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20 Years of Guns, Germs, and Steel
There are a lot of 20th anniversaries for me this year. 1997 happens to be a year of outsized importance in my life — I graduated from Ponderosa High School and started attending the Colorado School of Mines, after all — but important cultural winds were blowing aside from matriculation, including the release of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Although I didn’t pick up the book for several years after its publication (I was busy doing other things … like calculus) the influence that this work would have upon the world — and the worldview of those who have read it — is important and worth discussing now that time has allowed for cool reflection upon its central and provocative thesis.
That thesis, in short, is this: European powers were capable of overwhelming native populations in places like the New World due to the confluence of technology developed by those societies, largely as a result of factors outside of their control. The development of germs to which native populations had little resistance was mostly due to the domestication of animals that passed their diseases over to their symbiotic partners (humans) and the presence of those domesticable animals was itself a function of geographic luck in the first place.
Eurasian populations also benefited from temperate climates which had enabled the selective breeding of highly productive plants which set off a positive feedback loop, improving agricultural outputs, allowing for urbanization and economic specialization, development of technology, and the centralization of political power. The relative alignment of Eurasia also led to inherently greater speed with which technology and domestication could occur due to large East-West travel routes of similar climate, so such innovations didn’t need to be invented sui generis in every geographically distinct location.
So, how has Diamond’s thesis held up over the last 20 years and why is it important to me? To begin with, I’ve always been fascinated by history. If I weren’t numerate, I could have envisioned myself becoming a historian, and my college and high school transcript reflect it. A four on the AP American History Exam (I had mononucleosis when I took the test…) and a five on the AP European History Exam are probably my crowning Prep School achievements which I attempted to continue even in the environment of engineering higher education.
I keep my copy of Palmer and Colton’s “A History of the Modern World” as a reference whenever I need to place important historical events in context. Although those AP courses wiped out most of my liberal arts requirements, I nonetheless kept up my interest with elective classes like “The History of Technology” and a couple of other courses which led me directly into reading Guns, Germs, and Steel.
It is precisely that academic and casual interest in history that has led me to the conclusion that Diamond’s thesis is deeply flawed, and flawed not because he presents facts which are incorrect, (although some are certainly debatable) but because he allows his personal views and attachments to the native cultures that he has personally studied and interacted with to color his judgment. It’s arguable that Diamond is also something of a cultural relativist, given how far he goes out of his way to point out that even though the vast majority of scientific, mathematical, and societal achievements have come from Eurasian civilization, this has nothing to do with the inherent intelligence or moral character of the native populations that he has come across. Instead, he lays credit for the outcome of history — European hegemony over the known world such as what had emerged by the 18th century — at the feet of what I’ll call “geographic determinism.”
Several facts militate against Diamond’s explanation for this ordering of world affairs.
This piece does a workmanlike job of taking down at least one of the legs of the stool of Diamond’s thesis — mainly the portion about Germs — in which his unsupported assertion that many areas had undomesticable animals and plants is debunked. There were animals and plants available for domestication in those far-flung locations but the proper incentives to do so likely didn’t exist. He may have been correct about Europe being a petri dish for novel bacteria and viruses, but for the wrong reasons. Many of the diseases endemic to Europeans didn’t leap from animals, but are ancient. And add to this the fact that there were simply more people to serve as a breeding population for pathogens, and a population that needed to resist them to survive and, voilà, you can have carriers of disease that are resistant to that disease but can nonetheless pass it along to others without such resistance.
What I’m more interested in, however, are the looming counterexamples that Diamond omits on the frontiers of Guns and Steel. Really, this is one topic in that you can’t have guns without steel, but what this actually consists of is an expression of a society’s capability to synthesize something novel out of a variety of unrelated disciplines ranging from mathematics to metallurgy to chemistry and even economics.
The counterexample to which I refer that bestrides the horizon and casts severe doubt upon these remaining legs of Diamond’s thesis is of course China.
China’s culture is incredibly old. There is evidence of Homo Erectus using fire at some sites in China over a million years ago, and there is a relatively unbroken string of historically documentable civilization there going back at least 2,000 years before the Common Era (BCE). For reference, classical Egyptian civilization extends as far back as 3000 BCE, but whereas Egyptian civilization essentially collapsed from within and before an onslaught of various outsiders, including Persian conquerors and dynastic failures, Chinese civilization was defined primarily by consistent internecine rather than external conquest, the exception being the conquest of Genghis Khan.
Chinese civilization possesses many of the features and advantages that Diamond claims Eurasian civilizations benefited from and came by naturally, including:
- temperate weather
- navigable rivers
- domesticable animals
- abundant natural resources
- plenty of arable land
- over-land routes of transportation to other Eurasian civilizations enabling easy transfer of technology
Using these numerous advantages, the population of China surged and its civilization prospered such that by the time of the 10th century, many of the features of the modern technocratic state had emerged. Alongside the invention of advanced metallurgy and knowledge of chemistry which allowed for the manufacture of functional firearms, the Chinese pioneered the invention of moveable type, had invented hydromechanical clocks and were even practicing the use of insurance for ships involved in commerce and performed exchange with paper money.
While classical European civilization had collapsed with the end of the Roman Empire, the Chinese were sailing to Eastern Africa and possessed the world’s largest naval fleet. Using this economic and technological might, China grew into the dominant power of Southeast Asia until the coming of the Portuguese and Dutch in the 1500s. After that time, Chinese power relative to European colonial power ebbed, as both internal and external foes steadily ate away at the Empire.
So, what happened between the height of classical Chinese civilization and the coming of the Colonial powers that shifted the balance so dramatically that the British seized Hong Kong in the Opium War? The aforementioned internecine warfare, of course, but something else entirely novel to Chinese civilization. In comparison to its Western European rivals, one of the principal features of Chinese culture was its adherence to Confucianism, which led in turn to a more inward-looking and xenophobic society just as China was reaching its zenith economically and politically relative to its neighbors around 1200 CE.
Given similar advantages to those possessed by the vast majority of the Eurasian powers, Chinese society chose instead to look inwards rather than out, and the advanced technology that they possessed relative to their competitors was quickly surpassed. The various warring factions within China failed to unite under a common banner and proved intractable when faced with new and diverse threats, preferring to maintain its older culture rather than advancing where possible.
For instance, everybody “knows” that Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press sometime around 1450, but the reality is that this technology had already existed for hundreds of years in China at that point. So, why did this invention help spark a scientific and cultural revolution in Europe, while the technology had seemingly peaked in China? The answer of course is that Europeans possessed the pre-existing technology of Phonetic written language, whereas the Chinese written language (especially prior to the “simplification” of written Chinese) consists of over 80,000 unique characters. With just 52 interchangeable characters (upper and lower case — not counting numbers or punctuation) a person could theoretically spell out any message in English, and adding just a few more characters gets you close to practically any European language you want to select. In comparison, it is impractical to have on hand a sufficient number of type-set worthy characters to mass print and transmit anything beyond the most rudimentary message in Chinese. Add to this the difficulty of regional dialects and usage, which were quickly overcome in Europe due to the efficiency gains associated with coalescing around common usage and grammar.
Also, in order for this to be useful, you must not only be able to read and write this complicated language (an elite educated class) but possess all of the prerequisite technology to build a printing press, (such as metallurgy) the medium upon which you are going to print (paper or papyrus), and lastly, have sufficient numbers of people available who want and are able to read what you’re printing.
When mating the technology of the printing press together with phonetic language, Europe was able to leap far ahead of their Chinese counterparts by quickly disseminating all manner of knowledge throughout the economic spectrum and radically increasing the value to an individual of learning to read and write. Meanwhile, the economics of reading and writing the Chinese language remained prohibitive for all but the wealthiest members of Chinese society. Serfdom in China carried on for centuries, long after it had been functionally abolished in Europe, largely as a result of the explosion in knowledge brought about by the printing press.
The story of this sort of technological transfer and improvement is repeated in the European context over and over again, where it was ultimately put to very effective use in conquering of most of the planet.
This synthesis of varying technological strands into one Earth-shaking invention is the sort of cultural dexterity that Jared Diamond scoffs at and dismisses when he ascribes all of the differences in outcomes that we see between cultures to what boils down to luck of the draw in where your ancestors ended up.
Thomas Sowell once said, “Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal.” Guns, Germs, and Steel attempts to answer that thorny dilemma and does so in a very compelling manner. It’s an important book and should be read — but it should also be examined and have its flaws explained even as its virtues are extolled.
Published in History
My thesis is actually much simpler:
Africa has the biggest and fastest animals, because it has the most number of species competing.
It also has the most deadly diseases, same reason.
Even their people are the biggest or the strongest or the fastest in the world. Lots of competition.
Europe had similar petri-dish conditions – but instead of the animal kingdom, Europe had, by far, the greatest range of competing ideas and cultures and languages, and just enough freedom and religious and property rights for them to really dig in and compete.
In all cases, the free market leads to a winning side.
Europe
The places with the most competition (cultures/languages/companies/technologies), coupled with
Historical analysis points more to Carthage and Sicily than Egypt for feeding the western Mediterranean. Very fertile lands, abundant olive, grape, and wheat cultivation, and easy shipping all over. Patrick Wyman, on his podcast series, discusses the economics in depth and posits that the loss of Carthage to the Vandals was the real death blow to the Western Empire as it gutted the tax base, or “tax and trade spine” (as he calls it) that held it all together.
https://fallofromepodcast.wordpress.com
Forgot to include the link.
Again, the pertinent question is: where did these idea, cultures, and languages emerge from? What distinguished proto-Europeans from their contemporaries that allowed them to cultivate the intellectual prowess required for competition at the level of ideas and not physical strength?
As I said previously, the only conceivable options are environment, genetics, or random chance. In all likelihood a combination of the three.
One trap we can easily fall into in this discussion is assuming that history has an arc which has already reached its conclusion.
I was not much of a history buff when I first read Guns, Germs, and Steel, and one point that it drove home was how rapidly the title of “peak of civilization” got passed from one society to another across history. Now that I live in Germany, it is fascinating to note how the status of dominance has passed from country to country even over the course of a few centuries.
What we currently view as the crowning achievement of mankind – i.e., Western Civilization – will also likely prove to be yet another transient phenomenon. At which point historians, if there are any, will use the acuity of hindsight to point out the glaring flaws in the system we currently view as the best possible product of mankind.
Really?!
My sense from the book—which I enjoyed tremendously— was that it was a matter of “both-and” rather than “either-or.” Also, one of the elements Europe had going for it was also the cause of so much bloodshed, namely that it’s geography fostered the development of diversity and competition of every kind: religious, intellectual, technological, immunological… And so good ideas had a chance to get tested, strengthened and adopted, and it was much harder to impose an ideological hegemony from a center point.
This isn’t to say that the ideas themselves didn’t matter, But when the FF’s declared “all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain, inalienable rights…” that sentence was the result not of a bolt from the blue, but of a long, long heritage of intellectual effort and ferment. (Something, sadly, the left doesn’t quite understand).
Have you, by any chance, read 1491? That has some fun things to say about the size and complexity of pre-Columbian American civilization(s) and how domesticable plants were used…
One thing I’d never thought about before I read G,G & S is really obvious once it’s pointed out: Africa has very few natural harbors. Europe has lots. Without harbors, there isn’t much incentive to develop long-distance shipping technology.
I don’t think Diamond was intending to diminish the pride that Westerners ought to have in our culture. Indeed, I think we have to try hard to avoid the progressives’ binary of “pride” vs. “shame.” What we can feel is, simply, gratitude. Thank God there was someplace on earth that had all the elements required to create Western European culture (rule of law, freedom, the inherent worth of the individual, etc.) so that we —whatever our genes—could inherit and enjoy it.
I was going to say something similar. Ferguson’s thesis is that it was Western culture – in particular the religious and scientific enlightenment that led to the West becoming rich.
I disagree, of course. I think the Protestant Work Ethic played a key role. So did Judaism. And other competing faiths. Which means that the thing that made Europe different from China and Africa and countless other places were the cultures enabled by the Torah.
What on EARTH was Diamond thinking when he agreed to debate VDH? Talk about walking into a buzz saw…
Great clip – thanks!
Geography—that is, the nature and location of Israel— is an interesting factor in the emergence/creation of Torah, too.
According to Josephus, north Africa provided about eight months of Rome’s grain and Egypt the other four. (I thought it was tilted a bit more toward Egypt.) Of course, both fell into Muslim hands at about the same time, so the point remains.
Why is this whole thread in Italics? And why is it affecting things below it on the Member Feed? Could it be that the title has:
The whole site is in italics.
No, edit your post and put a / in that second <em>. It’s only the Member Feed below your post.
Seriously, @majestyk, it’s correct everywhere but in the title. I think this might also be why the gap is showing on the first page of the Member Feed. Can you edit it? If you can’t see the <em> codes, can you clear formatting on the title and try again?
Okay, I have just proven what the problem is by putting your closing tags in my post, which is directly below yours on the page. Please edit your post. On the title, the very last thing you should see will be a tag <em>. Add the / to make it </em>. I don’t know if you put it in there or if an editor is working on it for promotion and missed the /, but it is the problem. Doesn’t matter who did it, so long as it gets fixed.
An editor failed to close the tag. :) Fortunately, I’m suffering from insomnia and saved everybody from being in Italic-land.
Thanks, Maj.
Wait, it wasn’t just me then – all of R> was in italics for you too because the tag wasn’t closed out in the title of my post?
Yep. It was also producing a gap on the first page of the Member Feed between the columns, as so:
That was what I noticed first. Then I noticed the Italics on my thread directly below yours on the Member Feed. I traced it back to this thread’s title. That caused it all. Amazing, isn’t it?
It was producing that effect for me as well. Is the site really that tetchy that opening that style and failing to close it will filter down through how the entire thing looks?
I feel like an accomplished hacker now.
I’m not sure that one alone would do it, but definitely having the second opening tag in place of the closing tag did.
Have I mentioned lately how much I hate WordPress?
Use your powers for good. :twisted:
That’s really good. An insightful critique of Diamond. I loved the “guns..book. I just ignored his romanticization of indigenous civilizations and accepted the role by technical superiority and better domestic grains. What stuck me was how the lack of communications between South American and Mexican civilizations played such an important role and the ease of conquest because because of the nature of the centralized slave cultures (not his point but clear enough from the narrative) Moreover, since I had served in Ecuador and Colombia and could contrast descendants from centralized slave cultures and those from independent decentralized tribes in Colombia the nature of the conquest was instructive. I hadn’t realized they didn’t have to fight while the Spaniard in Colombia had to subdue the tribes with real war. As to domesticated animals there were wild bore and deer that could have been domesticated along with the llamas and vicuna in the Inca civilization, but what could the Aztecs domesticate? They just ate lessor tribes.
As to China was it confucianism that turned them inward? I simply don’t know. Now some credit confucianism with turning them into the export juggernauts they, Singapore, Taiwan have become. I think it’s more the internal dynamics of total control because of the river system, the bureaucratization and centralization along with confucianism and the mandarin technocratic class it gave rise to. After all when China built the giant ships and sailed the entire world they were confucian. So were they when they conquered all of China. Centralization and decay happens to old mature societies. The economies grow from the ground up through production, agriculture and trade, but need a central government to protect them. That government gradually grows, forms symbiotic relationship with successful and growing traders and larger enterprises and together they milk the system into a death spiral. The trade and outreach that was occurring in China led to disputes between the mandarin centralizers and the trading private sector. The mandarins won and closed the place down to destroy their rivals. A similar thing happened in Japan. Tokugawa did not want modernization because guns and western technology would have destroyed the Samurai class, empowering ordinary folks and upstarts and the consensus society. That’s also why they killed Christians. But then modern Japanese learned by watching the West carve up China and set about to turn it all around. The samurai now run the place as the super technocrats, no more sword play.
No large draft animals, though.
Phillip Hoffman in Why did Europe Conquer the World? builds a much better explanation that Diamond and takes Diamond’s thesis head on. He also takes on the geography explanation @amyschley brings in.
Hoffman is an economist. Economists build models. So does Hoffman and shows where Diamond falls short. If you read the reviews (see Graham Siebert’s review) at Amazon, you get a good idea of the model he creates.
I highly recommend the book.
Just dromedaries: