Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Brilliant, but skewed

The brilliance of the book is its disarming simplicity in explaining why some continents and cultures advanced, and others lagged behind.

It's all about geography.

Growing crops and using animals can easily spread across continents where climates are similar (e.g. Middle East, Europe); it doesn't happen where there are severe climate differences, and grim physical boundaries (e.g. The Americas, Africa). A major spin off from animals is developing immunity form the diseases they carry. So when Europeans invaded the Americas those diseases defeated the natives more than war.

The success then of Europe and the West has got nothing to do with Europeans being more intelligent than aborigines or native Americans. And in this scheme forget Tawney and Weber and arguments about religion and the rise of capitalism, that's detail. When you dig back to the basics as to why it was Europeans who took over Australia and not the other way round, it's all about geography. Religion might explain why it was the northern Europeans who got richer than the southern ones, but in the big picture (Europeans taking over from native Americans or Australians) it's geography.

It's the same when it comes to politics. Why was China,with a longer history of civilisation, technological innovation and agriculture, overtaken by Europe in the 19^th C? Diamond's persuasive answer is that China's state was homogeneous due to geography. This meant the country was easily ruled by a dictator and one of them – foolishly in the 15^th C – stopped ship building. Europe, because of geography, was fragmented. There has never been one ruler of Europe, which meant that when Columbus was turned down by the French and the Portuguese, he could still turn to the Spanish.

It's a convincing paradigm and largely true; but still skewed. It is absurd to think, as many did a hundred years ago, that people are superior because of their race. But equally it is difficult to conclude that a civilisation has nothing to do with how human beings behave. So there is a difficulty with India, a country not looked at in detail by Diamond. Like China, India also has an ancient civilisation with a long history of agriculture, writing, and history. And here is a question for Diamond. Why is India, after all these centuries, still ravaged by poverty and injustice, while the United States, just a few hundred years old, is a place where immigrants flock to because they know if they work hard they can prosper under the rule of law? It's hard to see where geography plays a part. India has all that is needed for a prosperous economy but still enough fragmentation not to lend it naturally to be ruled by a dictator as with China. So why the chronic poverty and corruption? Is it racist to ask whether the different outcomes has something to do with human morality and that Hinduism with its cruel caste system has allowed the rich to ignore the poor and treat them as inferior before the law?

Perhaps there is a geographical answer to this question, but if this is true for India it is true for the rest of the world. It has not just been about geography; it has also been all about how human beings behave and some civilisations have come up with better ways of dealings with the evil that lurks within us than others.

So Diamond's paradigm is brilliant; but skewed because there the impact of human morality is largely ignored.