Guns, Germs and Steel
Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer Prize Winning, National Best Selling book Guns, Germs and Steel, summarizes his book by saying the following: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves." Guns, Germs and Steel is historical literature that documents Jared Diamond's views on how the world as we know it developed. However, is his thesis that environmental factors contribute so greatly to the development of society and culture valid? Traditions & Encounters: A Brief Global History is the textbook used for this class and it poses several different accounts of how society and culture developed that differ from Diamond's claims. However, neither Diamond nor Traditions are incorrect. Each poses varying, yet true, accounts of the same historical events. Each text chose to analyze history in a different manner. Not without flaws, Jared Diamond makes many claims throughout his work, and provides numerous examples and evidence to support his theories. In this essay, I will summarize Jared Diamond's accounts of world history and evolution of culture, and compare and contrast it with what I have learned using the textbook for this class.
Jared Diamond begins Guns with a prologue which sets the stage for the rest of the book. Approached in New Guinea by his friend and local politician Yali, he is posed a question: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" Yali's question flared a nerve in Diamond. This question brought about the thesis of his book, that environment is more persuasive on development of civilization than people may have once thought.
In the first chapter of Guns, Diamond establishes two main arguments that will become crucial to his thesis later on in the book. First, he goes in depth about mass extermination and further extinction of large mammals that occurred in New Guinea and Australia which were important for food and domestication, and secondly he argues that all the first civilized peoples in the world each had the ability to out develop one another, but were hindered or helped by their environment.
Diamond continues to provide evidence for his thesis that environmental factors play a significant role in the development of society by citing the Maori and Moriori incident of 1935. In 1935, the Maori killed and enslaved the Moriori peoples.
Jared Diamond is born in Boston on 1937. He is a physiologist, ecologist, and a prolific writer. Diamond has published hundreds of articles that is about science. Not only that Diamond is a writer, but he also received his Bachelor’s Degree at Harvard University in 1958 and PHD at Cambridge University in 1961. Diamond is currently working at UCLA as a professor of geography and physiology. He has done many research about ecology and the evolutionary of biology in New Guinea and many other southwest Pacific islands. Diamond has done many projects in his career. He is also a field researcher and director of the World Wildlife Fund. No only he published hundreds of articles, but he also wrote many essay in his life. One of his essay that he shared to the public is called, “The Last Americans: Environmental Collapse and the End of Civilization.” Diamond wrote this essay on June 2003. The essay that Diamond wrote is about the environment and how it is failing miserably.
The prologue of the book clearly lays out Diamond thesis. He explains that past societies have collapsed based on five factors: human induced environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and society’s response to environmental problems. He also explains how is wrote this book in a scientific manner using the “comparative method”, comparing natural situations differing with respect to the variable of interest. There is a slight flaw in this though. Showing these correlations between different societies,...
The reason Jared Diamond wrote this book was to answer the question of his political friend Yali, why did some societies like Eurasia were able to develop Guns, Germs, and Steel that were able to dominate major parts of the world, and why New Guinea was not capable of doing this? This question is certainly not a small picture kind of question because it covers a broad realm. Diamond is a book that has tried his best to cover a whole pattern of history, starting from before the Ice Age to the modern period. But Diamond's all-time famous and award-winning book was really successful in explaining the broad question. Such a type of question is critical to gain a stronger understanding of Diamond’s argument and its effect on the field of history.
In the book “Collapse” written and theorized by Jared Diamond, historical societies known for their peril due to environmental and human catastrophes. Jared Diamond analyzes the root causes of failed societies and uses his knowledge to depict today’s warning signs. The main focus of this book is to present clear and undeniable evidence that human activities corrupted the environment. To prove this Diamon used past societies, modern societies, and social business societies as a foundation. The most specific and beneficial theories that Diamond analyzes would be the decline of biodiversity on Easter Island, the deforestation of the Greenland Norse, the mining mismanagements in Australia and big businesses.
I first read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel in the Fall 2003 based on a recommendation from a friend. Many chapters of the book are truly fascinating, but I had criticisms of the book back then and hold even more now. Chief among these is the preponderance of analysis devoted to Papua New Guinea, as opposed to, say, an explanation of the greatly disparate levels of wealth and development among Eurasian nations. I will therefore attempt to confine this review on the "meat and potatoes" of his book: the dramatic Spanish conquest of the Incas; the impact of continental geography on food production; and finally, the origins of the Eurasian development of guns, germs, and steel. In terms of structure, I will first summarize the book's arguments, then critically assess the book's evidentiary base, and conclude with an analysis of how Guns, Germs, and Steel ultimately helps to address the wealth question.
In his well known piece, Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond proposes that the differences between populations of different continents is not due to differences in the people, but of the environment. There are, of course innumerable differences to be found among the environments that each continent has to offer, however, Diamond stresses only a few. They include: wild plants and animals native to the area- which affect a society’s surplus thus allowing the society to move beyond their basic need- a group 's ability to travel and/or migrate both intercontinental and to other continents- this would allow for trade and access to other goods, and exposure to alternate philosophies and illness- and the size of the continent and population allowing for more potential inventors, competing societies, and groups to exchange with (Diamond, 1999). Diamond’s theory lends to the concept of how our environment shapes us. It’s the nurture of Nature vs Nurture on the large scale. There are countless things that we cannot control about ourselves, where
Many geographers have attempted creating a unified theory explaining why cultures advance much more readily than others. Very few have actually reached mainstream society and even fewer seem reasonable. However, Jared Diamond shines where most do not. His book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, proposes an idea that has long been established called environmental determinism. Most view environmental determinism as a racist theory attributing a peoples’ intelligence only to their oppressive climates and geographical barriers. Diamond instead has created a theory that applies environmental determinism to only a peoples’ technology—not the people themselves. This has given researchers valuable tools that allow them to explain why some nations have become the superpowers they are today. If applied to the modern United States, Jared Diamond and his new theory would attribute the country’s dominate status to blankity blankity blank.
“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [goods] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” [p. 14]. This question: Yali’s question, is the centerpiece of Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond’s claim is that the evolution of technology and overall differences of the advancement of society are due to the factors of geographical location, plants, and animals . “Technology may have developed most rapidly in regions with moderate connectedness [Europe], neither too high [China], nor too low [India]” [p. 416] says Diamond in the epilogue of his book hoping to provide further proof for his argument. Diamond’s view of history is not the conventional every-day view a student who is reading the book may have but he successfully brings the reader to, at the very least, consider his ideas. His book is said to be “An ingenious attempt to explain racial differences in achievement.” [Michael Levin]
Coffin, Judith G., and Robert C. Stacey. "CHAPTER 18 PAGES 668-669." Western Civilizations: Their History & Their Culture. 16TH ed. Vol. 2. New York, NY: W. W. Norton &, 2008. N. pag. Print.
Bulliet, Richard W. Earth and Its Peoples: a Global History. 5th ed. Vol. 1. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011. Print.
Professor Jared Diamond is an American scientist and author of the best known book “Guns, germs, and steel”. He is known for drawing from a variety of fields, including geography, ecology, anthropology, and etc. Documentary movie which was shot on guns, germs, and steel, made an excellent job of demonstrating the authors theoretical approach in pursuit of the question “What are the factors that contributed to some country's capacity to grow, while others have remained impoverished?”. In each episodes of three parts, Jared Diamond visits a different continents of the world to find an answer for the root of inequality. He mainly focused on how environmental resources such as topography, climate of different parts of the world predisposed particular
Jared Diamond’s theory of “Guns, Germs and Steel” accounting for global inequalities is a concept which has raised many conspiracies over the years of publication. Professor Diamond’s theory answers a significantly complex question with simple answer; the reasons which ‘history unfolded differently on different continents1’ as the result of the primary basis of geography and climate. It is an interesting and arguably true notion, which agrees greatly with the facts of history, including the Australian context during 1888 to 1900. The thesis is associated to European technological superiority over the Aborigines who lived a balanced lifestyle and did not require advancement in any regards. It is therefore important to discuss the guns, germs
Human civilization is constantly in a state of flux. It is always changing, evolving, and adapting to the ways that humans not only interact with one and other, but also with the earth on which we reside. We often call this evolving interaction progress. Progress can be defined as the destruction and re-building of social, political, and religious norms to promote a more prosperous and equitable society. Perhaps more than any other event in human history the European “discovery” of the New World fundamentally altered the social, political, and religious landscape the world over.
For as prey is almost the unique subject of fighting among carnivorous animals, and as frugivorous ones live among themselves in continual peace, if the human race were of this latter genus it clearly would have had much greater ease subsisting in the state of nature, and less need and occasion to leave it. (Rousseau 188)
...l the flow of conflict diamonds. Both assure consumers that more than 99% of rough stones today come from conflict-free sources which are regulated by the Kimberley process. According to the people who profited from diamonds, the blood diamonds problem is passé5. Further research tells us that it is not. According to Father Rocco Puopolo of the Africa Faith and Justice Network, he says “It’s not passé,” “the diamond industry can claim what they want and the film will always serve as a template for what is going on in Africa today.” This point out that labour exploitation and conflict (for control of precious resources such as gold) may still be going on in Africa.