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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at UCLA and graduate of The Roxbury Latin School. In 1998 it won a Pulitzer Prize and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book was broadcast on PBS in July 2005, produced by the National Geographic Society.

Contents 1 Specifications 2 Background 3 Synopsis 3.1 Prologue 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Specifications

• Author = Jared Diamond
• Cover illustrator =
• Series =
• Genre = Geography, social evolution, history of civilization, ethnology, cultural diffusion
• Publisher = W. W. Norton
• Country = United States
• Publication Date = 1997
• Nature of Rarity =
• Number in Existence =
• Estimated Value =

[edit] Background

According to the author, an alternative title would be A short history about everyone for the last 13,000 years.^[1] But the book is not merely an account of the past; it attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations, as a whole, have survived and conquered others, while attempting to refute the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that: the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate in environmental differences amplified by various positive feedback loops; and that, if cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example Chinese centralized government, or improved disease resistance among Eurasians), it is only so because of the influence of geography.

The book's title is a reference to the means by which European nations conquered populations of other areas and maintained their dominance, often despite being vastly out-numbered - superior weapons provided immediate military superiority, and European diseases weakened the local populations and thus made it easier to maintain control over them. Hence the book attempts to explain, mainly by geographical factors, why Europeans had such superior military technology and why diseases to which Europeans were immune devastated conquered populations.

Diamond highlights two major environmental advantages of Eurasia over other areas in which farming apparently developed independently. The various Eurasian inventors of farming, and especially those in "South West Asia" (roughly Mesopotamia and Turkey) had by far the best natural endowment of crops and of domesticable animals in the size range from goats or dogs upwards - the superiority in domesticable animals was the more extreme, as other areas had at most two and often none. Eurasia's other big advantage is that its mainly East-West axis provides a huge area with similar latitudes and therefore climates. As a result it was far easier for migrating Eurasian populations to use in their new homes the plants and animals to which they had become accustomed; by contrast the Americas' North-South axis forced migrating Native Americans to adopt new crops and, where available, animals because they found a wide variation in climates as they migrated from North to South.

Diamond also touches very briefly on why the dominant powers of the last 500 years have been West European rather than East Asian (especially China). The Asian areas in which major civilizations arose had geographical features conducive to the formation of large, stable, isolated empires which faced no external pressure to correct policies that led to stagnation. On the other hand Europe's many natural barriers divided it into competing nation-states and this competition forced the European nations to encourage innovation and avoid technological stagnation.^[1]

The book has met with several criticisms, even from reviewers who are sympathetic to its aims and approach. Diamond attempted to anticipate some of these in the book and has answered some of them more recently.

[edit] Synopsis

[edit] Prologue

The prologue to the book opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the obvious differences in power and technology between Yali's people and the Europeans who dominated the land for 200 years, differences that neither of them considered due to any genetic superiority of Europeans. Yali asked, using the local term "cargo| Cargo cult|cargo" for inventions and manufactured goods, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"(p. 14)

He says that the same sort of question seems to apply elsewhere: "People of Eurasian origin... dominate the world in wealth and power." Other peoples, having thrown off colonial domination, lag in wealth and power. Still others, he says, "have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists." (p. 15) He says that, unable to find a satisfactory explanation from the best-known accounts of history, he decided to make his own investigation to seek the root causes of Eurasian dominance.

[edit] See also

• Climatic determinism
• Cultural ecology
• Cultural materialism
• Environmental determinism
• Gun, Gunpowder, Gunpowder warfare
• IQ and the Wealth of Nations
• Indigenous Australians - see impact of European Settlement
• Ishmael
• Marvin Harris
• Population history of American indigenous peoples
• Scramble for Africa

[edit] References

• E. L. Jones: The European Miracle : Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, 1981, Cambridge University Press; 2nd edition (1987) ISBN 0-521-33670-8 ::- this is a more extensive discussion of the effects of geography on comparative Chinese and European development than in the final section of Professor Diamond's book, and predates it by sixteen years.

[edit] External links

• Official Guns, Germs, and Steel Site at PBS
• ABC Radio Transcripts: Why Societies Collapse: Jared Diamond at Princeton University
• The World According to Jared Diamond is a positive review of Diamond's thesis from Georgetown University in 2001. It points out that the historical evidence is weaker than it appears because roughly 80% of humanity lived in Eurasia rather than the other continents, so that the "deck was stacked even without Diamond's biogeographical factors". J.R. McNeill judges the book a "compelling illustration that human history is embedded in the larger web of life on earth" but also states the view that "Diamond has oversold geography as an explanation for history".
• Food, social evolution, and conquest is a Science & Society editorial on the book from the marxist perspective, arguing that its ideas are insightful, but require the addition of the social dimension to produce a theory with more explanatory power.
• ENVIRONMENTALISM AND EUROCENTRISM is a very critical review from Marxist scholar James M. Blaut. It originally appeared in The Geographical Review, July 1999, Vol. 89 (3), pp. 391–408
• Professor (of Economics and History) Joel Mokyr reviews the book from the perspective of teaching and understanding economic history, his Northwestern University review says that Diamond has revived the respectability of "Geographic Determinism" in economic history, and that whilst many of his assertions are questionable the book presents a well-thought out argument that will make the reader wiser and better informed.
• review of the PBS production by Science reporter Michael Balter.
• Steve Sailer's review of Guns, Germs, and Steel (the book)
• J.P. Rushton's review of GGS (the book)
• Michael Levin's review of GGS (the book)
• Danny Yee's review of GGS (the book)
• Diamond's How to get rich analyses the costs and benefits of centralisation versus decentralisation for both firms and national economies. Part of it expands the suggestions in Guns, Germs, and Steel about why cultures of European origin gained economic and technological advantages over other advanced cultures.