Jared Diamond Guns Germs and Steel
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, W. ... The origins of empires, religion, writing, crops, and guns are all here. ... ” Jared Diamond is professor of physiology at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1972, a remarkable New Guinean politician, Yali, asked Diamond a question that many Indians, who increasingly see themselves as world-beaters, may ask. ... ” For much of the book, Diamond takes Europe and Asia as one continent, treats Eurasians as one people, and so does not explicitly answer the Indian question. ... The usual answer is the proximate one – the Europeans had Guns, Germs and Steel. ... The advantages of horses, steel and guns need no elaboration in this brief essay. But Diamond is not satisfied with this proximate answer. Why, he asks, did Eurasians have horses, germs, writing, steel and guns by the end of the 15th century while Native Americans did not? ... But Diamond brings in palaeontology, archaeology, biology, anthropology, geography, linguistics, ethnology and history to provide a more convincing alternative. ... Smallpox, for example, probably came to us from cattle and then spread as epidemics in the dense populations of Eurasia leaving survivors who were carriers of the germs but immune to them. ... Diamond shows that most domesticable species, after continental drift, extinction of dinosaurs, ice ages, etc. ... Well, while Diamond develops his base thesis by intercontinental comparisons, he validates it with intra continentally – there are chapters on “How China became Chinese” and “How Africa became Black”. ... Diamond does not take up the Indian experience in any detail. ... Being part, though guarded by high mountains, of Eurasia, India participated in the commerce in germs, food production, writing, technology, warfare, etc. ... Diamond favours Bismarck’s contrary idea, “The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history and try to catch on to His coattails as He marches past.” Diamond discusses why China slipped behind Europe after millennia of having been ahead technologically, organisationally and culturally.