Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared Diamond on the Axis of History

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Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared Diamond on the Axis of History

The motivating question

When the last Ice Age thawed some twelve thousand years ago, humans from every continent emerged from their long winter as wandering hunter-gatherers. But their worldlines diverged from one another over the next few millennia. While some societies in Australia and North America kept to their hunter-gatherer lifestyles, others in Eurasia and South America advanced in technology and transitioned towards complex states. A key question naturally arises: what factors account for the differences that unfurled during this long-arm of history?

People are quick to point, for instance, to invention, warfare, capitalism, medicine, leadership, and other proximate causes. Few will doubt the role of these elements, of course. But one might want to peer further back to understand the preconditions that allowed these factors to flourish in the first place. One such man is the American historian and geographer Jared Diamond—who published his painstaking book, Guns, Germs and Steel, to address this very herculean question. In his view, “history followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments”.

Farming power

If we go back some fifty thousand years ago, humans were already adept at making tools and trinkets for all sorts of activities. But the divergence that concerns us truly began when some of our ancestors learned to farm while others did not. Agriculture in turn went on to determine many things for humanity.

For one, more foodstuffs meant more people, and more people meant more foodstuffs, and also more fighters. This positive feedback loop is what Diamond refers to as an autocatalytic process. There was no turning back once agriculture was underway. By virtue of size, many agricultural societies gained an economic and military edge over their smaller hunter-gatherer neighbors. 

With food surpluses, larger populations, and sedentary living, new opportunities for production, organization, and specialization emerged. Agricultural societies could feed non-food-producers like kings, bureaucrats, priests, soldiers, artisans, builders, merchants and scribes. And the tandem of mass religions, centralized administrations, and trained armies allowed early chiefdoms and protostates to concentrate power and resources at unprecedented scales; and to pursue more ambitious projects like the building of city-wide irrigation systems and long-distance trade routes. 

Indeed, the prevailing but haphazard trend for humans over the last thirteen thousand years has been the transition from smaller, simpler bands and tribes, to larger, more complex chiefdoms and states. Where earlier social units were more reciprocal, kinship-based, and self-sufficient, modern forms of organization grew more centralized, hierarchical, transactional, integrated, and territorial. All of this is an exploding by-product of our population growth that followed the agricultural revolution. 

Runaway technologies

Of course, the development and diffusion of technology is important. And it is closely related to the rise and spread of food production as well. Diamond notes, for instance, that writing arose independently in the regions where agriculture first emerged. This includes Mesopotamia some five thousand years ago, Mesoamerica some three thousand years ago, and possibly in Egypt and China as well—presumably to support their burgeoning bureaucracies and administrations, and because they had the necessary surpluses to feed their scribes. Writing then began to spread from these regions to others via trade, conquest and religion.

Interestingly, many societies that underwent a delayed transition towards food production, such as the thirteenth century Inca Empire, were also the ones that went without writing, Diamond notes. Hunter-gatherer societies, likewise, never invented or adopted the practice themselves since they lacked the need, time and scale for it. 

By contrast, writing introduced great boons to the empires that adopted them well. It opened the door to accounting, propaganda, mapmaking, scientific enquiry, and other bedrocks of economic, political, military, and technological advance.

More broadly, the transition to agriculture unlocked another runaway process in technology. After all, more people implies more inventors and competitors, all else being equal. And more innovation in turn begets more innovation as society explores the adjacent possible. A large population then, one with writing and established networks, makes its diffusion all the more likely.

While differences in the level and rate of change of technology were initially imperceptible, the results can be pronounced when the process has several thousands of years to run the course. Here, Diamond is contrasting the Old World with the New during Europe’s Age of Discovery in the early sixteenth century. As he writes, “the rise of technology became exaggerated because technology catalyzes itself.”

Disease and miasma

That is not all, however. Intense food production introduced another unintended consequence by way of infectious diseases. Smallpox, influenza, malaria, measles, tuberculosis, and the likes, Diamond reminds, all evolved from animal-borne diseases. “They have been decisive shapers of history.” Research estimates, for instance, that the Black Death killed at least 25 million Europeans during 1347 and 1352 AD, or around forty percent of their population at the time.

Such “crowd diseases”, however, could not have arisen in hunter-gatherer bands and tribes. No, they required populations of greater size and density, like the cities and empires that rose with the boons of agriculture. These societies in turn were the first, Diamond notes, to experience the devastations of diseases that spread like wildfire. But their denizens also became the first to acquire a resistance against them.

So when the colonialists arrived on the coastlines of Australia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands, they unwittingly carried with them a myriad of biological weapons that the natives did not have an immunity for. For instance, when the Spanish sieged Tenochtitlán in the fourteenth century, “the resulting epidemics”, as Diamond writes, “[killed] nearly half of the Aztecs, including Emperor Cuitláhuac.” And by the early 1600s, Mexico’s population had fallen from around 20 million to around 1.6 million people.

Haves and have-nots

In Diamond’s view, “the result was a long series of collisions between the haves and have-nots of history.” You see, only a few regions in the world were able to make their transition to food production independently. In other words, only a few places in history got to have a head start on the autocatalytic treadmill. Others had to wait for first contact to discover and adopt these innovations for themselves.

Eurasia, for instance, took an early lead when farming began in the Fertile Crescent some twelve thousand years ago—making way for writing, science, empires, and everything else in due course. Elsewhere, in regions like Australia and the Argentine pampas, agriculture did not emerge until the outlanders arrived. But they arrived not only with crops and subdued animals, but with foreign guns, germs, and steel.

But why did agriculture arise in some places and not others? We should realize first that most wild plants are poor candidates for food production. Few plants are easy to grow, yield, and store in the quantities and cycles we require for large human populations. And this was before the arrival of modern fertilizers, irrigation systems, and other innovations. Can you imagine a diet consisting of your favorite cacti or gum trees? Even to this day, humans have domesticated only a few hundred wild plants out of the two to three-hundred thousand species available to us. And only a few of them account for the vast majority of global crop production.

Moreover, all founder crops—emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch, and flax—were cultivated first in the Fertile Crescent. This was due in part to having a mediterranean climate conducive to producing big-seeded annuals. And of these founder crops, only flax and barley could be found naturally beyond the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia (Asia Minor), Diamond notes.

Big mammals

The story is similarly true of the animals. Very few had suitable diets, growth rates, dispositions and social structures for domestication. Just imagine starting a farm with a handful of bears, gazelles, zebras, gorillas, and hippopotami. Indeed, of the world’s hundred-and-fifty or so big terrestrial herbivorous mammals, only fourteen, Diamond notes, made the cut for domestication. 

What’s more, their availability was greatly skewed. While wild goats, sheep, pigs, and cows were found in the Fertile Crescent and were swiftly domesticated, none of them roamed the harsh lands of North America, Australia or sub-Saharan Africa. Similarly, Mesoamerica only had access to turkeys and dogs, while South America to llamas and alpacas.

Within a few thousand years, many early societies in the Fertile Crescent, Diamond notes, made an almost complete transition from hunting and gathering to food production. Agriculture began radiating with contact, trade, and conquest. While certain domesticates were sometimes rejected for cultural or religious reasons, many others were adopted when the opportunity arose. Here, Diamond is pointing, for instance, to the adoption of European horses by Native Americans, and the farming of Eurasian cows and sheeps in West Africa.

Obviously, such differences in initial conditions and endowments have important consequences for early productivity in many domains. They range initially from nutrition and warm clothing and later to transportation and warfare. And so it is vital to understand the manner in which food production and technology spread before premodern times.

The axis of history

Diamond argues in particular that the axial orientation of our continents can account for much of this. Let us note, for starters, that Eurasia rests on an east-west axis while the orientation of the Americas, and Africa to a lesser extent, is north-south. This difference is noteworthy, for regions on an east-west axis tend to share, amongst other things, similar habitats, seasons, and diseases. As Diamond explains, “most Fertile Crescent crops grow well in France and Japan but poorly at the equator… Eurasia’s east-west axis allowed Fertile Crescent crops to quickly launch agriculture over the band of temperate latitudes from Ireland to the Indus Valley.”

By as early as the first millennium, Roman emperors were already indulging themselves in foods like cucumber, chicken, peach, and apricot—all of which were originally sourced from regions like China and India. Diffusion, however, was not so easy elsewhere. Many founder crops, for instance, as Diamond notes, while quick to reach Egypt, struggled to cross the north-south axis and the tropics that laid in between Ethiopia and South Africa. Similarly, many domesticates did not travel from Mesoamerica to South America and vice versa. He notes, for example, that while domesticated potatoes, llamas and guinea pigs of the South American Andes would have grown well in the cool highlands of Mexico, they could not cross the hot lowlands that spanned in between.

Pre-modern technologies, likewise, were also more likely to diffuse along these lines, albeit indirectly, as they followed the trade routes that were most populated with exchange and interaction. As Diamond writes, “the invention of the wheel in or near Southwest Asia [around 3,000 BC] spread rapidly west and east across much of Eurasia within a few centuries, whereas the wheels invented independently in prehistoric Mexico never spread south to the Andes.”

Ceaseless tension

Together, the differences in environmental endowments and orientation cast an invisible bias on food production and technology development. But as you know, all of this is a crude explanation for intercontinental differences, and an even cruder unpacking of Diamond’s thesis. As the geographer himself notes, food production and large populations alone will not guarantee the rise of large, complex, literate and innovative states. But  one might expect a sort of evolutionary principle to select haphazardly for societies that learn to cooperate, innovate, and build-up more effectively and sustainably than the rest.

One issue, however, pertains to the ceaseless tensions that arise with scaling. Inside every large society or organization are self-interested individuals and groups who vye for power, authority, and monopoly. So the viability and stability of any empire depends on its institutional ability to maintain accountability, resolve conflicts, and uphold the rule of law in the interests of its populace. This is easier said than done, of course. Even to this day, humanity has not yet found a way to rid itself completely of despotic, hereditary rule. 

Differences in starting conditions, likewise, struggle to explain  intra-continental developments. This includes the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the many dynasties of Ancient China; and the comparative development of modern states that are no longer bound by their borders, farmland, or natural resources. Today, almost all of us are a part of an integrated global economy. Even our farmers are not self-sufficient. Here, we have to turn to other books on development, like Daren Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail, Francis Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay, and Hernando De Soto’s The Mystery of Capital.

The human puzzle

We also cannot ignore the idiosyncrasies of history. As Diamond notes, “a minor cultural feature may arise for trivial, temporary local reasons, become fixed, and then predispose a society toward [other] cultural choices.” An extreme example perhaps is the Ottoman Empire’s fateful decision to ban mass printing in Arabic characters for nearly three centuries while the printing press spread quickly across Europe, fearing the effects that unrestrained writing might have on their religious legitimacy. 

Similarly, from Mohammed and Jesus Christ, to Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler, to Adam Smith and Karl Marx, some individuals will go on to have a tremendous influence on the shaping of history. One wonders how things might have unfolded, for instance, if Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of Rome, or if the Cuban Missile Crisis had escalated beyond the point of no return. We are reminded every now and then that the worldline itself is a cumulation of flukes and happenstance. 

Ultimately, world history is like an onion, Diamond writes. One that is especially difficult to peel and dissect because so many variables and details loom large. What’s more, historians cannot rely as much on the experimental methods that physicists and chemists enjoy. We cannot perform and replicate events in a controlled setting to extract general principles or cause-and-effect. Great historians are limited to natural experiments, a paltry of evidence, the comparative method, and their humility. In the end, Diamond’s powerful insight—that “societies developed differently on different continents because of differences in continental environments”—is only a start. One interesting piece of a much larger human puzzle. 

References

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