Guns, Germs, Steel, and Diamond.

This is the second time in my education that I've been asked to read a review or response to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. For whatever reason, the book itself has never appeared on my reading list. To me this implies that this book is easily summarized if you're not actually interested in the history of it and that, more important than its explanatory power is the debates it brings up (at least among economists and agents of development).

The last time I didn't read Jared Diamond's book was my senior year in college in Development and Poverty, an Economics Course taught by Professor Nathan Nunn. Instead, he appeared in a text book (Weil, David N. 2005. Economic Growth, 1st edition. New York: Addison Wesley. ), summarizing his argument.

For those like myself who have not read Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond argues that the reason why Eurasia (and especially Europe) conquered the rest of the world was for largely geographic reasons. That is, the climate was more favorable to fixed agriculture which many historians argue started civilization or something. I've been hearing this argument and not entirely understanding what "civilization" is and how "agriculture started it" since 9th grade. But I digress. Anyway, that gave Europeans the time to focus on other pursuits like making weapons. Naturally.

In Poverty and Development, Diamond entered the conversation because, when dealing with economic development, you run into this question of how did this happen? Citing the assignment I wrote dealing with this question (instead of going back to the articles (cough)), Sachs and Sachs and Malaney favor the geography explanation, while Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson attribute the underdevelopment of Africa to European colonialist strategies. Professor Nunn also has done some fascinating work on the subject all available here: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/nunn/papers_nunn

Currently, I am not reading Diamond and instead reading a debate he and William H. McNeill had on the New York Review of Books in 1997. Diamond's explanation is the same as above. He concludes with the important caveat that leaving colonialism unexplained lets people invent racist explanations in their heads implicit or explicitly for the domination of the global south by the global north and the all-but-complete eradication of Native American culture. By so-doing he creates a brilliant buffer around his argument. "Don't disagree with me, World," Diamond seems to challenge, "that's racist!"

McNeill seems to concede that environmental factors do play a role, while also sticking to his claim that cultural autonomy is an important role as well.

Without having read any of McNeill's work (or, really, Diamond's either) I find him more convincing.

"Racist!" Jared Diamond yells from across time and space.

Well, that's one way to look at it, but what I think is most fascinating about Diamond's argument that "In the absence of convincing explanations, many (most?) people resort, consciously or unconsciously, to racist assumptions: the conquerors supposedly had superior IQ or culture (1997)" is what you have to take for granted to make that conclusion. I do think, without any evidence whatsoever, that many people do invent some explanation in their minds that Europeans were some bestowed with an innate conquering ability. But what I disagree with is, well, one, that this exists. And then two, that there is anything great about this.

The problem with a lot of historical explanations is the inclination toward ranking. There is a real habit of investigating one pattern of development and then extrapolating that this is necessarily the way cultures, economies, governments, whatever, progress. To say that Europeans surpassed other cultures in development already imposes a Euro-centric value structure.

Were the Europeans more developed? Or did they have a societal structure that favored brutalism? Were Europeans better at warring? Or were they more obsessive toward total annihilation?

I'm not saying that Europeans were the only people who warred against their neighbors, but the nice thing about not having guns is that your enemy then doesn't have guns. I don't know why each civilization fought each war with each neighbor they fought with, but for some reason (historical, cultural, geographical, whatever) the Europeans at that moment in time were intent on being the superior and perhaps only power on the entire globe. Some people sailed for exploration and knowledge, but many more people sailed to conquer. I'm not convinced that we can say with 100% certainty that if the Europeans did not go on a violent rampage for global domination, someone else would have.



Diamond's response to McNeill's response to his book and McNeill's subsequent response can be found here :
Diamond, Jared. 'Guns, Germs, and Steel.' The New York Review Of Books. 26 June 1997. web. 28 January 2012. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/jun/26/guns-germs-and-steel/?pagination=false

Other Related Readings.
Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. (2001). “Reversal of Fortunes,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117, 1231-1294.
Sachs, Jeffrey and Pia Malaney. (2002). “The Economic and Social Burden of Malaria,”
Nature, 415 (6872), 680-685.
Sachs, Jeffrey. (2001). “The Geography of Poverty and Wealth,” Scientific American,
284 (3) March, 70-75.