Guns Germs and Steel : Review

The theory proposed by Prof Jared Diamond of UCLA about the nature of inequalities in the modern world is a refreshingly new attempt at understanding the global power distribution as exsiting today. His work has already been quite popular leading to a best seller of the same name, a National Geographic feature story and another new book on the decline of the civilisations recently being published.

Being a scientist by training his rational approach to understand a problem raised by a native during an ornithology expedition in Papua New Guinea 30 years ago has taken him on a socio-historical journey dating thousands of years back when human like mammals were first creating settled communities. His effort throughout the book Guns Germs and Steel (GGS) is to find a reason to the way human society has evolved since those early days 30,000 years back. According to Prof Diamond the cradle of human civilisation is the so called fertile crescent in the Middle East around present day Israel and Syria which was green and rich with food during the retreat of the last ice age. From there on he proposes that human civilisation spread along areas of similar latitude to Asia and Europe. The fact that greater Eurasia has the biggest continental land mass and a geographical spread along the east-west meant that the new settlers had a huge land mass to inhabit featuring the same climactic and vegetation as their original homeland. This is unlike the Americas or Africa with a dominant north-south spread which meant that migration was often accompanied by highly varying climate and vegetation which required the population to reinvent their farming and herding all the time leading to more time investment in those activities precluding civilisation building.

Further he asserts that the majority of the farm animals domesticated (Cows, Sheep, Goats, Pigs, Horses etc ) are native to the fertile crescent as are the major cereal crops like wheat and barley. These situational advantages meant that the residents of that area harnessed animal power and quickly built agrarian societies based on efficient farming leading more man power to be available for development of other crafts like metal forming etc. This was unlike the case in America or Africa where societies continued primarily to depend on manual labour and small scale farming not freeing up resources for other activities leading to a technology gap.

His third point is regarding the evolution of the germs in human society. The close contact with farm animals in societies of Europe meant that they were ravaged by germs which transmuted into affecting humans from animals like small pox, plague, tuberculosis. These ravaged populations forcing a natural selection process which weeded out the weak and ensured some resistance to such disease was developed. Societies unexposed to such germs were wiped out when they came in contact with European people due to lack of natural resistance leading to their decline.

All the above postulated theories make for a cogent analysis and rationalisation of the historical events but inherent within them are flaws which are bound to be present in any simplistic theory trying to explain thousands of years of choices across the globe that human beings have made which has led to the current world order. Though Prof Diamond is careful in steering away from attributing any racial superiority to the Europeans; the effort to explain Euro-American dominance betrays a tacit acknowledgement of the superiority of the European model, though based on geographic and climactic advantage than any racial one. Geographic determinism is fine, but the underlying assumption in the analysis is that the current world order has reached a final stage of evolution, which is far from the case. Already there are signs that the European model of dominance may be under threat due to host or reasons like demography, shrinking power sources etc. The very advantage of high altitude temperate climate could turn on its head if the next dominant power source would be solar based giving the tropics the geographic advantage they seemed to have missed. The current European world order has been valid probably for last 400-500 years of human history before which the Chinese, Indian, Central Asian as well as the American civilisations of Incas and Aztecs were much more advanced than the contemporary Europeans. So to assume that the current world order is going to continue and that due to emergence of some other factors the current dominance of the European model won't be lost is difficult to assume.

Further the generalisations of the whole world society based on the New Guniea's backwardness or the conquest of the Incas by handful of conquistadors is fraught with dangers of oversimplification. It neglects the historical political and cultural factors in totality. Lets not forget that it was the dominance of the Arab power and their control of Constantinople, the gateway to Asia through land, which forced the Europeans to discover the sea route to India. That was the motivation behind the great sea expeditions across Atlantic which led to the discovery of the new world and eventual colonisation of the Americas as well as Asia. It was the need to secure trade routes which spawned much of the innovation leading to maritime dominance of England, Portugal and Spain. Had the Arabs allowed transit through Constantinople much of the European colonialism and rise would probably not have happened and the current world order could have looked very very different. Another fact that the authors seems to neglect is that the inferiority of metal working skills and horsemanship in traditional cavalry warfare, that forced the Europeans to innovate and use gun powders and develop the modern guns which eventually displaced horse ridden cavalry as the chief war machine. Clearly the Incas secured behind the heights of Andes and without any strong adversarial civilisation to wage wars with were not martially advanced as the Spanish conquistadors. Again it is the age old dictum of Sun Tzu to dictate and fight a battle on one's own terms that the Europeans used to hilt to decimate the Incas and Mayas. To judge advancement of civilisations solely on the ability to wage wars neglecting other cultural and scientific advancements is a narrow way of defining modernity and progress. The huge cities that the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans built overcoming inhospitable environs on the Andes while Europe was still roiling in medieval feudal village economy cannot be dismissed as signs of backwardness. The current poverty of South America after wholesale adoption of European methods of farming and city building probably shows the superiority of Incas in evolving a prosperous and sustaining society in the environs of Andes.

The superiority of the crop argument again looks hollow if we observe that important crops like potato, tomato, corn and maize were imported from the Americas as much as wheat and barley was exported there from Europe. Why is it that the role of wheat is so important compared to corn or even rice which seems to be the most dominant cereal even today is not straightforward to understand. Similarly the fact that potato, a south American import is probably the most important and popular source of calories worldwide today shows that the importance assigned in the book to wheat as a superior and more efficient food source is probably logically flawed.

The importance given to the 'Fertile Crescent' i.e. Middle East and Mediterranean region in the overall scheme of evolution of human civilisation also betrays the Judeo-Christian bias of the modern western thinking of some mythical garden of Eden which got bespoiled by human plunder. Though the area deemed fertile crescent may have been a transit for early man between Africa and Southern Europe to west and Persia, Caspian Sea, Mesopotamia, Indus - Gangetic valley and China in the East, to suggest that this region played a central role in development of human history is not backed by any settlement of the order or complexity comparable to the ones mentioned above. Again the probablity of environmental degradation caused by nomadic tribes of few thousands of people to render with primitive stone age tools sounds far fatched though appealing in the modern environmentally sensitive world. Would it not be more possible that the area mentioned lacking any major river systems was simply not suitable for sustaining any meaningful agriculture to support villages. Historically nomadic tribes moved out of Africa and typically settled along massive river systems which afforded good games and fertile land for cultivation. The lack of any major river system in the middle east denies the very precursor for long existence of tribes to adapt and build an agrarian society of any large scale such that their way of agriculture would dominate the whole of Eurasia.

The biggest shortcoming of GGS lies in the complete neglect of all the events in South and East Asia which has always housed upto 40% of world population.The fact that these areas are currently home to most of the world's poor despite housing some of the earliest and most advanced city states and being blessed with all the advantages associated with Guns Germs and Steel shows that there is much more to evolution of human society than just geography and climate. In fact as late as 1500 AD this region accounted for as much as 75% of world GDP which in a matter of 2 centuries has been reduced to a minor player in the global sweepstakes. Despite all the ancient innovations in maths(invention of zero, algebra), astronomy (evidence of solar systems being accepted in 500-600 AD in India much before Copernicus and Galileo in 1500-1600 AD), military strategy (Sun Tzu), medicine (evidence of advanced surgery as early as 100-200 AD), paper, gun powder, compass, rockets, sericulture, cotton, maritime power (Ming dynasty in 1500 AD possessing the most powerful navy) these regions failed to prosper anywhere close to the Europeans in the latter part of the era from 1600-2000 AD. In terms of germs this region is unrivalled next to probably equatorial Africa. In fact south eastern Asia is postulated as the germ factory of the world due to the range of poultry and animals being harvested for culinary purpose and evidenced with all the new dreaded viruses SARS, Avian flu registering their first human victims there. So despite being home to the most fertile regions of the world and massively populated societies dating back to 4000 BC why is it that these regions closely rival sub-saharan Africa in poverty?

The key which would make Prof Diamond's work more complete is the inclusion of cultural and political aspects to his geographical theory. A vast centrally administered state like the Ming dynasty, Mayas, Incas, or even the Mughals are prone to made policy decisions which limited and shackled development making societies vulnerable to attack by more versatile and mercenary Europeans of 15-16th century. The fragmented European society wasn't prone to massive blunders like the decision of the Mings to dismantle their navy at the height of its imperial power. Fragmented Europe as a whole saw continuous rise though within it the early imperialists like Portugals, Dutch and Spaniards gave way to the French , Germans and the British followed eventually by modern day USA. Being on continuous interactions with Arabs was of tremendous advantage in helping them aggressively adopt new technologies and further enhance them. This openness to adopt new ideas be out of willingness or compulsion was missing in the Chinese and Indian civilisations which increasingly became inward looking leading to their eventual demise. That said the recent events show ample evidence of reversal of old traditions as Asian nations are aggressively adopting the modern techniques from the west leading to rapid economic growth while the Arabs being increasingly inward looking are seemingly failing to latch on to a rapid progress curve.