Guns, Germs, and Steel
by Jared Diamond
Summary
On a beach in New Guinea in 1972, a local politician named Yali asked Diamond a question that took him twenty five years to answer: why did white people bring so much cargo, and New Guineans so little of their own? The book is the answer, and its force is that it takes the question seriously while demolishing the racist answers history had usually supplied.
Diamond's argument runs on geography rather than genes. The peoples of Eurasia inherited the planet's luckiest real estate: the largest suite of domesticable grasses, wheat and barley waiting in the Fertile Crescent, and thirteen of the world's fourteen large domesticable animals, against the Americas' one. Farming came earliest and easiest there, and Eurasia's east west axis let crops, herds, tools and writing travel along constant latitudes, while the Americas and Africa, stacked north to south, broke every diffusion against climate. Dense, settled, animal keeping societies then bred the killers of the title: epidemic diseases from the herds, to which Eurasians paid in centuries of dead and acquired immunity, and which then did the actual conquering of the Americas, killing an estimated ninety five percent before the battles; the guns and steel arrived to finish what smallpox began.
The synthesis sweeps from plant genetics to the fall of the Inca, written with the confidence of a man answering for a whole species.
Around four hundred and eighty pages.
Best for readers who want the biggest question in history answered without recourse to race, and the most argued about synthesis of its generation.
Historical Context & Significance
Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Science Book Prize in 1998, the same season it took the Pulitzer for general nonfiction, making Jared Diamond the prize's first double winner after The Third Chimpanzee in 1992. It became one of the bestselling serious books of its era, a National Geographic documentary in 2005, and a place on syllabuses in history, geography and biology at once.
The criticism has been as durable as the sales. Historians and anthropologists charged it with environmental determinism, with flattening human agency and institutions into geography, and with a frame that explains conquest so thoroughly it can read as excusing it; Diamond's defenders answer that the alternative on offer had been racial pseudo explanation, and the argument became a fixture of methods seminars.
Either way the book set the terms: every big history since, admiring or hostile, positions itself against this one, and Yali's question entered the language.