Guns, Germs and Steel is by Jared Diamond, originally published in 1997, revised 2003, 2005. It won a Pulitzer Prize, and was made into a ‘Major PBS Special!’
(That last is intriguing – I wonder what a dramatization of this content would be like.)
I read GGS because of Mistress Jadi’s recommendation – I’d heard about it years ago via Readerville, and took the blurb at face value: "why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquiring or displacing their peoples." This wasn’t terribly interesting to me as a Cherokee descendant – I’ve heard quite enough about infected blankets and assimilation to last me a lifetime.
But that’s not what GGH is really about. It’s about HOW the peoples of various continents got their stuff. Their domesticated animals, their crops, their clothing fiber, their boats, their writing, etc. THAT is fascinating to me – and it’s really the first part, that dwells extensively on crops and animals that’s the best part.
Basic tenets:
Not all continents were created equal in terms of raw materials. Continents that presented wild versions of edible foods and useful animals that were somehow easier to domesticate – well, those people had the deck stacked in their favor. The Fertile Crescent presented more wild crops that became our present day wheat, barley, peas, lentils, olives, figs, dates, pomegranates, grapes, apples, pears, plums, cherries, rye, oats, turnips, radishes, beets, leeks, lettuce, strawberries and flax.
Not all continents were created equal in terms of geography. A long east-west axis means a greater climate-friendly ‘market’ for your freshly domesticated animals and food crops. Whereas a long north-south axis means you’ll have to develop new varieties for each crop every few hundred miles.
Disunity can have major advantages over unity. The longstanding differentiation in Europe caused an incredible amount of productive competition, that for example, the Chinese couldn’t take advantage of, because China has been unified for a very long time.
Fascinating stuff, and I’m looking forward to reading Diamond’s Collapse – which thinks it’s about how societies fail. I’ll let you know if I agree with the blurbs.
I haven’t read Guns Germs and Steel yet. It’s on my reading list, but not at the top. Have you read 1491 by Charles Mann? This is the review from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ref=sr_1_1/102-6732570-0929745?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189555197&sr=1-1
Amazon.com
1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even “timeless” natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.
Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. –Tom Nissley
I wonder how 1491 gibes with Diamond’s view of the Americas? Crap, I guess I’ll have to read GGS now! 🙂
My husband was very impressed with this book.