28 May 1998 10:25:57 -0500
================= EH.RES POSTING ================= EH.NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by EH.NET (May 1998)
Jared Diamond, _Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies_. New York: W.
W. Norton, 1997. 480 pp. $27.50 (cloth), ISBN: 0-393-31755-2.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Joel Mokyr, Departments of Economics and History,
Northwestern University. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Jared Diamond is a physiologist and evolutionary biologist with a passion for
archaeology and linguistics. That, by itself, should seem to make him irrelevant
to economic history. Yet his widely read and admired recent book, honored last
month with a Pulitzer Prize, is one of the more important contributions to
long-term economic history and is simply mandatory to anyone who purports
to engage Big Questions in the area of long-term global history. He starts off
his account with what he calls "Yali's question." Yali is a New Guinea notable, who
one day poses to the author the question why white people have so much
'cargo' (western manufactured goods desired by New Guineans), but New Guinea
produces no cargo that Westerners are interested in.
Indeed, the question of questions. Diamond joins such heavyweights in economic
history as Eric Jones, Douglass North, Nathan Rosenberg, and recently David
Landes in asking why "we" are so rich and "they" are so poor. Is it
institutions? Culture? Technology? Religion? Diamond does not reject any of these
answers altogether, but instead formulates models in which they become endogenous
variables. The real exogenous variable, when all is said and done, is
geography. Diamond, to put it bluntly, is a geographical determinist. The shape
and location of continents, flora, fauna, microbes, water, climate, topography,
all are truly exogenous to history. The rest is endogenous.
Geography has of course a terrible reputation. David Landes, in _Wealth and
Poverty of Nations_ (New York, 1998) starts off by recounting how geography
departments were closed around the country without a tear, and notes that "no
other discipline has been so depreciated and disparaged." Simple models
that submit that "Britain had an Industrial Revolution because it had coal"
have long been abandoned. Yet before we dismiss this as another simplistic
model, we have to face the fact that Diamond knows his stuff inside out, to the
point where any thought of using the adjective "crude" (traditionally preceding
"determinist") evaporates as we turn the pages. Diamond fires off a barrage of
facts and observations based on half a dozen disciplines most economic
historians this side of Eric Jones are unschooled in: archaeology,
botany, linguistics, anthropology among them. The story he tells is one of a
trajectory in which the world's population bifurcated for geographical
reasons. Once on different paths, Africa, America, and "Eurasia" diverged
more and more through positive feedback effects, in which geography fed into
technology, technology fed into power structures and culture, feeding back
into technology and growth until we got a world of Western economic hegemony.
Such "autocatalytic" models which view economic history as a disequilibrium process
once were shunned by the neoclassical cliometric orthodoxy. Today, thanks to the
efforts of scholars as diverse as Douglass North and Paul David, we are getting
used to them, and the intellectual gains are substantial.
What, then, are the geographical factors that Diamond thinks determined the course
of economic history? Above all, it is that human wealth and success depends on
interaction with the environment. Economic history in his view is a game against
nature, not primarily a social process. Production-- especially in agriculture--
depends on the geographical hand we have been dealt. Yet Diamond's emphasis is not
on soil fertility and minerals as in the writings of most geographers, but on
the ability of homo sapiens to domesticate plants and animals. His view is that all
societies and cultures have approximately similar abilities to manipulate
nature, but the raw materials with which they had to work were different. Diamond
points out in his witty prose that domestic animals are much like Tolstoy's view of
happy marriages: all happy marriages are the same, each unhappy marriage is
different in its own way. Domesticable animals are all domesticable in the same
way, but recalcitrant animals are all different. To exploit large animals for
food, energy, or other services, domesticable wild animals need to exist, a
condition that did not obtain in Precolumbian America (where the arrival of homo
sapiens 13,000 years ago had led apparently to their extinction). But even if
they existed, they needed to satisfy some conditions such as being able to
breed in captivity, safe for children and other living beings, and so on. He
argues, with great conviction, that the hippos and giraffes of Africa, the jaguars
of the Amazon, and the kangaroos of Australia did not meet those conditions.
The domesticated llamas, turkeys, and dogs of America could not pull it off either.
Eurasia, on the other hand, was lucky enough to have had the wild animals from
which our cows, sheep, horses and chickens could be bred. This gave the
Europeans huge advantages, not only in terms of the development of technology
(e.g. mixed farming and wheeled transport) but also in providing them eventually
with immunity against infectious diseases caused by the proximity of these animals.
When they then established sudden contact with non-Europeans, the "Plagues and
Peoples" effect simply overwhelmed the unprepared victims.
A similar and perhaps less well-known effect occurred with respect to
domesticable plants. Eurasia was simply lucky in that its environment provided
a much larger stock of plants that lent themselves to domestication, and
plants that had better quality in terms of the nutrients supplied, resistance to
disease, ease of cultivation and so on. Botanical wealth, constrained by the local
flora, determined agriculture, agriculture determined everything else, says Diamond.
Eurasia won because the supply of wild plants that provided the gene pool for
domesticated crops was larger, richer, and better. If you feel that this is a
bit simplistic, read his chapters on "How to Make an Almond" and "Apples and
Indians." It is a serious, informed, and well-thought out argument, and if in the
end we are not wholly convinced, thinking of how to refute Diamond will make us
wiser and better informed.
Diamond's argument makes serious use of counterfactuals, to the point of
wondering in the last chapter what would have happened if a German truck driver
in 1930 would have hit his brakes a second later and killed Hitler in a head-on
collision. But in the chapters on agriculture his imagination abandons him. How
much of the performance of non-Europeans was really constrained by their
environment and how much their own making? In Diamond's view, the answer is
"all and nothing." Yet one can imagine crops that were manipulated and
selected to produce crops that are as unimaginable to us as poodles and sweet
corn would have seemed 10,000 years ago. Take one example: among the disadvantages
that the indigenous plants of what is now the Eastern U.S. suffered from is a lack
of founder crops. Yet he does concede that some of them on the surface could
have done nicely, such as a flower named sumpweed, "a nutritionist's ultimate
dream" with 32 percent protein. Sumpweed, Diamond explains, did not make it to the
rank of corn, potatoes, and rye because it causes hayfever, does not smell good,
and handling it can cause skin irritation (p. 151). Are we really sure that
these vices could not have been bred out of them? After all, all domesticated plants
had originally undesirable characteristics, but through deliberate and lucky
selection mechanisms they eventually got over them. Wheat, rye, and maize, which
feed much of the world's population, all had humble beginnings. Diamond points out
that much of our ability to improve plants depended on whether certain
characteristics were the result of epistatic effects, that is, caused by more
than one gene. People could select for a particular trait as long as it was caused
by one of very few genes; if it was controlled by many genes, breeding
specimens that displayed the traits would be unlikely to fix it in the
population. But apart from a few examples, Diamond does not persuade us that this
lay at the heart of the geographically challenged societies.
A somewhat similar problem exists with Diamond's view of technology. In a chapter
cleverly named "Necessity's Mother" he notes the many links between geographical
constraints and technical options. Why would a society produce wheels if it had no
horses or oxen to pull them? Wheelbarrows and rickshaws might have been an
option, but maybe draft animals came first. Not all questions can be answered that
way: some indigenous populations in America might have built seaworthy ships, or
managed to develop some technology we cannot imagine today. If they did not,
is this because they tried but failed, or because they never tried?
Yet Diamond points out two elements that suggest that links between
geography and technological progress may be significant. One is that
geography constrains mobility of knowledge. Assume, somewhat implausibly, that
the idea of a wheelbarrow only occurred to one person in history, but that it
spread to people seeing their neighbors use. If this happened in Central Asia, it
may well have reached China, France and Yemen in a few centuries, but before
1500 it would never get to America or Australia. Agricultural technology, he
notes, also diffuses easier from East to West than from North to South, as
changing longitude has a stronger effect on climate and seasonality than
changing latitude-- giving Eurasia an advantage over America and Africa.
Furthermore, Diamond resurrects the late Julian Simon's argument that
technological success depends on population density and the ability of a
society to produce a surplus beyond subsistence, so that there are
resources available for thinking and experimenting. Maximum population density
was largely a function of the ability of the environment to feed the population.
Writing, for instance, required large and dense settlements with complex
hierarchical institutions, much different from hunting and gathering tribes.
The notion that much economic history is a game against nature, in which people
form certain views about its regularities and use these to manipulate them
to improve material conditions is a powerful one. Diamond's insight is that
nature differs from place to place and that certain environments are easier
to manipulate than others. The economic historian must add two qualifications to
this. One is that environments can be manipulated or abandoned. While Diamond
describes in detail pre-historic population movements (which he deduces from
linguistic evidence), he does not realize that he tells the story of regions, not
necessarily of people who always had the option to move to a more generous and
flexible area. Secondly, it could be argued that much technology emerges precisely
because the environment is not generous and requires hard work and ingenuity. What
is the partial derivative of technological creativity with respect to initial
geographical endowment? In the final analysis, this is still unknown.
The book is full of other clever arguments about writing, language, path dependence
and so on. It is brimming with wisdom and knowledge, and it is the kind of knowledge
economic historian have always loved and admired. If you teach economic history, any
kind of economic history, go read this book. Or else you are taking a serious risk
that a clever undergraduate who has read it will ask you a question you don't know
the answer to. Nothing worse is imaginable, short of organizing a world conference
and canceling at the last moment.
Joel Mokyr Departments of Economics and History Northwestern University
Joel Mokyr is author of _The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic
Progress_ (Oxford University Press, 1990).
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