Guns, Germs & Steel (1997)
Jared Diamond
An absolutely fascinating book that answers the question : Why did history unfold differently on different continents ?
I’ve been wanting to write about this book for a while. I consider it one of the most fascinating read I’ve had in a long time, and I will try to explain why here.
Jared Diamond is hmm, an interesting character. He started his career as a biologist, more specifically an ornithologist. He spent a lot of time in Papua New Guinea to study the birds there, and it seems that it’s at this time that he got interested in humans, their evolution as well as their cultural diversity and basically why we differ from one another. He will write 5 books about it.
In this book, he asks the simple yet very general and hugely important question : Why did groups of humans develop to be different ? Why did some of them develop advanced technologies, weapons, writing systems, hierarchies, and others didn’t ?
These questions are fundamental because, in many ways, the history of the World was shaped by them.
We all know Europeans went on to genocide the people and conquer the lands in many parts of the « New World » because of their comparatively advanced weapons & technologies to the ones of Native populations of the Americas, Australia, Pacific Islands and (too) many other places. These are the direct causes of the chain of events that would occur - colonization, invention of racism, extension of this system to other lands, displacement of millions of people during the slave trade, many cultural & physical genocides and general suffering of literal billions of people that still perdure to this day.
But Jared Diamond asks the ultimate question of WHY were Europeans coming with all these advantages in the first place.
If we refuse the racist answer - which is false - that the Europeans were more intelligent all along and therefore more capable than other people to start this chain of events, we nonetheless have to ask : why didn’t the Native people from Australia or the Americas the ones to arrive in Europe to decimate its people and claim their lands as their own ? As Diamond puts it : « Why did history unfold differently on different continents ? »
Now, if this book is so fascinating, it’s because to answer such a big question, Jared Diamond will use a wide range of scientific fields reaching from anthropology to linguistics, archeology as well as botanical studies, behavioral ecology and epidemiology to basically singlehandedly launch a new academic discipline, or at least popularize it, geographical or environmental history.
To summarize a 700 page book attempting to synthesize 13000 years of human history in a few sentences is no easy task. But I’ll give it a go.
Jared Diamond, in his essay, explains that what will determine the whole chain of events leading to differences between groups of people is the environment in which the evolve in the first place.
Eurasia was comparatively well doted in domesticable plants & large mammals, which made it a propice terrain for the early transition from hunter-gatherers nomadic civilizations to more sedentary food-producing (agricultural & pastoral) based civilizations.
By doing so, people in this region of the World increasingly lived in densely populated areas where germs would tend to develop more, immunizing the survivors to deadly diseases, as well as favorise the emergence of technological improvements by maintaining a class of artisans and bureaucrats with the surplus of the food-producing class. Furthermore, its West-East Axis and relative absence of major environmental barriers would make it easier for cultures to spread - crops, animals as well as technological improvements by diffusion of ideas.
Comparatively, none of the other continents would be as well doted in any of the advantages that the Eurasian continent had.
Africa is full of large animals, yes, but none of them are satisfying for domestication, which would discourage the development of pastoralism and encourage populations there to keep the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The spread of many domesticated plants stopped for millennia to North Africa because of a monumental natural barrier known as the Saharan desert. Even South of this desert other barriers would slow down the propagation of food-production lifestyle: diseases transmitted by mosquitoes & tsetse flies would kill the migrating cattle that would have been otherwise very fitting for the vast grazing plains of South Africa, just to give one example.
The American continents were doted, before European colonization, of only one large mammal to domesticate : the Llama in the Andes. Surely enough, the Native people domesticated it, but one species pales in comparison to the 13 domesticated large mammals of Eurasia. The American continent also illustrates well the problem posed by unfavorable environmental obstacles slowing down the spread of animals on these continents :
The cool highlands of Mexico would have provided ideal conditions for raising llamas, guinea pigs, and potatoes, all domesticated in the cool highlands of the South American Andes. Yet the northward spread of those Andean specialties was stopped completely by the hot intervening lowlands of Central America. Five thousand years after llamas had been domesticated in the Andes, the Olmecs, Maya, Aztecs, and all other native societies of Mexico remained without pack animals and without any edible domestic mammals except for dogs.
Because of these differences in animal & crops dotation depending on their environment, according to Diamond, the different human groups located in different parts of the World would simply adapt to utilize to their environment to the best of their abilities. It would be absurd to expect of Inuits from Kalaalit Nunaat (Greenland) to have developed an agricultural society based on Wheat production. On the contrary, environmental factors, such as the abondance of large non-domesticable marine mammals, influenced them to continue the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and to develop skills & culture corresponding to this lifestyle.
Likewise, Aboriginal Australians adapted to create society in their environment, and the society they created was precisely that : adapted to their environment. They did not have any Sheep, Horses, Cattle nor Wheat, Malt or Lentils - all of which are originally from Eurasia.
Agriculture was another nonstarter in Australia, which is not only the driest continent but also the one with the most infertile soils. In addition, Australia is unique in that the overwhelming influence on climate over most of the continent is an irregular nonannual cycle, the ENSO (acronym for El Nino Southern Oscillation), rather than the regular annual cycle of the seasons so familiar in most other parts of the world. Unpredictable severe droughts last for years, punctuated by equally unpredictable torrential rains and floods. Even today, with Eurasian crops and with trucks and railroads to transport produce, food production in Australia remains a risky business. Herds build up in good years, only to be killed off by drought. Any incipient farmers in Aboriginal Australia would have faced similar cycles in their own populations. If in good years they had settled in villages, grown crops, and produced babies, those large populations would have starved and died off in drought years, when the land could support far fewer people.
The other major obstacle to the development of food production in Australia was the paucity of domesticable wild plants. Even modern European plant geneticists have failed to develop any crop except macadamia nuts from Australia's native wild flora. The list of the world's potential prize cereals—the 56 wild grass species with the heaviest grains—includes only two Australian species, both of which rank near the bottom of the list (grain weight only 13 milligrams, compared with a whopping 40 milligrams for the heaviest grains elsewhere in the world). That's not to say that Australia had no potential crops at all, or that Aboriginal Australians would never have developed indigenous food production. Some plants, such as certain species of yams, taro, and arrowroot, are cultivated in southern New Guinea but also grow wild in northern Australia and were gathered by Aborigines there. As we shall see, Aborigines in the climatically most favorable areas of Australia were evolving in a direction that might have eventuated in food production. But any food production that did arise indigenously in Australia would have been limited by the lack of domesticable animals, the poverty of domesticable plants, and the difficult soils and climate.
Nomadism, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and minimal investment in shelter and possessions were sensible adaptations to Australia's 'El Niño' driven resource unpredictability. When local conditions deteriorated, Aborigines simply moved to an area where conditions were temporarily better. Rather than depending on just a few crops that could fail, they minimized risk by developing an economy based on a great variety of wild foods, not all of which were likely to fail simultaneously. Instead of having fluctuating populations that periodically outran their resources and starved, they maintained smaller populations that enjoyed an abundance of food in good years and a sufficiency in bad years.
There is actually in the book a few example of modification of the environment to intensify the food-production by Native Australians, shown by archeological findings :
Within the last 5,000 years, some of those productive regions witnessed an intensification of Aboriginal food-gathering methods, and a buildup of Aboriginal population density. Techniques were developed in eastern Australia for rendering abundant and starchy, but extremely poisonous, cycad seeds edible, by leaching out or fermenting the poison. The previously unexploited highlands of southeastern Australia began to be visited regularly during the summer, by Aborigines feasting not only on cycad nuts and yams but also on huge hibernating aggregations of a migratory moth called the bogong moth, which tastes like a roasted chestnut when grilled.
Another type of intensified food-gathering activity that developed was the freshwater eel fisheries of the Murray-Darling river system, where water levels in marshes fluctuate with seasonal rains. Native Australians constructed elaborate systems of canals up to a mile and a half long, in order to enable eels to extend their range from one marsh to another. Eels were caught by equally elaborate weirs, traps set in dead-end side canals, and stone walls across canals with a net placed in an opening of the wall. Traps at different levels in the marsh came into operation as the water level rose and fell. While the initial construction of those "fish farms" must have involved a lot of work, they then fed many people. Nineteenth-century European observers found villages of a dozen Aboriginal houses at the eel farms, and there are archaeological remains of villages of up to 146 stone houses, implying at least seasonally resident populations of hundreds of people.
All of this to lead to the main anti-racist theme of the book.
In an age were the false & debunked thousands of times racist World map of IQ resurges in public debate, as well as talks of White superiority on supposed inferior ‘races’ that ‘haven’t invented the wheel’ and these kind of talking points, this felt refreshing to read.
We can now return to the problem that I posed near the beginning of this chapter. How, except by postulating deficiencies in the Aborigines themselves, can one account for the fact that white English colonists apparently created a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy, within a few decades of colonizing a continent whose inhabitants after more than 40,000 years were still non-literate nomadic hunter-gatherers? Doesn't that constitute a perfectly controlled experiment in the evolution of human societies, forcing us to a simple racist conclusion? The resolution of this problem is simple. White English colonists did not create a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy in Australia.
Instead, they imported all of the elements from outside Australia: the livestock, all of the crops (except macadamia nuts), the metallurgical knowledge, the steam engines, the guns, the alphabet, the political institutions, even the germs. All these were the end products of 10,000 years of development in Eurasian environments. By an accident of geography, the colonists who landed at Sydney in 1788 inherited those elements. Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology. (...)
The people who did create a society in Australia were Aboriginal Australians. Of course, the society that they created was not a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy. The reasons follow straightforwardly from features of the Australian environment.
On one of the English covers of the Book, the image selected takes the form of an Onion. It is an allegory of history as layers of depths that is at the core of the book.
When the Old World of Europe collided with the New World of what would later be called America in 1492, event which would start all the chain of events mentioned earlier, the New World, despite being far more numerous than the Conquistadors, and organized into fantastic empires, fell and in the lapse of a few centuries, got conquered & exterminated in a series of disgusting betrayals of the Natives, hundreds of bloody massacres, treaty violations from the Europeans, justified by supremacist ideologies.
What Jared Diamond tells us, is why these things were able to occur in the first place.
The decisive strike to New World's civilizations was not that Europeans in the end of the 15th Century were cleverer than the rest of the World, but that they unknowingly carried certain Germs that would decimate 80 to 100% of the Natives upon arrival.
These germs were with them because they got immune to deadly diseases formed in the heart of more densely populated urban centers in the Old World, because, in another layer of history, they had more available livestock to cultivate more crops available to them.
This allowed as well to liberate a surplus of available food to feed an « unproductive class » of scribes, warriors, artisans, that would in return offer an advantage in terms of inventions, war tactics and transportation of information in contrast to civilizations where writing was never needed and therefore not invented. The process itself of « invention » is closely linked to the spread of ideas, the fact one civilization is in contact with another one that already has this invention, such as a writing system. Therefore, isolated civilizations by their environment - mountain ranges, deserts, oceans…- had by their very nature less chances of incorporating into their culture a writing system. (There’s a whole chapter about it just read the book I swear it’s good)
By contrast, Native people in America had, as we said, very few large domesticable mammals. They had also way fewer crops - even though the potatoes, tomatoes, chilis & corn became staples in the whole World, their spread within the Americas was relatively slow, due once again to these same environmental barriers, such as the extremely narrow parts of Central America, the deserts of Northern Mexico, and the North-South general Axis of the continent, making the spread of the same Crop more difficult.
As a consequence, the Native people of present day America would develop less endemic Germs susceptible to kill Europeans (which was. by the way, the case for other parts of the World that would only be colonized way later with the perfection of more modern medicine, namely Papua New Guinea or the ‘White Man’s Grave’ of Central Africa), but also the absence of large mammals would limit the developments of agricultural progress - plowing would be limited to what humans could do themselves, in contrast to what a buffalo would. The environmental barriers would slow down the process of spreading of inventions, for example :
(…) wheels were invented in Mesoamerica, and llamas were domesticated in the central Andes by 3000 B.c., but 5,000 years later the Americas' sole beast of burden and sole wheels had still not encountered each other, even though the distance separating Mesoamerica's Maya societies from the northern border of the Inca Empire (1,200 miles) was far less than the 6,000 miles separating wheel and horse-sharing France and China. Those factors seem to me to account for the Americas' technological lag behind Eurasia.
These are the layers of history that Jared Diamond offers us to explore in this brilliant book.
Go have a look at it, for real, it’s great.
There are whole chapters I didn’t get to talk about, for example on the spreading of people through Polynesia, and how & why people differ given what island they ended up on, or another chapter solely dedicated to how writing got invented & how it spread throughout different areas, and why some areas didn’t adopt it.
Fascinating book. Go read it !!