Book Review

Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New
York, U.S.A.: W. W. Norton & Company. 1997. 496 Pages. USD 18.95.
Guns, Germs and Steel begins with a basic yet unsettling inquiry, Why did wealth
and influence get to be circulated as they now seem to be, as opposed to in some other
way? Put in more pointed terms, how is it that people of Eurasian descentwhite
people from eastern Asia, Europe, and North Americacame to conquer, colonise, and
control indigenous peoples in the past and still exert enormous economic and political
influence today? The question is straightforward yet unsettling. It is straightforward
because it appeals to obvious imbalances in the modern world. And it is unsettling
because it might invite answers based on claims of national, cultural, or racial superiority.
But Diamond's target is to counter such claims by taking the reader on a broad, edifying
and, very nearly debilitating, trip through time and space, covering practically each part
of the world in the past 13,000 years. The outcome is arrival to the present with a vastly
improved comprehension of how individuals have collaborated with one another, as well
as with a mind-boggling mix of creatures, plants, and organisms, and how social relations
rely upon on-the-spot decisions as much as they rely on planning. The excursion is surely
well worth taking.
The strength of Guns, Germs and Steel lies in the details it presents. Jared
Diamond starts with a proposition every reader would wish to believe that all humans
are born with much the same abilitiesand then proceeds to argue, through meticulous
and logical steps, that the playing field throughout history was anything but level. This
book, even after almost 19 years of its publication, is still relevant and deserves to be
reviewed because it offers an alternative view of how the developed world came to be
developed. The view presented by Diamond is in contrast to the popular view that relates
institutions to development. It would probably make more sense to juxtapose the
hypothesis forwarded in this book with the institutional hypothesis to enrich our
understanding of the evolution of development.
This book is divided into four parts. Part 1 takes the readers to a quick trip
through human development and history, starting from apes around 7 million years back,
until the end of the last Ice Age, around 13,000 years prior. Part 2 is probably the most
important part of the book. This part explores the numerous factors driving the shift from
the hunter-gatherer lifestyle toward food production in some areas but not in others. It
also clarifies contrasts in the geographic conditions that explain why just few areas
became independent centres of food production, and why it happened earlier in some of
those areas than in others. Part 3 explores the connections from ultimate to proximate
causes, beginning with the evolution of germs that killed dense human populations. Far
more Native Americans and other non-Eurasian peoples were killed by Eurasian germs
than by Eurasian guns or steel weapons. This part also deals with the crucial

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Book Review

question of whether technological innovation is actually dependent on rare inventorgeniuses, and on many idiosyncratic cultural factors, so as to defy an understanding of
world patterns. Part 4 applies the lessons of Parts 2 and 3 to each of the continents and
some important islands. It shows that the history of Sub-Saharan Africa offers striking
similarities, as well as contrasts, to the New World history. The same factors that formed
Europeans' encounters with Africans shaped their experiences with Native Americans as
well.
Jared Diamond, who is also the author of The Third Chimpanzee, in addition
to being a professor of physiology at the Institute of Medicine, University of California at
Los Angeles, ought to be commended only to ask this unique question. Maybe it had
never been explored before on the grounds that the answer was thought to be self-evident:
the Europeans triumphed on the grounds that they were innovatively and politically better
than the indigenous populaces, they colonised. Left unexamined, this supposition has
prompted the conviction, unknowingly held, that European administration had something
to do with the Europeans inherent superiority. We might no more discuss ''the white
man's burden'' or announce our ''manifest fate,'' however books are still written and sold
(The Bell Curve is a particularly insidious example) that try to strengthen the thought
that Europeans got where they are today simply because they deserved to be.
The main theme of Guns, Germs and Steel is that the course of history has been
distinctive for diverse populaces not because of any difference among people, but rather
as a result of contrast in their physical surroundings. Advancement through natural
selection is the driving force, at least at the start of the story, some 13,000 years back.
The author's contention, based on evolutionary biology, incorporates disciplines as
differing as geology, plant hereditary qualities, and the study of disease transmission. In
short, Diamond presents an exhaustive account of agriculture production, social classes,
unified governments, organised fighting, and market economies.
According to the book, the atmosphere of the Mediterranean (cool, wet winters
and hot, dry summers) chose for certain wild grasses (einkorn and emmer wheat) that put
away quite a bit of their vitality in large seeds. These grasses turned into the premise for
the starting of the Neolithic transformation somewhere in the range of ten centuries prior
in eastern Turkey. People found inexhaustible sustenance in these seeds, as did other
animals, the grazing herbivores like stallions, steers, and sheep, which then turned into
the establishment for a livestock food system. Mediterranean sustenance framework, in
light of wheat, hamburger, and olive oil, managed extensive and creative realms. The
closeness of people and creatures brought individuals into closer contact with the
creatures' microscopic companion and consequently empowered Eurasians to advance
guards against maladies obscure to different peoples of the world. These advantages in
climate, mobility, and food energy paid off in advantages in technology (guns and steel)
and the institutions they made possible, including writing, commerce, statecraft, warfare,
and so forth.
Diamonds treatment of the meeting between the Spanish adventurer Francisco
Pizarro and the Inca ruler, Atahualpa, demonstrates his worldview at work. In November
1532, Pizarro and his power of 168 warriors entered Peru and encountered there
Atahualpa, the outright leader of the biggest and most propelled state in the Western Half
of the globe. The small Spanish power was dwarfed by about 500 to 1 by Atahualpa's

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Book Review

armed force, which had, as of late, won a war with other indigenous individuals. Pizarro
was in new landscape, cut off from fortifications, and uninformed of the nearby tenants.
Notwithstanding these obviously difficult hindrances, Pizarro still figured out how to
catch Atahualpa in a matter of hours, hold him for payment for 8 months, and execute
him in spite of the instalment of payment. Why, inquires Diamond, did history work out
this way? According to him, the answers can be found in the complex of animals, plants,
sustenance supply, malady, transport development, weapons, and political, religious, and
money related foundations that reinforced each one of these things.
To elucidate the chain of reasons, the author invokes the concept of ultimate
and proximate levels of explanation, used in evolutionary biology. Thus, the proximate
reason behind why Europeans and Asians conquered the world lies in superior
technology in the form of boats, weapons, steel swords, and superior political
organisation, at times helped by epidemic disease. A definitive reason is that technology
started earlier and continued in mainland Eurasia due to Eurasia's legacy of domesticable
plants and creatures. By difference, Australia was ruined and different landmasses were
just tolerably endowed, thus their relative backwardness. Along these lines, the value of
Guns, Germs, and Steel is clear in Diamond's record of the beginning of the centralised
states. Such an approach can be found to be very enlightening, mainly on the grounds that
it reveals how the natural world (in this case, the biosphere) places limits on the range of
choices one confronts. In the case that his answers are not the last word, they, in any
event, indicate the way toward a palatable comprehension of human history. The book
helps us to understand that historical studies of human societies can be pursued
scientifically and proves to be very valuable to our society today, by teaching us what
shaped the modern world, and what might shape our future.
Sabah Mushtaq

Quaid-i-Azam University,
Islamabad.
REFERENCE
Herrnstein, Richard J. and Charles Murray (1994) The Bell Curve. New York: Free
Press.