Guns, Germs, and Steel Summary - eNotes.com

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel opens with a prologue in which the author presents a question from a New Guinean politician and friend named Yali: why were Europeans able to conquer so many other societies around the world? This question, in the past, has often been answered in terms of genetics, a belief that Diamond sets out to disprove. People are not born superior to another group, Diamond contends. To provide a background for, as well as an argument to support, his own explanation, Diamond then briefly sketches millions of years of human evolution. When Diamond reaches the last 13,000 years, he slows down to focus on specific societies and historical events. In the process, Diamond’s theory becomes apparent. He believes that the success of a society is not based on intelligence and ingenuity but instead on geography, food production, germs and immunity, the domestication of animals, and the discovery and use of steel.

Societies become more stable as they move from hunting and gathering to cultivating crops and raising domestic animals. What then inevitably follows is the development of specialized labor groups as well as the establishment of hierarchies in ruling parties. Populations thrive under these conditions, and in time empires rise. The stability provides farming societies with powerful advantages over nomadic hunter-gatherer groups, which are forced to roam the countryside in search of food. One major advantage of farming societies is that some members are eased from the burden of producing food and are then able to devote their time to making weapons and perfecting the art of using them.

Major portions of the Eurasian area, Diamond points out, had a natural advantage in agriculture because of the presence of plants and animals that were easily domesticated. Not only did this allow food surpluses to develop, but it also enabled crops such as cotton, flax, and hemp to be easily processed into clothing, blankets, nets, and ropes. Animals, besides providing food and labor, also gave Eurasians wool and leather—protection from the cold. Gourds, such as those grown in North America, were used as containers, which made life even easier for farming societies. Horses, which were domesticated in Europe, offered significant advantages in wars. Animals such as camels, llamas, mules, reindeer, and yak pulled wagons and sleds, easing the workload and allowing further exploration.

One of Eurasia’s main advantages in producing stable and profitable societies was its long landmass with an east-to-west axis. Such an axis created an environment in which plants growing in one area in the east were easily adapted in another section in the far west. The east-west axis also allowed the use of similar animals that were easily domesticated. People from different groups in Eurasia were able to exchange ideas, which increased the chances of innovation and thus helped technology advance more rapidly. This was not as true in the Americas, whose land mass extended broadly on a north-south axis. Plants or seeds taken from the more temperate areas would not grow in the tropical zones or the frigid areas, which prevented people in different locales from exchanging ideas, crops, and innovations, thus decreasing their chances for rapid advancement. Other impediments to progress included large bodies of water or land barriers such as mountains and deserts. The slow development of Mexico’s corn crop is one example of decreased adoption rates. The vast desert between present-day Mexico and the United States prevented, or at least vastly slowed down, the knowledge gained by one group of people from being passed on to another.

But among Eurasian societies, information flowed quite freely and relatively quickly. Because communication was widespread through trading, Eurasians hurriedly developed and improved on such innovations as the use of the wheel, metalworking, shipbuilding, and (one of the ultimate advantages) guns. Their populations, food production, and technologies grew at faster and faster rates. This provided them with greater economies, which in turn allowed them to conquer more people in more extended areas of the world.

As a consequence of living in dense populations, trading with other dense populations, and living close to domesticated animals, Eurasians came into contact with stronger germs. At first this might sound like a disadvantage, but as weaker members of early societies succumbed to germs, the people who survived built natural immunities against them and passed the immunities down to their children. This provided later generations of Europeans with an extra advantage, especially when traveling to the Americas and later to the Polynesian islands in the Pacific. The germs were devastating to the Indigenous people of the Americas and Polynesia, many of whom died without the Europeans even lifting a gun.

Diamond closes Guns, Germs, and Steel by briefly examining how his theories explain societal development in five areas of the world: Australia and New Guinea, China, Polynesia, the Americas, and Africa.