BookMarks #63: Guns, Germs, and Steel

Title: Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years

Author: Jared Diamond 

Genre: Anthropology, History, Geography

Published: 1997

Setting: Entire human history across the world

Summary

Guns, Germs, and Steel attempts to understand how the human society across the world, reached into its current form and how different regions developed differently leading to the dominance of Eurasian societies.

BookMarks

“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own” This was the question asked by a New Guinean politician Yali to the author Jared Diamond. Cargo here being a generic term for all technology & goods brought by the western civilization. Through this book, Diamond tries to answer this question.

The book attempts to trace the evolution of the modern human societies in different parts of the world and the factors which influenced their growth. As per Diamond, humans started as hunter-gatherers, then moved on to building agriculture based societies. Stable food production led to increased population and development of a bureaucratic societal structure. More people had more ideas and more innovations leading to technological advancements. Technology diffused and spread from one society to its neighbours. However, the rate of such advancement was different in various regions. Diamond attributes this to geography, climate factors, availability of suitable crops as well as potential large animals which could be domesticated. Geographical barriers play a major role in preventing/aiding the diffusion. 

Exposure to different animals lead to animal borne diseases being spread into human society. The exposed societies later developed immunity to these. Advanced military technology as well as new germs helped decide which group won the battle of that region. And how one group was able to displace the other.

The book is an interesting exercise in attempting to summarize more than 10,000 years of human history. The readers may or may not agree to Diamond’s interpretation. And there are enough evidences being unearthed regularly which present new facts to the contrary. However, the book certainly makes you think about human evolution. Is it only geography or climate which is the contributing factor or are there other factors at play too. And how does it impact the modern society which is getting increasingly inter-connected and even a bit more homogeneous. With changing climate across the globe (another hotly debated subject) how does it impact the future development. As we have seen, different regions have been the leaders in technology at various points in time. How does this equation change in the future? With increased digitization, who becomes the new leader? That’s an interesting point to ponder upon.

Previously on BookMarks: Anne Frank’s Diary