"; if(is_file("header.php")) include "header.php"; else include "../header.php"; ?>

Challenging but fascinating Jared Diamond has given an impressive account of why complex civilizations and technology emerged on the Eurasian continent rather than other locations. Noting that many earlier writers have suggested an innate superiority of the population, he argues persuasively that it was in fact an accident of geography. In essence, as Diamond shows with solid evidence, the earliest civilizations in the Fertile Crescent area (roughly Iraq and parts of Syria) enjoyed unique advantages due to a large number of easily domesticable plants and animals. Domestication of plants and animals spread out from Iraq to other areas both East and West, giving Eurasia a jump start in technology. Technology, population growth, and urbanization interacted and reinforced each other to produce the combination of guns, germs, and steel that ultimately resulted, about 9,000 years later, in Europeans conquering the rest of the world. Along the way, he offers provocative answers to questions such as why European diseases devastated the native populations of the Americas, Polynesia, and Australia, but no diseases from those regions did real damage to European settlers. I should also note what this book is not, since negative reviewers here and elsewhere seem not to understand it. First, it isn't an explanation of why specifically Western European countries rose to global dominance. This topic is discussed only for a few pages, and only in the epilogue. And even then, the discussion is entirely a contrast of Western Europe vs China. Other outcomes that were at least hypothetically possible, such as global empires arising from India, Japan, or Korea, aren't even discussed, nor is the question of why England thrived for centuries as an imperial power while Spain, with wealthier conquests, rapidly became a hollow shell that merely looked like a powerful empire on the map. It also isn't an argument that geography is destiny and culture is meaningless. Consider this passage from page 252: "Traditional New Guinea has conservative societies that resist new ways, living side by side with innovative societies that selectively adopt new ways. The result, with the arrival of Western technology, is that the most entreprenuerial societies are now exploiting Western technology to overwhelm their conservative neighbors.... The Chimbu tribe proved especially aggressive in adopting Western technology. When Chimbus saw white settlers planting coffee, they began growing coffee themselves as a cash crop.... In contrast, the Daribi, a neighboring highland people with whom I worked for eight years, are especially conservative and uninterested in new technology. When the first helicopter landed in the Daribi area, they just looked at it and went back to what they had been doing; the Chimbus would have been bargaining to charter it. As a result, Chimbus are now moving into the Daribi area, taking it over for plantations, and reducing the Daribi to working for them." The above passage illustrates a point with an example from New Guinea. Diamond has lived for many years in New Guinea, performing research largely into bird populations, and has a clear fascination with the place. He starts the book with a question asked by a native New Guinean and a dedication to numerous Guinean friends; he returns there for discussion or examples in almost every chapter. Generally history on this global scale is written from a heavily Eurocentric or perhaps American perspective; Diamond's unique 'New Guineacentric' perspective adds to the appeal of the book. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is skillfully written. Certainly it isn't light reading, but it is hard to imagine how a study covering such a broad subject matter, and analyzing in comparable depth, could have been more readable. I strongly recommend this book.