Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Recognisably a popularisation, but it's in an under-reported field (speculative human geography) so it is still high in nourishing insight. Exciting, thoughtful, deserving.
The title's misleading: all three of those pro-colonialist environmental factors are merely proximate effects of what he argues is the ultimate cause of world inequality: domesticable crops and livestock on a continent which happens to be oriented in a way that makes its climate very similar across wide latitudes. His theory explicitly disclaims racist explanations of world history - e.g. his chapter on the conquistadors is the most harrowing account I've ever read - and he says things like
Yet the anthropologists' party line on him is just that: that he's a racist and, almost worse in that circle, a determinist, a dirty reductionist. I feel perfectly fair in explaining their rancour by his skilful scientific intrusion on their ill-tended turf. (Diamond was originally an ornithologist and geneticist.)
Engaging and original as it is, his thesis faces a hard explanatory limit: agriculture has not been the limiting factor on economies for more than 200 years, and yet the Great Divergence dates from then and not earlier. Diamond could appeal to simple path-dependency: "we win now because we won then" or argue that the technological and military edge yielded land, and that land yielded the economic miracle. But the evidence (also known as Gregory Clark) certainly does not warrant crop or zoological supremacism.
Anyway I know of no better introduction to cultural evolution theory, human population genetics, the Clovis / pre-Clovis controversy, philology, New Guinean traditionalism, the origins and downsides of civilization, animal husbandry, and the ancient history of Africa. The rub is that you can't stop with him, because he doesn't go for all the angles.
In one sentence: See Q&A above.
4/5 (minus a half for awful references - vague, without page numbers in the text or in the source, nor footnotes).
Q: Why is it that you white people developed much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but
we black people had little cargo of our own?
A: History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people's environments, not because of biological differences among people themselves.
The title's misleading: all three of those pro-colonialist environmental factors are merely proximate effects of what he argues is the ultimate cause of world inequality: domesticable crops and livestock on a continent which happens to be oriented in a way that makes its climate very similar across wide latitudes. His theory explicitly disclaims racist explanations of world history - e.g. his chapter on the conquistadors is the most harrowing account I've ever read - and he says things like
When I arrived in New Guinea for the first time, it became clear to me that New Guineans are curious, questioning, talkative people with complex languages and social relationships, on the average at least as intelligent as Europeans and Americans. In New Guinea, I’m the dope who can’t do elementary things like follow an unmarked trail or light a fire in the rain.
Yet the anthropologists' party line on him is just that: that he's a racist and, almost worse in that circle, a determinist, a dirty reductionist. I feel perfectly fair in explaining their rancour by his skilful scientific intrusion on their ill-tended turf. (Diamond was originally an ornithologist and geneticist.)
Engaging and original as it is, his thesis faces a hard explanatory limit: agriculture has not been the limiting factor on economies for more than 200 years, and yet the Great Divergence dates from then and not earlier. Diamond could appeal to simple path-dependency: "we win now because we won then" or argue that the technological and military edge yielded land, and that land yielded the economic miracle. But the evidence (also known as Gregory Clark) certainly does not warrant crop or zoological supremacism.
Anyway I know of no better introduction to cultural evolution theory, human population genetics, the Clovis / pre-Clovis controversy, philology, New Guinean traditionalism, the origins and downsides of civilization, animal husbandry, and the ancient history of Africa. The rub is that you can't stop with him, because he doesn't go for all the angles.
In one sentence: See Q&A above.
4/5 (minus a half for awful references - vague, without page numbers in the text or in the source, nor footnotes).