Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (review)

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. By Jared Diamond. New York: Norton, 1999. Pp. 480. $14.95 (paperback). *

Originally published in 1997, this remarkable, Pulitzer Prize-winning book has just been reissued in paperback. Since its initial publication, it has received much well-deserved praise for its singular insights and the breadth of its scholarship, as well as for its graceful style. In time, it will undoubtedly take its rightful place among the classics of history, perhaps at the head of the classics, since it describes the foundations of human civilization, the history of pre-history, if such an oxymoron is permitted.

Every historian brings to his task certain assets, such as knowledge of language and culture, and access to museums or libraries. The pre-historian must have an entirely different set of assets: scientific knowledge of evolution, ecology, anthropology, archeology, and mainly curiosity. Diamond has all of these in abundance. Trained as a membrane biophysicist, an area where he holds a faculty appointment at UCLA, he has spent a substantial fraction of his time studying the evolutionary ecology of birds in less developed parts of the world. The seeds of the present work were sown during a field trip to Papua New Guinea in 1972, when a young and stimulating native politician named Yali asked why the white man had so much "cargo," i.e., so much technological development. It has taken the author 25 years of part-time work to address Yali's question fully, and his answer is both surprising and satisfying. The depth of the detail leaves no doubt that it is also correct.

The history begins at the end of last ice age, about 11,000 BCE, a time when humans had populated all of the habitable continents of the globe and only a very few were beginning to make the transition from hunter-gatherer to village life. Rising oceans resulting from icecap melting obliterated land bridges that had eased intercontinental travel, and populations became isolated. The history ends with the beginning of the written records, and the author has used extant accounts of disastrous initial meetings between more and less developed peoples to illustrate the great disparity in rates of technological development.

The most dramatic of these collisions was the encounter between the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and the Inca emperor Atahuallpa in the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca. Atahuallpa had assembled 80,000 soldiers to participate in civil wars resulting from the deaths caused by an epidemic of smallpox brought to the New World by earlier Spanish visitors. Pizarro had come overland to this strange country from Panama, with a total of 168 ragtag soldiers, 62 mounted and the remaining 106 on foot, armed with only a dozen guns. In a short, sharp battle, the Spaniards killed 8,000 Incas and took their emperor prisoner without loss of a single Spanish life. They held the emperor prisoner until his people had delivered an enormous ransom and then killed him. The overwhelming Spanish advantage derived from their horses and from steel: their steel armor easily warded off the primitive Incan weapons, and their swords easily penetrated the padded blankets which the Indians used as armor. Apart from creating a great advantage of surprise, the cumbersome harquebuse guns were of relatively small import in the battle.

The enigmatic title of the book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, serves as a shorthand for the "cargo" that allowed Europeans to conquer the rest of the world so easily. In many instances germs were the major factor, killing the enemy even before it was even met. But these are only the proximate reasons for the Europeans' success. The main point of the book is to describe how they came by this cargo.

The Spanish witnesses of the events at Cajamarca give great credit to God for their success. While most of the readers of this review are likely...