Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Two decades ago when I served in the Missouri National Guard we had an extended drill weekend at Ft. Leonard Wood for a live fire artillery exercise. This was a three day drill and I remember it clearly because it was the same weekend as Princess Diana’s funeral on September 6, 1997. I had been at the local library the day before we rolled out and saw an interesting book that promised to explain why western civilization had been the one to colonize the New World and rise to ascendency over much of the world for a long period of time. That had always been an interesting question for me and one which many people do not know the answer to. I checked out the book and during some downtime I began to read. To say that the book grabbed my attention is an understatement. I started it on Friday and finished it on Saturday. My whole conception of how history had seen the rise of Western Civilization was fundamentally altered and would never be the same. At the time I thought that using Guns, Germs, and Steel as an educational tool would be a great idea. My dream of teaching history had never been realized and in 1997 seemed like it would never happen. However, history is full of strange things and in 2009 I got the chance to return to college and pick up my degrees. I began teaching American History in 2013 and was then asked to teach World Regional Geography for the Spring 2014 semester. They handed me a textbook and said, “Good luck.” As I drove back home I considered how I would teach this course and my mind recalled Jared Diamond and his Pulitzer Prize winning book. To make the story short, I built a course that used the textbook, Diamond’s book, and the National Geographic series based on the book. Obviously I take what Diamond said in Guns, Germs, and Steel seriously. I think Diamond did some outstanding work in doing three decades of research and then writing a book which to me is resonates with readers. For many years the idea that Western Civilization was superior to any other form has been the dominant world view. Diamond rejects that completely by saying Western Civilization had advantages that others did not have due to geography, or literally where it was. When you stop and think about it, why were the Europeans so superior to others for so long? Was it their race, their ideals, or what? Diamond said it was because of where they started that they developed into the world spanning civilization we know. What advantages did the Europeans have over others? They arrived with technology superior to all others, were better organized, and had the lethal gift of germs which in the Americas killed over half the population and was the biggest reason as to why the Europeans took those lands over. When Diamond explored the germ theory he realized that these germs came from contact with domesticated mammals such as horses, cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, and goats. These same mammals were what enabled Europeans to transport materials as well as have a convenient food supply and a power source such as horses pulling plows. This idea works when you look at the Americas and Australia, but not when you look at Africa and Asia. The lethality of germs did not affect the people in those regions like it did the Americas. In fact, some of the diseases in Africa killed the Europeans and prevented them for exploiting Sub-Saharan Africa for centuries. Some of these germs are now known to have come from Asia as well along with domestic animals that came from there. Many of the larger mammals Europe had were also found in Asia. In fact, some of the technology such as gunpowder came from Asia as well. Diamond acknowledged this in his book and sought to explain why Europe was able to expand while Asia did not. This is something I really stress in my class and it is something which the book and National Geographic series does not explore as deeply as it should. Diamond saw a decision made in the 15th century by a Chinese emperor as being the decisive event that altered human history. At that point China was the leading power in the world. It had a great navy, the largest country, gunpowder, advanced technology and far more people thanks to its agricultural practices than any other nation at that time. The decision by emperors in China’s Ming dynasty led to China losing its technological advantage over Europe although no one had any idea that this was happening. These decisions or orders are called Haijin. Diamond did not explore this in any depth other than to point to it and say that China’s inward looking policies which had existed for centuries were the result of its location, its geography. Its singular form of government used Haijin to build up its power at the expense of expanding China’s culture and boundaries. There is a lot here to work with, but Diamond seems to casually bring it up in the book’s epilogue. Instead he focuses heavily on the Americas where his theory of environmental determinism is the strongest. I think he gets the theory right, but in the case of Asia he needed to go deeper. Since Diamond is an ornithologist by education, and his world journey’s focused on New Guinea, I think his point of view was heavily influenced through his contact with hunter-gatherers. His theory is at its weakest in Asia and specifically China. That again reflects his preference for focusing on one type of people versus another. This does not mean his theory is wrong. It just needs expansion and I do not think Diamond will be doing that any time soon. His recent works have dealt with different ideas. Even with this glaring problem, I think this book is outstanding. It does answer the question of why Western Civilization dominated the world for the most part. For my geography class it is a wonderful tool. I focus heavily on how man domesticated two grains from the Middle East, wheat and barley, and built Western Civilization upon them. Coupled with the domestication of large mammals, the forerunners of Western Civilization spread through Europe. Geography played a huge role in why it went west and why there are so many differences between East and West on a cultural level. It also explains why there are such huge differences between North Africa and the lands to the south of the Sahara. The role of geography in shaping mankind is without a doubt the single underlying reason as to why history occurred like it did. This is really hard for students to understand because they seem to have been taught a much different concept prior to taking a geography course. Only by explaining the human-environment interaction do students begin to realize that geography caused man to make decisions which would reverberate for millennia. The people of the Middle East followed the Tigris and Euphrates rivers northwest into Anatolia and out of the desert. Man’s movement west, north, and south with the crops and animals of the Middle East were shaped by geographical barriers. Diamond points out how man overcame these barriers over time. The civilization that was able to do so developed greater technologies than others. He points to both European and Chinese naval developments in this regard. China’s need to continue to build its naval forces was negligible due to a lack of naval enemies while in Europe those enemies were often themselves as nations competed for resources and trade. Since China controlled all of its trade which was mostly internal or land based, its need for a navy was reduced. Europe surged ahead while China languished. In my classes I point to the barriers as we explore the world’s regions. I show how these barriers played such big roles. We play a board game by Avalon Hill that helps to illustrate this as well. Diamond’s book plays a big role in my class and so do his theories. I find it really helps students take the principles and ideas from the first part of the class and begin to apply them to the world regions we study. They are able to make the mental leap to the realization that the people of the world are different for many reasons, the foremost being the place in which they live more than anything else. It helps them to break down and discard the erroneous belief which many of them have regarding their place in the world. Using Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel I am able to use Transformative Learning Theory to overcome the disorientating dilemma they find themselves in at the beginning of class. I could build a new class out of Diamond’s book that encompasses geography, history, and sociology if my school would let me. In fact, I could build two classes out of it. One would focus on why Western Civilization developed like it did and expanded to the Americas while the second one would focus on the development of Eastern Civilization and its failure to expand beyond Asia itself. While courses exist that dive into those ideas, they are built around history more than anything else. Few instructors use environmental determinism in explaining how early mankind developed in the places it did. The ultimate objectives of these courses would be why they developed like they did, not just their history. Diamond has written several other books such as Collapse, The Third Chimpanzee, and The World Until Yesterday. He is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been awarded all kinds of prizes and awards for his research and work in multiple fields. I find it interesting that he began to study environmental history in his fifties which led to this book and many others. This to me is proof that you are not bound by formal rules regarding your education, but rather by using your interests coupled with the research capabilities your education has provided you new careers beckon. This book is a testament to following one’s interests and using one’s intellect. I highly recommend it to all readers. It is one of my favorite books and I have read through it multiple times.

_Guns, Germs, and Steel_ by Jared Diamond is one of the most informative, epic, well-written, and fascinating "macrohistory" books I have ever read. In this book, Diamond discussed the rise of complex human societies in the last 13,000 years, seeking to answer one fundamental question; why did some civilizations come to dominate others? Why did the Fertile Crescent and China for instance develop advanced societies with, as the title suggests, guns, germs, and steel, while other areas of the world, such as Polynesia, Australia, and the Americas, did not? Or in those cases where some civilizations were beginning to acquire such things, why did they get off to such a late start? Why did the Spanish conquer the Incans instead of vice versa? In a nutshell, he concluded that societies developed differently on different continents not because of racial differences in attitudes or intelligence, but because of differences in continental environments. Advanced technology, centralized political organizations, writing, and professional armies (or simply put the military advantage of simply having large numbers of people), etc. could only emerge in dense, sedentary populations capable of accumulating food surpluses. Unfortunately, domesticable wild plant and animal species needed for agriculture to arise were very unevenly distributed around the world, with the most valuable species concentrated in only nine small areas of the globe (Southwest Asia, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes and the adjacent Amazon basin, the eastern U.S., Africa's Sahel, West Africa, Ethiopia, and New Guinea), all of which became the earliest homelands of agriculture and thus regions that got a head start on developing guns, germs, and steel. Animals were vital to a society as a source of meat, milk products, fertilizer, transportation, leather, for military use, plow traction, and wool and those areas that lacked suitable animals to domesticate suffered accordingly in terms of societal development. The Late Pleistocene extinctions of large mammals in the Americas and Australia deprived humanity in those areas of potentially very valuable domesticable species. Of the big (over 100 pound) herbivores and omnivores, 148 potential candidates for domestication, they are mostly located in Eurasia (72 candidate species, versus 51 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 24 in the Americas, and 1 in Australia). Further, out of those candidates, only 14 were actually domesticated, 13 of them in Eurasia; what he called the "Major Five" - sheep, the goat, cow, pig, and horse, and the "Minor Nine" - the Arabian camel, Bactrian camel, donkey, reindeer, water buffalo, yak, Bali cattle, mithan (wild ancestor the gaur, found primarily in India and Burma), and the one American one, the llama and alpaca (two well-differentiated breeds of the same species). The other 134 potential candidates were eliminated due to problems with diet, growth rate, problems of captive breeding, nasty disposition, tendency to panic, and/or social structure, any one problem enough to preclude domestication even in modern times. Of further interest, Southwest Asia had seven of the wild ancestors naturally occurring, a huge advantage. In the world of plants there were similar disparities in distribution; of the 56 species of grass with the heaviest seeds, at least 10 times heavier than median species, Eurasia's Mediterranean zone had 32 of them, with barley and emmer wheat 3rd and 13th respectively in seed size. In contrast, of the 56 species, only 6 were found in East Asia, 4 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 11 in the Americas, and 2 in Australia. Another set of differences lead to a variation in societal evolution in the case of plant and animal domestications as well as in technological innovations and political institutions, as most societies acquire much more from other societies than they invent themselves (his discussion on the evolution of writing and in particular the alphabet in this regard was fascinating). Diffusion and migration within and between continents played a very important role in the development of a society, and in some continents diffusion and migration was considerably easier, most rapid in Eurasia because of its east-west major axis and its relatively modest ecological and geographical barriers. As crops and animals depended strongly on climate and hence on latitude, huge areas ranging almost from the Atlantic to the Pacific were open to the movement of domesticated plants and animals. Diffusion was slower in Africa and especially in the Americas due to those continents north-south major axes (traveling just a few hundred or a thousand miles north or south can render a society's crops and animals completely unsuitable for use) and much more pronounced geographic and ecological barriers (such as the Sahara Desert in Africa). Similarly, diffusion in the last 6,000 years has been easiest from Eurasia to sub-Saharan Africa, while long completely absent between Eurasia and the Americas (isolated at low latitudes by broad oceans and at high latitudes by geography and by a climate suitable just for hunter-gatherers). The last set of major factors he analyzed related to continental differences in area or total population size. A larger area or population meant more inventors, more competing societies, more innovations that exist to be adopted, and more pressure to adopt and retain those innovations, as those societies that fail to do so tend to be eliminated or absorbed by competing societies. Among the world's landmasses, area and the number of competing societies were greatest for Eurasia, while considerably smaller for Australia for instance. The Americas, despite their rather large total land area, were in effect fragmented by ecology and geography into a series of poorly connected smaller continents. Relating to both population size and the "Eurasians' long intimacy with domestic animals" was the development of germs. Crowd diseases could not sustain themselves in small bands of hunter-gatherers or slash-and-burn farmers, nor perhaps would they develop at all, as only human association with cattle gave us for instance measles (evolved from rinderpest) and smallpox (evolved from cowpox). Obviously I have just scratched the surface in my review. This is an excellent book that ties together findings in history, archaeology, paleontology, epidemiology, and linguistics in an extremely readable and informative format.

This is the best book on history, anthropology and general understanding of humans past I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Jared shows how to scientifically approach simple questions, which are the deepest ones to answer. Why have Europeans sailed to Americas and Africa and not otherwise? Why were they in possession of horse, guns and germs? To find the right question is a talent in on itself, and Jared proves himself to be a master at it, an goes on to answer each and every question as fully as possible. In a very neatly organized way, carrying so many scientific discoveries on so many different fields that the book is certainly one of a kind. His serene view of thing, his class in reasoning, showing what is commonly thought on the subject and why, and when his views differ, again why and who claims otherwise. The depth of his inquiry. And amazing and must read book for anyone who wishes to understand more of how is it that the world ended up the way it is. “In short, plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human populations. The resulting food surpluses, and (in some areas) the animal-based means of transporting those surpluses, were a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies. Hence the availability of domestic plants and animals ultimately explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed earliest in Eurasia and later, or not at all, on other continents. The military use of horses and camels. and the killing power of animal-derived germs, complete the list of major links between food production and conquest that we shall be exploring.” “Taken together, these four factors help us understand why the transition to food production in the Fertile Crescent began around 8500 B.C., not around 18.500 or 18.500 B.C. At the later two dates hunting-gathering was still much more rewarding than incipient food production, because wild mammals were still abundant; wild cereals were not yet abundant; people had not yet developed the inventions necessary for collecting, processing, and storing cereals efficiently; and human population densities were not yet high enough for a large premium to be placed on extracting more calories per acre.” “Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent’s first farmers came to meet humanity’s basic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.” “In short, New Guinea offers an instructive contrast to the Fertile Crescent. Like Hunter-gatherers of the Fertile Crescent, those of New Guinea did evolve food production independently. However, their indigenous food production was restricted by the local absence of domesticable cereals, pulses, and animals, by the resulting protein deficiency in the highlands, and by limitations of the locally available root crops at high elevations.” “We found that these differenced between the Fertile Crescent, New Guinea, and the eastern United States followed straightforwardly from the differing suites of wild plant and animal species available for domestication, not from limitations of the peoples themselves. When more productive crops arrived from elsewhere (the sweet potato in New Guinea, the Mexican trinity in the eastern United States), local peoples promptly took advantages of them, intensified food production, and increased greatly in population.” “ I note that regions differed greatly in their available pool of domesticable species, that they varied correspondingly in the date when local food production arose, and that food production had not yet arisen independently in some fertile regions as of modern times.” “the reason Native Americans did not domesticate apples lay with the entire suite of wild plant and animal species available to Native Americans. That suite’s modest potential for domestication was responsible for the late start of food production in North America.” “‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness.” “Our former question about apples or Indians becomes a question of zebras or Africans.” “they provided meat, milk products, fertilizer, land, transport, leather, military assault vehicles, plow traction, and wool, as well as germs that killed previously unexposed peoples.” “This very unequal distribution of wild ancestral species among the continents became an important reason why Eurasians, rather than peoples of other continents, were the ones to end up with guns, germs, and steel.” “Almost all species of domesticated large mammals prove to be ones whose wild ancestor share three social characteristics: they live in herds; they maintain a well-developed dominance hierarchy among herd members; and the herd occupy overlapping home ranges rather than mutually exclusive territories.” “Such social animals lend themselves to herding.” “turns out that all but a few candidates for domestication have been eliminated by the Anna Karenina principle. Humans and most animal species make an unhappy marriage, for one or more of many possible reasons: the animal’s diet, growth rate, mating habits, disposition, tendency to panic, and several distinct features of social organization.” “Eurasian peoples happened to inherit many more species of domesticable large wild mammalian herbivores than did peoples of the other continents. That outcome, with all of its momentous advantages for Eurasian societies, stemmed from three basic facts of mammalian geography, history, and biology. First, Eurasia, befitting its large area and ecological diversity, started out with the most candidates. Second, Australia and the Americas, but not Eurasia or Africa, lost most of their candidates in a massive wave of late-pleistocene extinctions - possibly because the mammals of the former continents had the misfortune to be first exposed to humans suddenly and late in our evolutionary history, when our hunting skills were already highly developed. Finally, a higher percentage of the surviving candidates proved suitable for domestication on Eurasia than on the other continents.” “To a lesser degree, they also tend to share similar diseases, regimes of temperature and rainfall, and habitats or biomes (types of vegetation). For example, Portugal, northern Iran, and Japan, all located at about the same latitude but lying successively 4.000 miles east or west of each other, are most similar to each other in climate than each is to a location lying even a mere 1.000 miles due south.” “the orientation of Eurasia’s axis compared with that of the Americas or Africa. Around those axes turned the fortunes of history.” “Farmers tend to breathe ou nastier germs, to own better weapons and armour, to own more powerful technology in general, and to live under centralized governments with literate elites better able to wage wars of conquest. Hence the next four chapters will explore how the ultimate cause of food production led to the proximate causes of germs, literacy, technology, and centralized government.” “Pizarro had similarly grim luck when he landed on the cost of Peru in 1531 with 168 men to conquer the Inca Empire of millions. Fortunately for Pizarro and unfortunately for the Incas, smallpox had arrived overland around 1526, killing much of the Inca population, including both the emperor Huayna Capac and his designated successor. As we saw in chapter 3, the result of the throne’s being left vacant was that two other sons of Huayna Capac, Atahuallpa and Huascar, became embroiled in a civil war that Pizarro exploited to conquer the divided Incas.” “the germs evolving from Eurasians’ long intimacy with domestic animals.” “blueprint copying or idea diffusion” Thus, the commonsense view of invention that served as our starting point reverses the usual roles of invention and need. It also overstates the importance of rare geniuses, such as Watt and Edison.” “My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its users after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.” “The importance of diffusion, and of geographic location in making it possible, is strikingly illustrated by some otherwise incomprehensible cases of societies that abandoned powerful technologies.” “Let us now summarize how variations in the tree factors - time of onset food production, barriers to diffusion, and human population size - led straightforwardly to the observed intercontinental differences in the development of technology.” “All these effects that continental differences in area, population, ease of diffusion, and onset of food production exerted on the rise of technology became exaggerated, because technology catalyzes itself.” “The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesman, between a robber baron and a public benefactor, is merely on of degree: a matter of just how large a percentage of the tribute is retained by the elite, and how much the commoners like the public uses to which the redistributed tribute is put.” “Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other - by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. Second, it gives people a motive, other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others. At the cost of a few society members who die in battle as soldiers, the whole society becomes much more effective at conquering other societies or resisting attacks.” “These examples demonstrate that the sole missing ingredients required to sustain food production in large areas of the Americas were domestic animals and crops themselves.” “This continental difference in harmful germs resulted paradoxically from the difference in useful livestock. Most of the microbes responsible for the infectious diseases of crowded human societies evolved from very similar ancestral microbes causing infectious diseases of the domestic animals with which food producers began coming into daily close contact around 10.000 years ago.” “Hence it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and the New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization.” “But food production was delayed in sub-Saharan Africa (compared with Eurasia) by Africa’s paucity of domesticable native animals and plant species, its much smaller area suitable for indigenous food production, and its north-south axis, which retarded the spread of food production and inventions.” “But none of those tamed animals was actually domesticated - that is, selectively bred in captivity and genetically modified so as to become more useful to humans.” “In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differenced between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography - in particular, to the continents’ different axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.” “In fact, precisely because Europe was fragmented, Columbus succeeded on his fifth try in persuading one of Europe’s hundreds of princes to sponsor him.” “Europe’s barriers were sufficient to prevent political unification, but insufficient to halt the spread of technology and ideas. There has never been one despot who could turn off the tap for all Europe, as of China.” “Nevertheless, it remains an open question how wide and lasting the effects of idiosyncratic individuals on history really are.” “But recall that the word “science” means “knowledge” (from the latin scire, “to know”, and scientia, “knowledge”), to be obtained by whatever methods are most appropriate to the particular field.” “Like Arabs and Jews, Koreans and Japanese are peoples joined by blood, yet locked in traditional enmity. But enmity is mutually destructive, in East Asia and in the Middle East. Reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twins brothers who shared their formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.” “First, [rainfall] agriculture in Europe provided no role for the state, which remained far from local communities most of the time, and when the agricultural revolution in Europe produced a growing agricultural surplus, this allowed the growth of relatively autonomous towns along with urban institutions such as universities prior to the rise of the centralized states in the late Middle Ages. [irrigation and water-control] agriculture in China, by contrast, favored the early development of intrusive and coercive states in the major river valleys, while towns and their institutions never achieved the degree of local autonomy found in Europe.” “The optimal Fragmentation Principle: innovation proceeds most rapidly in a society with some optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation: a too-unified society is at a disadvantage, and so is a too-fragmented society.” “Those tiny German beer companies are relatively inefficient. There’s no competition; there are just a thousand local monopolies.” “Why does the Japanese food-processing industry, like the German beer industry, consist of small local monopolies? Basically, the answer is the same two reasons: local taste and government policies.” “All of this suggests that we may be able to extract a general principle about group organization. If your goal is innovation and competitive ability, you don’t want either excessive unity or excessive fragmentation. Instead, you want your country, industry, industrial belt, or company to be broken up into groups that compete with one another while maintaining relatively free communication - like the U.S. federal government system, with its built-in competition between our 50 states.”

A wonderful book describing the history of 13,000 years in details. Provides a great intercontinental comparison in the human needs ,development and social structure.

This is a must read if you have read Sapiens. This book opens up so many perspectives on why certain things in history happened the way they did!

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Compré la edición pasta dura, y la calidad de los materiales es muy buena, recomiendo ampliamente.