Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

1202 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Consequence of the Neolithic revolution

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond is an outstanding book about how different societies changed developmentally through time. Diamond tells readers about how many societies developed faster than others and how wealth and power spread throughout different regions of the continents. Wealth was spread unevenly because many societies had less technological advances or developed after another society. Diamond uses a question and answer approach to answers questions about society and the changes many of the societies went through during the Neolithic revolution. Diamond provides a realistic explanation of the development of different societies and different regions in 11,000 B.C., as well as developments of present day societies.
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies explores many questions about the development of societies and how societies have changed. Diamond uses this book to explain how “history followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of the biological differences among people” (25). Diamond first takes readers to New Guinea, where he is a biologist studying birds. Diamond is walking on the beach one day and meets a local politician named Yali. Yali was from a very different background than Diamond. Yali lived in a less developed country and had many questions for Diamond. Yali’s main question for Diamond was “why is it you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (14). Diamond had difficulty answering the question without examining the historical perspective of Yali’s question. Diam...

... middle of paper ...

... Diamond asks is how people have the ability to develop when their population decreases and people are dying. Many people such as the Europeans started to become immune to the germs. Diamond states that “plant and human domestication led to denser human populations by yielding more food than did the hunter gathering lifestyle” (89). Readers learn that the Europeans formed immunity because they were the ones that introduced germs as they traveled. They carried their germs and disease with them. As a result, many Europeans were already immune to the diseases and would not catch them later. Instead the people who were not European that had contact with the Europeans contracted diseases such as malaria and smallpox as they did not have immunity.

Works Cited

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Society. New York: W.W.
Norton &, 1999. Print.

Show More
Related

  • Guns Germs Steel

    1357 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Different Environments In Jared Diamond's Guns Germs And Steel

    899 Words  | 2 Pages

    “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples ' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves” (Jared Diamond). In the book Guns Germs and Steel he accounted a conversation with Yali, a New Guinean politician that had asked “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?”. Diamond tries to answer this by describing the difference in use of government throughout history by bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states.

    Read More

  • Guns Germs And Steel Critique

    985 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Thriving of Europe in Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

    683 Words  | 2 Pages

    Why did certain early civilizations thrive and some fail? Jared Diamond, a famous author and scientist, explains in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. He believes civilizations like the ones in Europe thrived because of geographical luck. Geographic luck is the idea that people in some areas got luckier than others. For example, the Fertile Crescent had a warm, moist climate, and fertile soil to grow wheat and barley, while people that lived in places like Papua New Guinea had to hunt, and forage for their food. Geographic luck aided the European empire, and was the reason they became so powerful. One of the key reasons Europe did so well was farming. Another reason they were able to conquer so much of the world was their well-placed civilization. Finally, Europe’s weapons, made from steel, were much more advanced than the weapons possessed by the rest of the world, and they came from their good geographic placement. Understanding geography’s role in Europe’s technological advancement is important, and to do so you must look at how they became powerful in the first place, which is because of farming, and domestication.

    Read More

  • The Role of Disease in European Exploration and Colonization

    1892 Words  | 4 Pages

    Human mobility, in terms of European transcontinental exploration and colonization, began to truly flourish after the 1400s. This travel, inspired by financial motives and justified by religious goals, resulted in the European dominance and decimation of countless cultures in both the Americas and Eurasia. While at first glance it seems as though this dominance was achieved through mainly military means - European militias, like Spanish conquistadors, rolling over native tribes with their technologically advanced weapons - the reality is significantly more complex. The Europeans, most likely unknowingly, employed another, equally deadly weapon during their exploits. With their travel, they brought with them the infectious diseases of their homelands, exposing the defenseless natives to foreign malady that their bodies had no hope of developing immunities against. Because of the nature of disease and their limited knowledge about its modes of infection, the Europeans were able to dispense highly contagious and mortal illnesses while limiting their contraction of any native ones to the new territories. In short, they were able to kill without being killed. In this way, the travel of disease in conjunction with the travel of humans in a search for exotic commodities was able to limit or even halt the development of some cultures while allowing others to flourish at exponential rates.

    Read More

  • Guns, Germs, And Steel Review

    1281 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Was Disease a key factor

    985 Words  | 2 Pages

    While the Europeans were traveling to the New World, they often brought domesticated animals with them for sources of food and livestock. When animals and humans are living in close quarters together, it is very likely for exposure to germs to occur. New diseases were brought over by foreigners looking for fame and gold that killed off many of the natives in the new lands. The natives did not stand a chance against these new threats because of a lack of knowledge and supplies to cure themselves. Once the Europeans established diseases as they made land in the New World, their journey had only become easier as their competition were being wiped out from the rapid spread.

    Read More

  • In Praise of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel

    1016 Words  | 3 Pages

    Jared Diamond's bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel (GG&S) is an attempt to explain why some parts of the world are currently powerful and prosperous while others are poor. Diamond is both a physiologist and a linguist who spends a good deal of his time living with hunter gathers in Papua New Guinea. As a researcher and as a human being, he is convinced that all people have the same potential. Hunter gatherers are just as intelligent, resourceful, and diligent as anybody else. Yet material "success" isn't equally distributed across the globe. Civilization sprung up in relatively few places and spread in a defined pattern. I should emphasize that Diamond doesn't equate material prosperity with well-being or virtue. He's just curious about the global distribution of bling bling.

    Read More

  • Native American Experience Research Paper

    964 Words  | 2 Pages

    In fact, according to Atrocities Against Native Americans, they said that the diseases spread because of the Europeans, cleared out an estimated 90% of the Native American population. Being from different areas, you can probably assume that the immunity of the Native Americans is pretty low against pathogens that came from a different area. Most of them got sick from the animals and ended up with diseases such as the whooping cough, scarlet fever, measles, influenza type B & more. If the Europeans never came over to their land, they wouldn't have gotten so

    Read More

  • The Neolithic Period: One Of The Most Important Revolutions

    816 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Neolithic Period, which includes events from 12,000 years ago, is one of the most important revolutions to occur in history. The Neolithic lifestyle was established first in the Middle East, and then later in the Yellow river basin in China, which then spread over the years into the Western Hemisphere. During this time period, the domestication of plants and animals and the development of cities was starting to become more prominent and well known to many different civilizations across many different countries. It consisted of many changes in human cultures from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of farming and settlement, which supported a larger population. As civilizations expanded, so did traditions and techniques. A major technological and cultural change to modern ways of thinking and acting began in Western Europe, and from these beginning new approaches to science and law spread quickly around the world. It spread to countries, causing more people to become aware of when and where to properly irrigate a crop, which type of area had the best security, and other common living strategies. Surely enough, many years later, traditions are the same as they were thousands of years ago. Although traditions may not have changed, the way people think about their God and religions have changed from culture to culture. Throughout the years, men and women from the Middle West completely changed their relationship from nature, to a more independent lifestyle; human beings learned to have more control over their lives.

    Read More

  • Impact Of European Colonization On Native Americans

    1108 Words  | 3 Pages

    Native Americans had previously remained isolated and healthy, as the rest of the world was ransacked by diseases like the Black Death. Europeans had been able to build up their immune system to these diseases; the Natives had never encountered European diseases like mumps and smallpox. Native Americans were left “immunologically defenseless” against the volatile European diseases (Document 6). Document 6 was written by a historian, which would explain why he is better able to write from a less biased view of the colonization of the Americas, as well as how he understands the consequences diseases had on the Native population. Although Europeans were not always purposely infecting the Native American population, the introduction of new diseases is what led to the Native population to decline by 82%. Diseases began to “spread during October” throughout major civilizations like the Aztecs and the Incas, where the disease “lasted for seventy days, striking everywhere in the cities and killing a vast number of [Native] people” (Document 4). Document 4 was written in the point of view of the Aztecs, one of the several Native American tribes to be victimized by disease. The Native 's’ point of view is significant because readers will better be able to understand the lasting impact the disease had on the Native population. Native civilizations like the Aztecs with Tenochtitlan had cities bigger in size than most European cities. This caused the disease to spread rapidly and stunted production in Native American tribes. Diseases weakened the Native population, further preventing them from attempting to abstain the Europeans’

    Read More

  • The Agricultural Revolution: Augmentation and Dissemination

    1231 Words  | 3 Pages

    The blessing and curse of the Agricultural Revolution is advocated with its augmentation and dissemination. Taking the stipulative definition of “blessing” and “curse” from the original premise, one can only superimpose the layman’s terms of “negative” and “positive”. Upon examination of the two classifications within the Neolithic Period and ancient Mesopotamian civilization one can confirm the premise. Therefore, the agriculture revolution was a blessing and a curse for humanity. Human society began to emerge in the Neolithic Period or the New Stone Age. This new age began around 9,000 B.C.E. by the development of agriculture in the region surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and what is commonly referred to as “The Fertile Crescent” located in West Asia.1 The very development of agriculture had benefited humans by no longer having to move about in search of wild game and plants. Unencumbered by nomadic life humans found little need to limit family size and possessions and settled in a single location for many years. One negative aspect of this settling is that the population increased so much so that wild food sources were no longer sufficient to support large groups. Forced to survive by any means necessary they discovered using seeds of the most productive plants and clearing weeds enhanced their yield.2 This also lead humans to develop a wider array of tools far superior to the tools previously used in the Paleolithic Period or Old Stone Age. The spread of the Agricultural Revolution in the Neolithic Period also cultivated positive aspects by creating connections with other cultures and societies. Through these connections they exchanged knowledge, goods, and ideas on herding and farming.3 Another major positive aspec...

    Read More

  • Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece

    889 Words  | 2 Pages

    A History of World Societies, Volume 1: To 1600 [VitalSouce bookshelf version]. Retrieved from http://online.vitalsource.com/books/9781457665363/id/L5-2-1

    Read More

  • Essay On Guns Germs And Steel

    1058 Words  | 3 Pages

    There is nothing better then realizing that each indigenous people evolved into something better or that they found ways to survive in situations they weren’t use too. There were many changes that happened over time that cause for situations to change for everyone around them. But it also has helped with being able to progress with the way they lived. Jared diamond the author of Guns, Germs and Steel interpret his famous theory oh how we came to be. How the geography luck helped each country developed more rapidly than others as well as being able to expand more. However they also had geography luck when it came to how many advantages they had with the technology nevertheless, germs also was a big part of how the conquered most of the lands because it would kill instantly millions of european and

    Read More

  • The Similarities and Differences between Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism

    1179 Words  | 3 Pages

    McKay, J/P/, Hill, B.D., Buckler, J., Ebrey, P.B., Beck, R.B., Crowston, C.H., & Wiesner-Hanks, M.E. (2008). A History of World Societies, Volume A: From Antiquity to 1500. New York, NY: Bedford/St. Martin's

    Read More

More about Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

Open Document