Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond, an American biologist and geographer, sets out to answer a question that a New Guinean politician named Yali put to him in 1972: why had white people developed so much "cargo", the goods they brought to New Guinea, while New Guineans had so little of their own? Published in 1997, Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1998 and became one of the best-known books on world history.

Diamond's argument is that history unfolded differently on different continents because their environments differed, not their peoples. Guns, germs and steel, the immediate tools of European conquest, rested on deeper causes: an early start in farming, thanks to the wild plants and animals a region happened to have; continents whose shape helped or hindered the spread of crops and ideas; and the dense, settled societies that farming made possible, with their epidemic diseases, writing, technology and governments. He rejects racial explanations of these differences as both offensive and wrong.

The book has four parts. Part One (chapters 1 to 3) runs from human origins to the Spanish capture of the Inca emperor at Cajamarca in 1532. Part Two (chapters 4 to 10) explains the rise and spread of food production. Part Three (chapters 11 to 14) traces how food production led to germs, writing, technology and government. Part Four (chapters 15 to 19) applies the argument to Australia and New Guinea, China, the Pacific islands, the Americas and Africa, and an epilogue sums up the answer and asks why Europe, not China, took the lead within Eurasia.

Notes: this summary follows the original 1997 text; later editions add an afterword written in 2003 and a chapter on the origins of the Japanese. Figures and estimates are reported as Diamond gives them; some, such as the size of the population of the Americas before 1492, are still debated. The conquests, massacres and epidemics in the book are retold briefly, as part of Diamond's argument. Critics, among them the geographer J. M. Blaut, have said that the book revives environmental determinism and gives too little weight to culture and human choices, and the economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that political institutions matter more than geography in why nations are rich or poor. In the book's epilogue, written before these critiques, Diamond rejects the label "geographic determinism": inventive people exist in every society, he writes, but environments differ in what they give them to work with. The Dari quotes are our own translation of Diamond's English.