Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel is a work of popular history written by the American biologist and geographer Jared Diamond and published in 1997. Its original subtitle, "A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years," signals its ambition: to explain why some societies came to hold a vast political, technological, and military advantage over others. Diamond surveys the development of the world's civilizations and offers an answer to the apparent dominance of Western European culture. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1998 and has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Diamond's central claim is that differences in power between peoples do not stem from any innate genetic, moral, or intellectual superiority of Eurasians, but from unequal environmental conditions that were magnified over time through feedback loops. He argues that agriculture emerged earliest in the Fertile Crescent and that Eurasia possessed more domesticable plants and an east-west continental axis that allowed crops, animals, and innovations to spread across latitudes with similar climates. The Americas and Africa, by contrast, had north-south axes and ecological barriers that slowed this process. The availability of large domesticable mammals, such as horses, cattle, and sheep, also supplied transport, labor, and food, and helped foster surpluses, specialization, and complex states.

The book also traces the link between livestock and disease. Close contact with animals exposed Eurasian populations to pathogens such as smallpox, measles, and influenza, and over generations many developed a degree of immunity. When these germs reached peoples who had never encountered them, as with the Americas after 1492, they caused catastrophic mortality that greatly eased conquest.

The structure is divided into four parts: an opening on the origins of inequality and the immediate causes of conquest, an analysis of the biogeographical factors Diamond considers ultimate causes, a study of intermediate causes such as writing, technology, and social organization, and a closing comparison of societies that concludes with an explanation of Western predominance. The title refers to the instruments through which Europeans imposed their rule, that is, the most visible causes, while the argument seeks to reach the deeper ones.

The book enjoyed great success in popular science because of its interdisciplinary character, combining biology, geography, anthropology, and history. Nevertheless, it drew substantial criticism from specialists in the regions and cultures it covers, who question its geographic determinism, the thin documentary evidence behind some claims, and the simplification of complex historical processes.