Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

This is a good book, but not, in my opinion, the earth-shaking book I heard being raved about for years on end. Nor is it entirely worthy of its own National Geographic special. Still, it is an important and worthy book. The major problem with it is that it does not, in fact, directly address the issues of European dominance of the colonial era, which topic is strongly implied as the subject by the title (the supposed European triple threat) and the cover picture (which is of Pizarro capturing the Inka emperor). As says many times over, there are proximate causes (the ones directly involved in a certain event), and there are ultimate causes (the most basic reasons for an event happening). He's not as much concerned with the proximate causes for European dominance in the Americas as he is with the ultimate causes.

I do believe he did an excellent job in detaling the ultimate causes of European expansion and the ultimate causes of other people's subsequent extermination or subjugation. He does assume, however, that it is sufficient that Europeans had disease and technology (guns and steel both being examples of technology) to explain why they dominated Americans. I think it's fair to say that disease was much more important than technology though. Europeans would never have had a chance if they hadn't killed 95-99% of the indigenous population of the Americas, as they would have faced a continent already filled with millions of people. Diamond does argue for the importance of technology, mainly by use of the Spanish-Inka dynamic, but instead of really arguing for the importance of Spanish guns, horses, and steel, he essentially assumes that their superiority is self-explanatory. If I had not read 1491 before this, I might have also assumed that. However, as that book explained, in reality the advantages the Spanish gained by steel swords and guns were negligible, and while horses were very powerful on the field of combat, they actually hindered Pizarro's ability to move quickly because they were not well adapted to climbing steep mountainsides, where Inka highways went straight up and over instead of using switchbacks. Diamond also rather glibly dismisses the importance of the 45,000 or more native troops who sided with Pizarro in order to overthrow the Inka, much less their destructive civil war.

With all that said however, and with the caveat that human behavior cannot be predicted 100% accurately based on environmental factors, his theory that the advantages Eurasians enjoyed were because of environmental factors is a good one and he makes a strong case for it. If we examine human settlement patterns from the stone-age onward, we see that differences quickly arise where agriculture is most suitable. For example, the first civilization in the world arose in the Fertile Crescent (which is not any longer, but was then indeed a fertile land). This is also where domesticated plants and animals appeared for the first time. And to show that this relationship is not coincidental, it is demonstrated that civilization appeared earliest in other places that agriculture first developed. You have the Yellow river in China, the Indus Valley in India, the Andes of South America, and Mesoamerica. Agriculture eventually developed over most of the world, but appeared later in the Americas than Eurasia and never appeared in Australia. Thus we can see that an obvious pattern is evidenced by the fact that the first civilizations arose in areas with the strongest history of agriculture, and that these civilizations then spread forth. Thus, agriculture enabled expansion, either because farmers displaced hunter-gatherers by converting land to farm use or killed them. And of course, in interactions between two agricultural societies, the one with the larger agricultural base won.

Diamond includes some information on how epidemic diseases are derived from livestock, so that societies that domesticated animals were the ones that developed resistances to those diseases, and then decimated people who didn't have those animals with their diseases. (I put a little of that information in a post on TWM). This is not new information, but it goes hand in hand with his thesis. As far as I'm concerned though, this should have been the focus of any event where Eurasians expanded and displaced, conquered, or killed the natives. Disease is far more powerful than any army Europe or China could have mustered, and again, technology just wasn't a factor until much later in the colonial period.

Diamond also puts forth the theory that an East-West orientation rather than North-South is what enabled Europe and Asia to share so much agriculture and technology. For example, Europe got agriculture from the Middle East and gunpowder from Asia, but MesoAmerica never got the llama from South America. The spread of agriculture took much less time in Eurasia than it did in the Americas. This is because whereas a single line of latitude can have the same climate world-wide, seasons and climates change significantly over thousands of miles of longitude.

As for starting points, Diamond also discusses why some people had agriculture and domestic animals before others. In short, it was just luck. Around the world, most of the megafauna of the ice age died out (Diamond subscribes to the Overkill theory, which I think is absurd, but it works either way). Some animals were left, and of those that were, not all were suitable for domestication. Diamond gives a list of criteria for domestication, which sounds eminently plausible to me. You couldn't domesticate buffalo, but you could oxen. You could domesticate the llama, but not elephants. He also gives a list of criteria for domesticating plants, and it's not as simple as it seems. Sumeria arose first because of a very fortuitous location and placement of certain plants and animals.

Obviously this is a very simplified view of the world, but I think as a general model it does work very well. Perhaps with a few decades of study, it will be possible to express these concepts mathematically by accounting for such factors as weight of grain in relation to labor required and those kinds of factors. Diamond says as much in the end, and this book may be significant as the first attempt at a serious scientific study of history with all that that implies.

My review may sound mixed, but I really do respect this book and recommend it. Read it!