Guns Germs and Steel

Summary

Guns Germs and Steel tries to answer a single question: why did Europe come ahead technologically compared to the other continents and go on to dominate and exploit them? There were civilizations in other places long before, why didn't they go on to invent the scientific process much sooner and then proceed to colonialize everywhere? Why is wealth in the world so unfairly distributed? Why did some civilizations develop advanced technology, large populations, and centralized governments, while others remained small with simpler technology?

The main idea and answer to this question that Jared Diamond comes up with is that there are main geographical differences in the landscape that foster or inhibit trade and therefore knowledge exchange between different civilizations that are spread apart far and wide. Basically, a continent that mainly stretches out from East to West is better than a continent that stretches from North to South. The reason is that climate changes more drastically along the North South Axis, making it harder to import crops and livestock from different places. Eurasia has the biggest advantage here, with lots of room for trading all sorts of things. And interestingly enough, most of the livestock we keep today, pigs, cows, chickens, and many of the staple plants that are used to feed the world, are originally from somewhere in Eurasia.

Using the same livestock and plants has another main advantage: it makes you want to trade with your neighbours because they are growing the same stuff as you and therefore need similar resources and can make use of similar tools. In a way, this use of the same crops and livestock trickles down into sharing knowledge about how to make best use of it. This combines to produce more technological output overall, because new knowledge can be incorporated, improved and built upon faster and the cycle of improvement continued. Which in turn, leads to a bigger surplus, which leads to the possibility of creating bigger governmental structures and nation-states that can fund and organize conquest.

The title Guns, Germs, and Steel alludes to the fact that technological, biological, and military factors enabled European societies to dominate much of the world, particularly through the colonization of the Americas and other regions. Especially Germs played a big role, especially, when Europeans first arrived in America and brought with them all sorts of nasty diseases that wiped out large chunks of the indigenous population.

Diamond emphasizes that the uneven development of human societies is largely due to environmental factors, rather than inherent differences in intelligence or culture, providing a powerful argument against racism and Eurocentrism. With different geography history could have easily gone another way. Guns Germs and Steel is very similar to other books that try to explain human societies from a bird eye view, like Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari or Stephen Pinkers The Better Angels of Our Nature