Guns, Germs, and Steel

Preview

Why did Europeans conquer so much of the world instead of being conquered by others? Why did steel swords, writing, ocean ships, and deadly epidemics flow in some directions and not in others? That simple but explosive question sits at the heart of this book. It begins with a conversation in New Guinea, where a local politician named Yali asks why white people brought so much cargo to his people, while New Guineans had so little cargo of their own. Behind that question stands a much bigger one about history itself. Why have human societies developed at such different speeds, and why did those differences lead to such unequal power? The answer offered here is both startling and deeply human. It is not about intelligence. It is not about some peoples being more creative, more hardworking, or more worthy than others. The whole point is to sweep away those lazy and poisonous explanations. Human history, the book argues, took different paths because environments were different. Geography shaped food production. Food production shaped population size, disease, technology, political organization, and writing. And those forces, over many centuries, produced guns, germs, and steel. That argument unfolds across a huge sweep of time, from the end of the last Ice Age to the modern world. Jared Diamond moves from Fertile Crescent farmers to Inca emperors, from Polynesian voyagers to African kingdoms, from Chinese inventions to Spanish horsemen in the Americas. Again and again, he shows that chance distributions of plants, animals, continents, and climate mattered far more than any built in difference among human groups. The broad pattern of conquest and survival was not inevitable because one people was superior. It emerged because some regions had better access to domesticable crops and animals, easier east west spread of those advantages, and denser populations...