Guns, Germs, and Steel Review

I first read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel in the Fall 2003 based on a recommendation from a friend. Many chapters of the book are truly fascinating, but I had criticisms of the book back then and hold even more now. Chief among these is the preponderance of analysis devoted to Papua New Guinea, as opposed to, say, an explanation of the greatly disparate levels of wealth and development among Eurasian nations. I will therefore attempt to confine this review on the "meat and potatoes" of his book: the dramatic Spanish conquest of the Incas; the impact of continental geography on food production; and finally, the origins of the Eurasian development of guns, germs, and steel. In terms of structure, I will first summarize the book's arguments, then critically assess the book's evidentiary base, and conclude with an analysis of how Guns, Germs, and Steel ultimately helps to address the wealth question.

Jared Diamond's fundamental argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel is that Eurasians were able to conquer the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia because continental differences set Eurasia on a different, better trajectory than the other continents. His argument addresses a simple question: Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? According to the author, the most important continental differences appear in domesticable plants and animals, germs, orientation of continental axes, and ecological barriers. Throughout the book, he refers back to the "Collision at Cajamarca," or the first encounter between the Incan emperor Atahuallpa and the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, as a "broad window onto world history." The encounter is effective in capturing his argument, namely that the Spanish "victory" over the Incas was all but a foregone conclusion given the centuries of accumulated benefits conferred on the Europeans by their continental circumstance.

The beneficial continental circumstances enjoyed by Eurasians first appears in vegetation. The Fertile Crescent was endowed with diverse, abundant, and highly productive cereals and pulses such as wheat, barley, and pea that yielded both starch and protein. These food staples were domesticated very quickly and with little effort by Eurasians, whose newfound farms gave rise to specialization and division of labor. Conversely, in the Americas, the sole cereal crop of corn took many more thousands of years of domesticated refinement to prove useful to humans. Mr. Diamond also places great emphasis on the geographic East-West orientation of Eurasia. A plant growing at a given latitude can grow at that latitude the world over. Thus, Eurasia's East-West orientation was highly conducive to the rapid spread (by trade) of productive domesticated grains across the continent. Conversely, the Americas, Africa, and Australia were impaired by their North-South orientation, which dictated that domesticated plants from people of one latitude were of little use to their neighbors to the North and South. Compounding the effect, the trade of agricultural technology in Eurasia ultimately led to trade in other things, such as technological advances, including writing and language

After tending to the pig and sheep herds, the next logical step for a Eurasian farmer who had just acquired the seeds for a new crop might be to hitch up oxen and plough a field. Indigenous Australian farmers might have done the same thing, if only they had pigs, sheep or oxen. Mr. Diamond places great importance on the availability of large (+100 lbs.) domesticable mammals to human development. Eurasia is endowed with a virtually monopoly of such animals. In fact, South America had only one - the ancestor of the llama and alpaca - while North America, Australia, and Sub-Saharan Africa had zero between the three of them. Large, domesticable mammals increased productivity not only in farming, but also in transportation and warfare. But most importantly, they exposed their Eurasian masters to a host of deadly germs such as smallpox, measles, plague, cholera. Through their livestock, Eurasians slowly developed immunity to these germs while Native Americans, Africans, and Australians didn't. Thus, these microbes devastated populations on those continents when they were first introduced, massively setting back human development.

From a critical perspective, one could take issue with a plethora of the author's assertions. I in particular find the text more narrowly relevant than the "book of remarkable scope" Colin Renfrew of Nature describes in his blurb on the back cover. It just feels as though Mr. Diamond really did author Guns, Germs, and Steel for his friends from Papua New Guinea, not for a broader academic audience. Stated bluntly, the book does a great job explaining why the achievements of an island country in the Pacific would hugely lag the advances of

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