Guns, Germs, and Steel (book)

     Jared Diamond Guns, Germs, and Steel (1999) Diamond’s thesis is simple: in the long run, over several thousand years, what determined the dominance of Eurasia in human history was its early development of food production, and this in turn was governed by climate, ecology, and geography. These interacted. The ecology provided a large suite of plants and animals for domestication, and the geography gave Eurasia a wide band of similar climates within which to diffuse the new technology. By contrast, Africa and the Americas had a much smaller suite of plants and no large mammals suitable for domestication, while Australia had essentially none. Africa and the American continents also had climatic and geographic barriers to north-south diffusion of food production when it was developed.
     The thesis is persuasive, and Diamond’s point that long-term trends in history cannot have been influenced very much by culture or idiosyncratic accidents such as the rise of some anomalous individuals. He is also acutely aware of short term culturally determined twists in history. For example, the adoption of new technologies is influenced by a culture’s openness; but a culture that doesn’t quickly adopt new techniques will be overwhelmed (conquered, out-competed) by cultures that do. But individual decisions by rulers over large coherent cultures can have long-term consequences: China’s long decline in technology was caused by internal power struggles, and that’s why Western Eurasia dominates today rather than China. And so on.
     What might be called the E-C-G theory of history sounds like a theory that explains everything, but not quite. Diamond claims that it is a statistical theory: it can explain, and to some extent predict, large scale phenomena, but not small scale ones. In this respect human history is like all historical sciences, and Diamond insists that human history can be brought to a more objectively scientific state by learning from the  the methodologies of the other, simpler, historical sciences. These sciences are even capable of a kind of prediction: If theory X is true, then certain should be found in the historical record. In his defence of historical sciences Diamond doesn’t quite say what I want to say: Physics has been so spectacularly successful because it’s simple.
     A rich and suggestive book, made better by Diamond’s ability, unusual in an American academic, to write clearly. **** (2000)