Guns, Germs and Steel

Title: Guns, Germs and Steel – A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years
Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Vintage, 2017 (First published: 1997)
ISBN: 9780099302780
Pages: 580

I had read this book for the first time in the early 2000s but before I started writing reviews of books I read. This was one of the best works I have ever encountered and I thought fit to read it for a second time and prepare a review for it. There were times in history when two societies encountered each other for the first time that led to clashes and the ensuing fight led to the downfall of the less developed one. When the Spanish met the Red Indians in the fifteenth century or colonialists fought with aborigines in Africa or Australia, the more technologically advanced society prevailed. The question here is why there arose differences in the development. This book admirably answers this crucial question. Till the end of the last Ice Age in 11,000 BCE, all peoples in all continents were still hunter-gatherers. From there, by 1500 CE, the societies were well differentiated. Search for the cause may turn up many things such as capitalism, mercantilism, scientific inquiry and technology, but these are only proximate factors. This book rules out racial differences as irrelevant and suggests that geographic differences constitute the ultimate answer to the question of why different peoples ended up with disparate degrees of power and affluence. It's the environment that affects the economy, technology, political organization and fighting skills within a short time. The author presents a convincing example of environmentally related diversification of societies in operation in Polynesia which was the field of the author's research. Jared Diamond is an American scientist, historian and author who had produced hundreds of scientific and popular articles and many books. This book received the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for general non-fiction. 

It is the triple combination of guns, germs for which the New World societies and aborigines had no immunity and steel that resulted in the victory of the society which possessed them. Food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of them. Domestication of wild animals helped to ensure animal protein and increase food production by pulling ploughs to till hard lands that had previously been uneconomical to farming. Sedentary lifestyle of farmers led to population growth. A stored food surplus built up by taxation supported full time specialists like kings, bureaucrats and professional soldiers. Food production failed to develop in some ecologically well-endowed areas that are among the world's richest centres of agriculture and herding today while the original centres of farming, such as Iraq and Iran, are somewhat dry and ecologically degraded today. The people from areas with a head start on food production gained a head start on the path leading towards domination in modern times. The result was a long series of collisions between the haves and have-nots of history. Moreover, the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers was not straightforward nor natural. Archaeologists find that the first farmers in many areas were smaller and less well-nourished, suffered from more serious diseases and died younger than the hunter-gatherers they replaced. Eventually they caught up, mainly because of the higher population density. Availability of domesticable food species in the wild, gradual depletion of wild game, development of technologies for collecting and processing food, the two-way link between rise in population density and the rise in food production and the ability of the farmers to displace the hunter-gatherers because of their much denser population density contributed to the adoption of farming globally. 

Food production was not a given in all societies that developed farming. It relied heavily on local geography and environment. Wheat and barley were developed in the Fertile Crescent and their evolution as cereals was easy because the wild ancestors of them looked so similar to the 'finished' crops themselves. In the New World, the cereal of corn was developed from a wild variety called teosinte, which is very different from the modern crop because it was tiny and the seeds were enclosed in a rock-like covering, which took many millennia more to domesticate. This may have been a significant factor in the differing developments of the human societies attached to them. 32 of the 56 wild grass species with large seeds occurred in the Fertile Crescent while this was one or two in the Americas. Hence by 6000 BCE, some societies in the Fertile Crescent were completely dependent on crops and domestic animals, while in the Americas settled villages did not arise before 1500 BCE. Examining the cases of New Guinea and the Eastern US, the author concludes that the deficiency or lateness in intensified food production is caused by the local biota and environment and not by the cultural conservatism of local people. The availability of suitable fauna was also heavily dependent on geography. The five major mammal species domesticated are the cow, sheep, goat, pig and horse. Thirteen of the fourteen wild ancestors of domesticated species occurred in Eurasia while only one was located in the Americas. Of these, seven species are found in or near the Fertile Crescent. The author proposes a geographic factor behind this variation in flora and fauna. The major axis of the Americas and Africa is north-south while that of Eurasia is east-west. Localities distributed east and west of each other at the same latitude share exactly the same climate. Hence, spread of crops is much easier east-west than north-south. The eventual fall in food production in the Fertile Crescent is also attributed to climatic factors. The fragile environment in the region was further undermined by the overutilization of resources. The forest cover dwindled quickly and desertification took place. However, north and west Europe was supported by a robust environment with more rainfall. 

An important aspect in the clash of various societies that determined its outcome was the vulnerability of one society to the diseases introduced by the other against which it had no acquired-immunity. Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced by Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian native population because they lacked immunity against smallpox, measles, typhus, plague and other such deadly diseases. Over a dozen major infectious diseases became established in the New World and killed most of the people but not a single major killer disease reached Europe from the Americas. The reason is that very few animals were domesticated there and hence limiting the numbers of microbes coming into contact with humans. The major killers of humanity throughout the history - smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles and cholera - are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals. These are also called crowd diseases which can arise only with the build-up of large, dense populations. That build-up began with the rise of agriculture, starting about 10,000 years ago. The critical influence of personal health in the growth of societies is outlined by the history of Europe's urban populations. These became self-sustaining only in the twentieth century with the rise of modern medicine and awareness of hygiene. Before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases. 

Another important marker of a victorious society is the development of technology and its concomitant growth of complex social structures which freed artisans from the crushing burden of food production. Technological innovations and political institutions are usually acquired readymade from other societies than re-inventing them all over again. Thus diffusion and migration within a continent contribute importantly to the development of its societies. Writing developed quite late in human evolution in Eurasia and it never arose in the New World. Early writing was intended only for record keeping of proto-states and royal propaganda by complex political institutions. The users of this technology were bureaucrats nourished by stored food surpluses grown by peasants. It could never develop among hunter-gatherers. At a later stage, writing helped to store and retrieve knowledge on an extended scale. The book begins with the story of a fateful meeting between the Inca ruler Atahualpa and the Spanish in which the latter captured the king treacherously. Literacy made the Spanish heirs to a huge body of knowledge and wide range of human behaviours. Atahualpa had no conception of his enemies and no personal experience of any other invader from overseas. So he walked into the trap set by Pizarro, got captured and later got executed. Sometimes, the New World was hampered by geography in the technological arena too. Ancient native Mexicans invented wheeled vehicles with axles for use as toys, but not for transport. This was because they lacked domestic animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles. Metals - including copper, then bronze and finally iron - were used for tools in all complex Eurasian societies by 1492. By contrast, although copper, silver, gold and alloys were used as ornaments in the New World, the tools they used were only made of stone, wood and bone. 

The book provides an illuminating explanation of how the complexity in human organisations developed. As the food production expanded, specialists could devote full time to the field of their talent, such as tool maker, trader, chief of the tribe or king. Likewise, societies developed on the graduated scale of band, tribe, chiefdom and state. Organised religion appeared at the level of chiefdoms when a lot of people, who are not related to each other intermingled. The necessity of religion was that it provided a bond of brotherhood with a stranger and helped the people live together, without killing each other. We are all familiar with the case of pre-modern Europeans conquering and displacing communities in the Americas, Africa and Australia. The author adds to this information the fact that there were big overseas movements of people long before Columbus and pre-historic replacement of non-European peoples by other non-European peoples as evidenced in Southeast Asia and Pacific Islands lying east to it. In fact, China was on the verge of discovering foreign lands by ocean-going ships carrying out trade up to East Africa. It was only a matter of time before they rounded the Cape of Good Hope or reached the western shore of the Americas. But internal political faction-fighting in China put an end to all these efforts. The winning faction curtailed the pioneering expeditions. China's overwhelming political unity prevented other states from doing anything against it in this regard. On the other hand, Europe was divided into a number of warring states. Columbus' proposal for an expedition was approved only in the fifth court in which he applied. The author also answers why Europe dominated the societies of Fertile Crescent, China or India. This is attributed to the development of a merchant class, capitalism, patent protection of innovations, Europe's failure to develop absolute despots and the associated crushing taxation and its Greco-Judeo-Christian tradition of critical empirical enquiry. It's doubtful whether a religious tradition would foster critical enquiry. It's also amusing to speculate whether a scholar from India would be allowed to attribute such gracious compliments to its Hindu tradition. However, these are only the proximate causes. The fundamentals remain the same which are noted in geography. These are, of course, the same for all Old World societies. 

The book is very well structured and convincingly argued. Diamond is very particular to dispel any notion of racial superiority to Europeans in their eventual conquest of the world. He condenses the book's message in one sentence as: History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people's environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves. Many parts of the book are focused on New Guinea for most of the detailed explanations because it was the author's own field of practical research. This gets a little tedious after some time for readers. The book's afterword is written in 2017. It addresses the issue of why the national wealth of countries vary widely. It concludes that tropical nations are generally poor because they are more prone to diseases and agricultural productivity is lower. 

This book offers a once-in-a-lifetime experience and is highly recommended. 

Rating: 5 Star