Hardcover, 480 pages
English language
Published 1997 by W.W. Norton.
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life even more intriguing and important than accounts of dinosaurs and glaciers.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, paths of development of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the southeastern United States, and other areas gave peoples of those regions a head start. Why wheat and corn, cattle and pigs, and the modern world's other "blockbuster" crops …
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life even more intriguing and important than accounts of dinosaurs and glaciers.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, paths of development of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the southeastern United States, and other areas gave peoples of those regions a head start. Why wheat and corn, cattle and pigs, and the modern world's other "blockbuster" crops and livestock arose in those particular regions and not elsewhere was, until now, but faintly understood.
The localized origins of farming and herding prove to be only part of the explanation for the differing fates of different peoples. The very unequal rates at which food production spread from those initial centers had much to do with other features of climate and geography--such as the differing sizes, locations, and even shapes of the continents. Societies that advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage were more likely to develop writing, technology, government, organized religions-- as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war.
It was those societies, adventuring on sea and land, that expanded to new homelands at the expense of other peoples. The most familiar examples involve the conquest of non-European peoples by Europeans in the last 500 years, beginning with voyages in search of precious metals and spices and often lending to invasion of native lands and decimation of native inhabitants through slaughter and introduced diseases. Similar population replacements, less familiar to American readers, unfolded earlier within Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and other parts of the world.
A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world, and its inequalities, came to be. It is a work rich in dramatic revelations that will fascinate readers even as it challenges conventional wisdom.
I understand the historian perspective on this book is very negative but I thoroughly enjoyed and was convinced by it at the time
If The Dawn of Everything was about humans as a political animal, this book is all about humans as a resourceful species. We all try our hardest, but some of us had better starting conditions than others. This book offers a great way of understanding why history unfolded the way it did.
If The Dawn of Everything was about humans as a political animal, this book is all about humans as a resourceful species. We all try our hardest, but some of us had better starting conditions than others. This book offers a great way of understanding why history unfolded the way it did.
“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?”. Yali's question serves the basis for a worldwide survey of the many factors influencing history and that determined the fates of world's power balance.
Through this amazingly thorough journey throughout history, we learn that most of what happened happened by chance, by subjecting different peoples in different continents to different conditions, conditions which were ultimately responsible for a particular set of peoples having reached the stage of dominating guns, steel and having greater immunity to certain (and very deadly germs).
This is probably one of the best books to make you rethink history under a much more naturalistic perspective, taking the thunder out of those that naively think that the real reasons for the present day status quo lie somewhere on human personality …
“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?”. Yali's question serves the basis for a worldwide survey of the many factors influencing history and that determined the fates of world's power balance.
Through this amazingly thorough journey throughout history, we learn that most of what happened happened by chance, by subjecting different peoples in different continents to different conditions, conditions which were ultimately responsible for a particular set of peoples having reached the stage of dominating guns, steel and having greater immunity to certain (and very deadly germs).
This is probably one of the best books to make you rethink history under a much more naturalistic perspective, taking the thunder out of those that naively think that the real reasons for the present day status quo lie somewhere on human personality or will [to power?].
From geography to weather to food production to plant and animal domestication to greater demography to wider spread of technology and diseases, all that contributing to make some peoples more apt to conquer others, resulting in the human world we witness today.
If you really want to know how we got from point A (being hunter-gatherers) to point B (present day world structure), this is one of the best books that will present an easy to follow, sufficiently rich in examples, and concise enough to save you from being overburdened with information (for any conversation trying to tie up all of human history necessarily covers too many topics, peoples and their histories, and thus covering too much raw information, which can be way too difficult to absorb and digest). If, by chance, you happen to be one of those who vow for the supremacy of any particular group of people, you probably should avoid this volume — for claiming superiority when you happen to be at the end of a long string of random events does not make you particularly special. In any case, whatever your starting position, you will be much more illuminated on world's history by the time you end up reading this book.
