Guns Germs and Steel

Jared Diamond

Back when I was studying history at college I crawled through a dreary module with a title something like "History 171: England in the 13th Century". It wasn't out of choice. I remember being told, no, students weren't allowed to spend all three years immersed in Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain.

So, I used to think the remoter the history the more tedious the textbook. Strange, then to pick up Guns, Germs, and Steel, the story of human technological development over the last 13,000 years, and find it one of the best works of history I've ever read.

Diamond argues that Europe's technological superiority over the most of the rest of the world after 1500 A.D. was due to longstanding environmental factors going back thousands of years. Those factors included the availability in Eurasia (less so in other continents) of cereals suitable for domestication and large mammals which could be bred for food, textiles, transport and traction. Diamond demonstrates how populations which made the transition to farming would always overwhelm sparser neighbouring populations of hunter-gatherers. He also shows how these patterns explain not only the explosion of European power from the 16th Century onwards but also other equally spectacular waves of human migration from the Bantus in Africa to the Polynesians in the Pacific.

If a disproportionately large portion of his narrative is devoted to Australia, New Guinea and the Pacific then he has his reasons. Mostly it's because, remote from the rest of the world and containing some of the last populations to experience contact with Europeans, the histories of Australia and New Guinea have much to teach us about how populations develop, expand and acquire technology.

If I've failed to make all this sound gripping then truly I've done Diamond a disservice. It's tremendous stuff, coherently argued and full of answers to questions you didn't know you had. As well as making the history of agriculture more interesting than I ever knew it could be he also has fascinating things to say about the development of languages, writing and political systems. A really valuable book.