Guns, Germs and Steel

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“Daunting.” That was the first word that sprang to mind when I picked Jared Diamond’s book up. At 480 information-packed pages and subtitled “A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years”, I think it’s fair to say that you need to be in just the right frame of mind to start reading this. Once you do start though, you’ll find it hard to stop.

The book starts by posing a simple question: why is it that Europeans have dominated the world for the last 500 years? A simple question perhaps, but not one that comes with a simple answer. For example, why was it that the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, rather than the other way around?

Diamond, as a professor of physiology, dismisses theories of genetic superiority out of hand, and instead provides a scientific examination of the evidence. He presents a thorough and logical explanation of how the land-mass of Eurasia, being wider, lent itself to farming and cultural interchange more than Africa or the Americas did. Combined with more varied flora and fauna, this allowed people to domesticate crops and animals earlier than on the other continents, which in turn led to increased populations, which led to specialisation and government, all of which leads to more rapid technological innovation. In all of this, the Eurasians also developed an increased resistance to diseases carried by the domesticated animals, and it was this that almost certainly carried the greatest threat to the Aztecs.

The book also touches on a wide variety of other topics, and I thoroughly recommend it—it’s objective, fascinating and enlightening.