Guns, Germs and Steel

"I read this book as I was going into my last year of graduate school at UCLA. I had just returned from doing fieldwork in a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon, where I was studying the indigenous population called the Matsigenka. They were always asking me questions—lots of questions that I thought were really complex and pretty deep—and one of the questions they asked me was, ‘You anthropologists come here and study us, but we never get to go to where you are from and see how you guys live. Why is it that you seem to be so rich and have so much and we have so little?’ “Oftentimes populations need an invention and they never get it, and instead they die out” I found that a difficult question to give an easy answer to. Then, when I came back, Guns, Germs and Steel had just come out and a friend gave it to me as a gift. The first chapter is about a conversation he has with a guy in New Guinea, in which he gets asked, basically, the same question as I had been. Guns, Germs and Steel is his effort to answer that question. He calls it ‘Yali’s question’ in the first chapter. The book is a masterpiece in terms of integrating a vast range of material from different disciplines, material on language, archaeology, comparative bio-geography, with also lots of his own ethnographic field studies peppered in there. It was inspirational to me for doing that kind of work. The Secret of Our Success , the book I wrote, has that flavour of pulling together stuff from across the diverse social sciences. It is not an effort to readdress the question that Jared Diamond answered in Guns Germs and Steel , but it’s very much an inspirational book in terms of the size of the questions one can ask and the scope of one’s research — if you are willing to rely on other people and don’t feel the need to be an absolute expert on everything you say. One thing that fed into my later work is the chapter in Guns Germs and Steel called “Necessity’s Mother.” In that chapter he makes the case that necessity is not the mother of invention, that it’s much more of a social process. Oftentimes populations need an invention and they never get it, and instead they die out. He goes on to talk about that more in a book he wrote later called Collapse . There are lots of urgent things that societies need that you think they might invent but don’t. Then oftentimes when inventions do pop up, they drift around for years and nobody puts them to use until finally somebody figures out how to use them. That got me thinking about innovation that then influenced my work on the collective brain. The idea of what generates innovation is actually the free flow of ideas, information, and practices among diverse minds. That means that the size and inter-connectedness of societies affects the rate of innovation. It turns out, when you model it, it’s the most important thing. For example, it is much more important than being smart. The first thing I would say is that, whether you think it is right or wrong, it’s spurred an incredible amount of research. People took it seriously and fully engaged with it. It’s driven economists to get better data to test the theory. So, for example, there’s a number of economic studies now supporting Diamond’s basic thesis. Researchers went and got the date for the earliest beginning of agriculture in different parts of the world, and then used that to predict modern economic development — GDP per capita in the year 2000. You control for a lot of factors statistically, and it is still seems to be the case that what Jared Diamond presented very qualitatively—that the earliness of agriculture really matters—does hold when you do statistical analyses. My own work and the work of others supports the ‘necessity’s mother’ parts of his work. And certainly, more studies on disease and pathogens have continued to support that part of his argument, where he argues that people in the New World and in other parts of the world had a great susceptibility to the pathogens that Europeans brought with them. The differences in domesticated animals in different continents, say, caused pathogens to spread and destroy many populations. I would say the most controversial part of his work—the place where there is the strongest disagreement—is about what’s happened in Europe since 1500. Diamond tried to make the case that you can go all the way back to the origins of agriculture around the world and use that to explain the poverty and wealth of nations in the year 2000. What the current evidence supports is that you can predict the poverty and wealth of nations in 1500 really well with what Jared Diamond found. Then, what happens in 1500 in Europe, seems to require additional explanation: something else was afoot in Europe after 1500 that eventually lead to the Industrial Revolution and the mass of European expansion after that. So I would say, he is doing pretty well on the terms of the evidence that’s come in subsequently. Mostly support has increased for his thesis, except for the since-1500 part of economic growth."

"Definitely. In choosing my books I’ve tried to give a balanced perspective on the Great Divergence but I’m an economic historian so the economic viewpoint and analyzing the rise of capitalism are what I know best. Diamond is very much outside that box. He doesn’t see the rise of capitalism as being particularly important at all. This is something I would criticize him for, but in general I admire him so much. He’s one of my intellectual heroes. I admire this particular work for its grand theoretic scope—its ability to encompass so many different factors and to spin them all into one coherent narrative. That narrative is based on what he calls “Yali’s question.” Yali is a New Guinean who asks Diamond why Europeans visiting there have so many material goods and great technologies while New Guineans have very few. Why were Europeans able to conquer these societies? Diamond answers this question by looking back to the very beginnings of human civilization. He starts with the origins of agriculture. He shows that in Eurasia—particularly in the Near East, which is the Eurasian cradle of civilization—there are more domesticated varieties of crops. Europe has barley, two wheat varieties and three kinds of pulses that can all be domesticated and turned to farming. Farming leads to food surpluses, which allow larger portions of the population to specialize outside agriculture and lead to population growth. This settled farming society also allows for cumulative social and technological innovations—from writing to bureaucracies and stable governments. It also allows societies to remember technologies. In small societies without writing—one of his examples is the Inuit—technologies arise and are forgotten because the ability to have collected knowledge is limited to the memory of individuals. In a large, writing-based society social and technological progress can be cumulative. “The lateral axis of the Eurasian supercontinent allowed both agriculture and animal domestication to spread easily in both directions” Diamond’s second major point is that there are other cradles of civilization: in Africa, in North America, and also in Polynesia, but that these areas lack fundamental components whose absence would delay the development of an advanced civilization. North America has fewer domesticable crops and animals. Of the 14 different types of domesticable animals, 13 are in Eurasia. One is in South America, the llama, and there are none in the rest of the world. Many were killed off by early Pleistocene hunter gatherers. As a consequence, Eurasia had a relative bounty of cows, sheep, goats, and horses and these animals could be used for traction in agriculture. Living next to these animals allowed Europeans to contract their diseases, which turned out to be particularly deadly. The lateral axis of the Eurasian supercontinent allowed both agriculture and animal domestication to spread easily in both directions, uniting all of Eurasia into a single disease pool. Eurasians were forced to develop immunities to all these animal-based germs or die. Also, the strong pro-growth traits that result from an agrarian society also spread—that’s the guns and the steel. The upshot of this is that whenever Europeans arrived in North America and Africa, where the spread of agriculture and animal domestication was limited by the available crops and animals and by the North South orientation of the continents (since biomes follow latitudes and not longitudes it’s very difficult for crops and technologies to diffuse) the European landfall hit like a hurricane. There was no reciprocal exchange of germs and technologies because there were simply fewer in North America. I do see this as a weakness of the book. Yes, he presents a compelling argument for why Eurasia is differentiated. Empirically speaking, it is: almost all of the advanced civilizations in the early modern period were Eurasian civilizations, and we’ve marked them out: the societies in northwest Europe, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Chinese Empire. These kinds of civilizations are not really present in the rest of the world. But in terms of differentiating Europe, he basically points to geographical factors like large rivers and high mountains that balkanized Europe, creating many independent populations that are not easily conquered. This leads to that polycentric state system we described earlier, where the presence of many different rulers stops the easy suppression of ideas. He does and he may be right about these things, but it’s definitely a limited way of explaining the massive gulf in incomes between the two poles of Eurasia, particularly because geographical factors are static: Europe didn’t suddenly get many rivers and high mountains and jagged coastlines. Economic status, however, is dynamic. Europe has been variously ahead of and behind other parts of Eurasia. There was no geographical shock that propelled that to happen. It’s incredible. Also, I get the sense that a lot of the people criticizing it—calling it crude geographic determinism—have not actually read the entire book. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of crude. It is the opposite of Eurocentric. For me, its biggest failing is its inability to explain the rise of Europe with regard to other civilizations and the sheer number of factors that it endogenizes, as economists say. Diamond’s assertion would be that every single factor that Mokyr, Jones and Pomeranz discussed is endogenous, caused by continental axis orientations and the location of domesticable crops and animals. The previous factors we discussed would, to Diamond, be proximate causes—whereas the factors which he is emphasizing are ultimate causes, the deep forces that make all the surface-level stuff described by us economic historians happen. I think it’s critical to sometimes step back, as Diamond does, and consider a whole host of different disciplinary approaches to studying this big question. As a historian, it’s easy to get bogged down with minutiae, but that has never been one of Diamond’s flaws. He’s been incredibly influential, at least implicitly, for a lot of the economic history that’s done today."

"He’s an anthropologist writing about economic history in a big picture way. Yes, and he explains the interaction of geography and science with economic development. He starts with what he called the Yali’s question, when a Papua New Guinean man asks him: ‘Why do you have so much stuff to bring to us, and we don’t have the equivalent amount of stuff to bring to you?’ Behind this question lay a bigger one: Why has there been greater economic development in Western Europe than in other parts of the world? Diamond traces his answer over 13,000 years, through the development of agriculture and the particular places that were conducive for the development of crops and domestic animals that became critical to economic development. You also had the crops in Europe that allowed for the development of agriculture. Equally there’s the oddity he describes of the geography of Eurasia running east-west, so you don’t get huge differences in climate which allowed for innovations to be easily transmitted. If you are brought up with the rationalist tradition of standard economics, you just never make the sorts of connections that Diamond makes. It’s about understanding how the disparities of income and wealth which we have today have built up over millennia."

"This is a really useful way of trying to figure out why different humans turned out the way they did, while considering the influences of technology and of the environment. At the beginning of the book, he asked why the Spanish invaded the Inca Empire, rather than the other way round. And most people would have a slightly racist answer to that, even if they don’t dare say so – that it’s something inherent about Europeans that makes them superior. But of course that’s rubbish. It is nothing to do with race. It’s to do with many other factors. Yes, like that Europe has a very wide East-West axis, which goes all the way to China. And we happen to be on the same latitude so there have been all sorts of trade going on for thousands and thousands of years. Things that the Chinese invented, such as gunpowder and the printing press, eventually made their way to Europe. There’s been a lot of cross-fertilisation, whereas in the Americas, which are North-South orientated, there is very little communication between the cultures. So you didn’t get anything like that level of rapidity of development. There were lots of different factors in Diamond’s premise and I think it is a fascinating look at the way humanity works."