was good and productive in the Indus Valley had a good chance of also being useful in (say) Spain. The size of Eurasia meant that there were many different groups of people who could invent new technologies. The long east-west axis of Eurasia meant that invented technologies could then diffuse.
By contrast, technologies invented elsewhere had a difficult time diffusing across oceans, or through ecological barriers within which technologies ceased to be of use. Corn took several thousand years to diffuse from Mexico north across the desert to the Mississippi Valley, in large part because corn selectively-bred for Mexico germinates too early and takes too long to grow for it to be of any use in Missouri. The llama never made it north from the Andes to the Valley of Mexico. The inhabitants of New Guinea and of Australia were on their own, able to draw only on the technologies they could invent by themselves. Because their population was low, and because one head was less than two, the growth of their technology was low.
Africa as well found itself largely on its own as far as technological development was concerned. Middle Eastern agriculture did very well on the north coast of Africa, but could not diffuse across the Sahara desert--and would have been of little use had it done so, for temperate agriculture does not flourish near the equator. (the failure of Indian Ocean traders to carry Eurasian agriculture to the highlands of Kenya and the grasslands of South Africa remains a mystery.)
The better agriculture of Eurasia gave it higher population densities. The enormous size and high population densities of Eurasia gave it the overwhelming bulk of world population. The large population share meant that Eurasia generated the lion's share of inventions and innovations. The ease of communication and diffusion across Eurasia meant that inventions in one part spread within centuries to other parts: China could not long retain the silkworm for itself, nor could India long retain the zero. Faster and widely-diffused technological progress gave Eurasians the wheel, sophisticated textiles, advanced metalworking, shipbuilding, the state--and the gun.
Thus when 1492 came Eurasian cultures had extraordinary advantages over others: decimated by diseases against which they had no resistance, out-organized, and without guns, other cultures found themselves conquered and dominated by those who came to their lands to serve the king, to serve God, to win glory, and to get rich.
But why Europe? Why did the subcontinent at the western edge of Eurasia acquire so much dominance over the rest of Eurasia. Many key inventions--the compass, gunpowder, block printing, and the zero--came to Europe from the rest of Eurasia. So why did small numbers of Europeans conquer large chunks of the rest of Eurasia in the period from 1500 to 1900?
Diamond doesn't have an answer. He runs through a laundry list of factors that have been noted by economic historians. This is a book about why Eurasians conquered the world in the past half-millennium. It is not a book about why Europeans conquered the world in the past half-millennium.
But to have brilliantly illuminated the first of these--the sources of Eurasian dominance--is more than enough for any one book.
Do not think that the book is perfect. For one thing, it begins badly. Too many of the opening pages are spent assuring readers that the inhabitants of New Guinea are in fact smarter than the rest of us because in New Guinea, where the principal causes of death were not plague but "murder... warfare, accidents, and problems procuring food," natural selection "promoting genes for intelligence has... been far more ruthless." The argument is implausible: Eurasian populations have been "dense" from the perspective of disease transmission for only an eyeblink of Darwinian time. There is a smell of excessive political correctness about the claims for the superior genetic intelligence of the aboriginal inhabitants of New Guinea. It almost made me put the book down then and there, while still reading its early pages.
But I did not put it down. Instead, I read on. And I am very glad that I did so. For what follows is truly a work of genius. |
