Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
by Jared Diamond
Completed November 2001
Jared Diamond sets out to explain 13,000 years of human history on all continents in just over 400 pages in Guns, Germs, and Steel. In the Epilogue, he points out that this gives him just about 1 page per continent per 150 years. Frankly, I think he does a very good job. I like reading books where the author has an agenda...and I think Diamond has several: he wants people to elevate the study of human history to a more scientific plane and, I think, he wants to establish that the conquest of certain peoples by other peoples is not due to an inherent superiority of one race or another, but is instead due to historical accident; he wants to explain the basis of these historical accidents. In all areas, I think he makes good cases.
There were a couple of things I take away from Guns, Germs, and Steel. First, Diamond argues that the single most compelling reason for the success of Eurasians in conquering other peoples can be traced to their early development of agriculture (both crops and domesticated animals). Eurasians -- through historical accident? -- ended up with the most compelling (nutritious, etc.) set of crops and that fact compelled the development of denser populations, which in turn drove the development of better technology (guns and steel) and nastier germs. Nasty germs and better technology, in turn, enabled Eurasian conquest. It is an interesting thesis which Diamond develops very well.
At times, of course, it is more interesting than others. In the interest of honesty, I must admit that I skimmed a lot of sentences like this one: "Around 1600 B.C., almost simultaneously with their appearance on Halmahera, the familiar archaeological hallmarks of Austronesian expansion -- pigs, chickens, dogs, res-slipped pottery, and adzes of ground stone and giant clamshells -- appear in the New Guinea region." Yikes! Fascinating, eh? A lot of sentences like this one, though, do lead to some very interesting (and succinct) conclusions.
For instance, Diamond runs through a bunch of different theories about the rise of technology in a society, trying to explain why some societies develop more technology faster than others. After running through three or four theories, all of which have varying pros and cons, he steps back for a moment and basically says: "It doesn't matter." The reason? While the causal agent(s) may be unknown or indeterminable, it is fairly clear that those agents exist most effectively in denser societies. So, while we may argue about whether the presence of great inventors (e.g. Edison, Einstein, Galileo, whoever) were the reasons that some societies are more inventive than others, it is really a moot point when we look at 13,000 years of history. What we see from that vantage is that denser societies produce more inventions -- and whether it is because of the presence of more great inventors or the fact that technology transfer is faster in denser societies is somewhat unimportant to understanding why some societies are more inventive.
How to foster more and better technology, of course, is a very interesting and worthwhile question, though, which underscores Diamond's point that we should devote more historical / scientific study to things like this. From my standpoint though, the insight that he gives us is powerful in and of itself. I can see its analogue in American business: the most successful "inventors" of the last 100 years or so are people and organizations that have found ways to institutionalize this idea: Edison's "workshop" or Bell Labs or Xerox Parc -- all incredibly productive centers of invention -- brought a critical mass of people and resources together...and the results speak for themselves.
So, in a nutshell, I'd recommend Diamond's work. I think that he does a remarkable job weaving somewhat dry facts (like archaelogical and linguistic evidence) into an interesting story (of course, human history is fascinating) with some very interesting and salient syntheses and conclusions. Of course it is a tome, though -- took me almost 4 months to get through it -- so you might just want to read a few reviews.