Book of the Week

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Recommended by George Davies

24 years after its publication, Jared Diamond’s seminal account of human history as we know it remains unrivalled in its impressively broad and interdisciplinary approach to the fundamentals of human development and inequality. You can find it on Geography, Politics, Anthropology, and International Relations lists anywhere you look, and it retains a strong hold on the 'Popular Science' section of your local Waterstones - at the very least, it is deemed worthy of enthusiastic endorsement by our own school’s Geography department. So what’s all the hype really about?

The first striking thing about Diamond’s book is its title. The rather playful 'short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years' certainly sets expectations high for the not-exactly-short history that is about to follow. This history is explored in order to answer one rather important question, posed to him in 1972 Papua New Guinea by a local politician named Yali: '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?' In other words, how did the global order develop such that Western Europe was able to colonise North America and much of the rest of the world? Why are Europe and North America the most prosperous regions in the world, and not Africa or Australasia, or any other region?

Diamond’s answer here lies also in the title. The catchy tricolon of Guns, Germs, and Steel stands for an intricately explored web of environmental and human factors that find themselves culminating in three proximate factors that enabled European societies to dominate others towards the second half of the last millennium. Diamond argues that as a result of the direction of continental axes, the availability of domesticable plant and animal species, and the subsequent development of sedentary farming societies, European societies had the guns with which they could defeat others in battle, the germs with which native populations could be weakened and wiped out, and the steel with which cities and the aforementioned guns could be produced. The most important element of Diamond’s answer to regional inequality, however, lies in what it is not. Consistently throughout the book, Diamond aims to dispel racist myths about intellectual, cultural, or physical European superiorities, taking a militantly anti-racist approach to the study of colonisation and development.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is engaging, readable, and explores the world with an exceptional agility and curiosity: you are moved from forensic examination of Austronesian linguistic evolution to exploration of food economies within mere pages - and with an authority that might perhaps be unexpected from a man who spent much of his twenties studying the biophysics of gall bladder membranes. Creative yet neatly controlled and structured, Diamond indulges himself in the intricacies of microbiology and hieroglyphic writing all while sustaining just enough focus on the big picture to keep you on topic and centred on his main geographical argument.

This is not to say, however, that his book and argument are without fault: at times, commitment and stamina is required to power through some of the denser sections of Diamond’s discourse. Furthermore, as a result of Diamond’s broad-net approach to world history, attempting a mixing of biology, linguistics, history, and geography, he has come under moderate fire from fellow academics and specialists; accuracy and absolute academic diligence do seem to take a bit of a back seat in order to maintain the strength of his ecological argument. One critic, the historian William McNeill, suggests that constant geographical facts are not capable of explaining such a temporal phenomenon: after all, the world dominance of Europe, as opposed to Eurasia, has only been the case in recent centuries, and thus cannot be explained by factors that have remained the same for millennia. Furthermore, there are certainly holes in the details of Diamond’s arguments: his mappings of continental axes, for example, completely ignores Australia, and can even be considered wrong when it comes to Africa. Thus, Diamond’s book by no means can be considered perfect.

Jared Diamond

On balance, however, it certainly makes a standout contribution to literature on world development. Diamond successfully reintroduces the importance of geography and science to the study of history, producing what could be considered a reasonably sensible, modern version of environmental determinism. Whether you are a Geography and Biology A Level student like me, or simply a keen politics/history reader wanting something a bit different, Guns, Germs, and Steel is one for you. Highly recommended!