Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel is a Pulitzer Price winning book on evolution of the human society, and it's a lot of fun to read. Jared attempted to answer one question, why and how Europe has achieved such predominant advantages on technological and military developments, and ended up conquering the rest of the world. I have always been curious of how the world becomes the way it is nowadays. So this is a summary of the main thesis in the book based on my reading.
The immediate factors that help Europe to dominate other continents, namely Africa, America and Asian-Pacific region, are their advanced weapons, the bacteria and diseases that Europeans carried to the New World, and the advanced industrial technologies, most notably metallurgy. There is no question that these three factors would put Europe in a great advantage over those who don't possess them. The real question, therefore, is why Europe, not Pacific Islanders, say, acquires the three factors? Many arguments come down to the difference between Europeans and the counter-parties that they conquered, such as intellectual ability, open-mindedness for innovations or risk-taking ability. Jared argued that the difference in the people play only a minimal role, if any. However, the environment in which the people inhabit, make the critical difference.
The origin and development of agriculture has play a major role in differentiating a society from it's hunter-gatherer counterpart. Being able to grow crops and raise cattle allows a steadier production of food than hunting-gathering. Surplus of food frees men up to do things other than food production, such as manufacturing, military, religions and politics. Agriculture also supports a larger population in a higher density. A higher population density has very important effects: first, more innovations would be possible because of the higher density of inventors; second, epidemic diseases occur and evolve more rampantly in a more crowded society, because they spread faster among people. Overall, the argument is very straight-forward that whoever has a head-start on agricultural food production, who will also lead in technological, social and even biological developments.
According to history, agriculture was developed in the Euroasia continent much earlier than Africa, America and Asian-Pacific islands. The primary reason is that, Euroasia happens to have the wild predecessors of some of the most popular crops and domesticated animals, while other continents are lack of these resources due to geographical and climatory conditions. In fact, the earliest food production centers were western Asia (known as the Fertile Crescent) and China.
Why Agriculture spread at a much faster rate across the Euroasia continent than the other continents? That's because of the geographical difference between these continents. If we open a world map, we can see that the Euroasia continent spans along an east-west axis, while Africa and America both span along north-south axes. An east-west orientation removes major climatory barriers which tend to retard the diffusion of food, animals and human. On the other hand, food production was confined to where it started by geographical and climatory barriers in America and Africa.
In a word, geographical and climatory conditions have given the Euroasia continent a head-start in agricultural food production, and hence accelerated their departure from the primitive, less-efficient hunter-gatherer life style. This lead has eventually equipped Euroasia with more complex social structure, more advanced technology and therefore significant military advantage, which help them conquering the rest of the world in the recent history. But why Europe, not other countries in the Euroasia, such as China, dominated the world, not vice verse? We will answer that question in my next blog entry.
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