Guns, Germs, and Steel, published in 1997, starts from a question Jared Diamond says a New Guinean politician named Yali put to him: why did Europeans arrive with so much cargo while New Guineans had so little? Diamond sets out to explain why Eurasian societies, rather than those of the Americas, Africa or Australia, ended up conquering much of the world.
His answer lies in environment rather than biology. Regions such as the Fertile Crescent happened to have wild plants and large animals suitable for domestication, which allowed food surpluses, dense populations, specialists, states and writing. Eurasia's east-west axis let crops and technology spread across similar climates, and living close to livestock bred diseases that later devastated peoples with no immunity, as in the Spanish conquest of the Incas.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and became one of the most influential works of popular history. Historians and anthropologists have criticised it for environmental determinism and for underplaying human choices and colonial politics. Even so, it reframed how a generation of readers think about inequality between societies.
Book details
| Author | Jared Diamond |
|---|---|
| First published | 1997 |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | History |
| Type | Non-fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 480 |
| Awards | Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction 1998 |
Themes
- Geographic determinism
- Domestication of plants and animals
- Epidemic disease
- Conquest
- Inequality between societies
Who should read it
Readers who want a bold, evidence-packed explanation of why world history unfolded so unequally.