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     title: Guns, Germs and Steel
          : The Fates of Human Societies
        by: Jared Diamond
 publisher: Random House 1997
  subjects: history, agriculture
     other: 480 pages, black & white photos, index, A$34.95

Why is it that Europeans ended up conquering so much of the world?
Or, as one of Diamond's New Guinean friends asks him, why do they have
all the "cargo"?  Despite all the contrary evidence from anthropology
and human biology, many persist in attributing the differing political
and economic successes of the world's peoples to biological, "racial"
differences.  Others appeal to cultural differences or to historical
contingency.  But Diamond sees the fundamental causes as environmental,
resting ultimately on ecological differences between the continents.
An extended argument for this, _Guns, Germs and Steel_ is nothing less
than a history of _Homo sapiens_ on a scale of continents and millennia.

Diamond begins with a survey of human pre-history, covering the spread of
humans around the world down to 11000 BC.  He then introduces Polynesia
as a "natural experiment", an illustration on a smaller scale of his
overall thesis.  In the Polynesian exploration and settlement of the
Pacific, settlers from the one cultural and ethnic background ended up
in vastly different environments, ranging from continental New Zealand,
through volcanic islands of various sizes, to barren atolls and remote
Easter Island.  Hunter-gatherer societies eventuated on some islands --
and sophisticated states and proto-empires on others.

As an exemplar of contact between different societies, Diamond chooses
the meeting of the Spanish conquistador Pizarro and the Inca Atahuallpa
at Cajamarca in 1532.  This resulted in Pizarro's victory, despite a
numerical disadvantage, and the capture of Atahuallpa.  The proximate
causes of this were germs, technology (guns and steel weapons, ships),
domestic animals (horses), and writing.  Hence the title.

--

Underlying these immediate causes, however, is what Diamond sees as
the central key to understanding human history -- food production, or
the domestication of plants and animals.  In an excellent summary --
probably the best popular account I have seen -- Diamond chronicles the
origins of agriculture.  He describes where and when food production
originated, how it spread with demographic expansion and by emulation,
and why it never took off in some regions.  He also touches on the
largely unconscious coevolutionary processes underlying domestication,
the origins of specific crops, and the characteristics that made some
plants more suitable than others for domestication.

Next Diamond considers, and rejects, the idea that some peoples failed to
adopt agriculture, or adopted it late, because of cultural characteristics
("backwardness").  Hunter-gatherers have a good understanding of the
potential of the plants in their environment and, while some groups are
conservative and resist change, there are always some who are prepared
to innovate.  The Fertile Crescent had a climate which favoured annual
plants (which tend to have large seeds) and a species mix  which included
critical, large-seeded, self-pollinating grasses.  The result was a swag
of crops including protein-rich cereals and pulses; other regions (New
Guinea and the eastern United States are his examples) lacked such a
crop suite.  (Potential crops can't be evaluated in isolation -- you
can't maintain a sedentary society on apple cultivation alone.)

A similar analysis is carried out for the domestication of large mammals.
Here, again, Eurasia was favoured with almost all the suitable species.
While there appear to be many others which could have been domesticated
(especially in Africa), they have behavioural traits which militate
against it.  (As evidenced by the failure of modern animal-breeders,
backed by genetics, to domesticate any of them.)  When they did become
available, the indigenous peoples of other continents rapidly adopted
Eurasian domestic animals.  The rapid mastery of the horse by some
Amerindian groups is a notable example.

Finally Diamond suggests a key difference between the continents: the
primary axis of Eurasia is east-west, whereas the axes of Africa and
the Americas are north-south.  Because crops are climate dependent and
climate varies strongly with latitude, crops and domestic animals could
spread across Eurasia more easily.

--

Returning to the proximate causes touched on earlier, Diamond looks more
closely at diseases, writing, technology, and centralised government.
Contagious diseases caused high levels of mortality in populations
throughout the New World and Australia, often well before direct
contact with European settlers.  In contrast, European penetration
into the tropics was slowed by Old World tropical diseases to which
they lacked immunities.  Where did these diseases come from, and why
did so few travel in the other direction?  Higher population densities
in Eurasia created a niche for new diseases, the presence of domestic
animals provided a reservoir of suitable candidates, and their spread
was assisted by good cross-continental communications.

Next Diamond presents a capsule history of the origins of writing
(in Mexico and Sumeria, and possibly in China and Egypt), exploring
the limited uses of early writing systems, its gradual refinement, and
its spread by emulation and copying.  This is followed by a chapter on
technological innovation more generally, highlighting its dependence
on population size, the easy diffusion of ideas, and auto-catalytic
feedback (with synergism between different forms of technology).

But the single most significant consequence of food production was that,
by creating reliable food surpluses, it allowed large, dense, sedentary,
and stratified societies to come into existence.  Diamond uses a simple
band/tribe/chiefdom/state typology to illustrate the relationship between
population density and social structure and the movement from egalitarian
societies to redistributive "kleptocracies".  He also touches on the
contributions of religion and ideology to political organisation.

--

Part four presents a series of case studies from different regions,
drawing on archaeological and linguistic evidence to reconstruct
their history in the context of the framework developed earlier.
Diamond briefly glances at how good communications and early political
unification produced China's unusual linguistic and cultural unity.
He also returns to the collision of the Old and New Worlds, comparing the
dates for the adoption of agriculture, metallurgy, states, and writing
in different regions.  And there's room for a quick look at New World
linguistics and the brief Norse contacts with North America.

Despite geographical proximity, Australia and Papua New Guinea had very
different histories.  Australia remained a continent of hunter-gatherers,
while New Guinea was one of the original centres of food production.
But New Guinea never developed centralised states and agriculture never
crossed the Torres Strait.  The explanations for this rest, once again,
with environmental differences and ecological barriers.  When Europeans
did build an industrialised state in Australia, they had to import the
key elements, the crops and technology, from outside.

The Austronesian expansion into Southeast Asia and the Pacific,
starting from Taiwan and Southern China around 3000 BC, was one of the
most significant movements of human history.  Equipped with outrigger
canoes, domestic animals and agriculture, Austronesian-speaking peoples
overran and replaced the hunter-gatherer populations of Indonesia and the
Philippines, and eventually expanded into the Pacific in the Polynesian
diaspora.  But the Austronesians failed to penetrate far into New Guinea,
or to have any significant impact on Australia.

Ecology is also a major factor behind the complex human geography of
sub-Saharan Africa.  Iron-working and agriculture powered the Bantu
expansion into southern Africa, displacing the pygmies and the Khoi-San.
The characteristics of their crops explain why they stopped at the Fly
River, leaving it for European settlers with suitable crops to introduce
agriculture to South Africa.  And the extraordinary Austronesian
settlement of Madagascar is book-sized subject all by itself.

--

An epilogue, "The future of human history as a science", proposes
extending the approach of _Guns, Germs and Steel_ to smaller geographic
and shorter time scales.  Diamond suggests geographical fragmentation
(producing the "right" amount of political unity) as an explanation for
why, within Eurasia, it was Europe rather than China that eventually
took the lead in technological innovation.  (It is all too easy, however,
to imagine a Chinese writer in an alternative universe invoking exactly
the opposite argument.)  He also hints briefly at a role for alternatives
to environmental explanations, namely "cultural factors and idiosyncratic
individuals".  And he argues that history should be considered a science,
sharing methods with the other historical sciences, though he barely
scrapes the surface of the epistemological issues this raises.

While this is a program that I have a lot of sympathy with, it also leads
me to some of the qualms I have about _Guns, Germs and Steel_: I am always
nervous when biologists turn their attention to history or anthropology.
Though Diamond is a physician turned evolutionary biologist, he avoids
the major pitfalls and can be read by historians and social scientists
without flinching.  He achieves this by avoiding some areas rather than
engaging with them, however.

In his introduction Diamond writes that "since Toynbee's attempt,
worldwide syntheses of historical causation have fallen into disfavor
among most historians, as posing an apparently intractable problem".
This disfavour is not entirely wilful, however, so Diamond's failure
to elaborate is frustrating.  Despite the breadth of _Guns, Germs and
Steel_, it doesn't even begin to be a general synthesis of historical
causation.  When Diamond writes about the proximate and ultimate causes
of the collision at Cajamarca, for example, he is not explaining why
_Pizarro_ captured _Atahuallpa_ at _Cajamarca_ -- only why a Eurasian
leader was confronting a Native American leader somewhere in the Americas.
Finer explanations require the invocation of forms of historical causation
on which Diamond doesn't touch on at all.

Diamond moves confidently around an amazing range of disciplines, but
there are some where he isn't so well informed.  Religion, for example,
is for him just a handmaiden of the state, providing a justification for
conquest and a method of inspiring personal sacrifice for the collective
good.  This naive functionalism hardly stands up to critical examination,
so it was not surprising to find that the "Further Readings" section
doesn't mention any studies of religion.  (And it has been argued that
Macassan contacts with North Australia did influence Aboriginal religion.)

But carping too much on this would be uncharitable, given the breadth
of Diamond's achievement.  He has produced a superb work of synthesis,
bringing together history, archaeology, agriculture, linguistics, medicine
and many other fields.  It is hard to evaluate just how strong his overall
thesis is, but he is persuasive and surely has the right general idea.
And even those who disagree with Diamond completely may appreciate _Guns,
Germs and Steel_, many chapters of which can stand alone.  If you are
looking for a last minute Christmas present, _Guns, Germs and Steel_ is a
book which should appeal to anyone who enjoys history or popular science.

--

Disclaimer: I requested and received a review copy of _Guns, Germs and
Steel_ from Random House Australia, but I have no stake, financial or
otherwise, in its success.

--

%T	Guns, Germs and Steel
%S	The Fates of Human Societies
%A	Jared Diamond
%I	Random House
%C	London
%D	1997
%O	hardcover, further reading, index
%G	ISBN 0-224-03809-5
%P	480pp,32pp b&w photos
%K	history, agriculture

23 December 1997

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        Copyright (c) 1997 Danny Yee (danny@cs.usyd.edu.au)
        http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/danny/book-reviews/
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