Summary of Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel
Written in 2017
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Prologue: Yali’s Question
Such as the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, the Americas, and southernmost Africa, are no longer even masters of their own lands but have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonists. (15)
Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than some other way?
Technological and political differences as of AD 1500 were the immediate cause of the modern world’s inequalities. But how did it get to this way?
Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history’s broadest pattern and this book’s subject.
Yali’s question: Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own? (14)
Counter Arguments (17) :
1. If succeeded in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination?
2. Eurocentrism: Isn’t that prominence just an ephemeral phenomenon of the last few centuries?
3. Glorification of Civilization: industrial vs. hunter-gatherer
My motive for investigating these geographical differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history.
Some people developed guns, germs, and steel before others did; and some peoples never developed these power factors at all.
Until we have some conving, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book (25).
Overall content: 28-29
Perhaps the biggest of these unsolved problems is to establish human history as a historical science, on a par with recognized historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, geology, and climatology” (32).
Part One: From Eden to Cajamarca
Chapter 1: up to the starting line
But it turns out that the actual reasons behind the more rapid development of Eurasian societies were not at all the straightforward ones that our imaginary archaeologist of 11,000 BC guessed. (52)
Chapter 2: A Natural Experiment of History
Environmental factors play a big part in development, these factors were included among Polynesian islands: island climate, geological type, marine resources, area, terrain fragmentation, and isolation (58)
Difference between Maori and Moriori pg. 54
“As a result of all this environmentally related variation in subsistence, human population increases” (61).
“A political unit’s population size interacted with its population density to influence Polynesian technology and economic, social, and political organization” (62).
“In short, Polynesia furnishes us with a convincing example of environmentally related diversification of human societies in operation” (66).
Chapter 3: Collision at Cajamarca
“For when, either in ancient or modern times, have such great exploits been achieved by so few against so many, over so many climes, across so many seas, over such distances by land, to subdue the unseen and unknown?” (69).
“Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples” (74).
Centralized political organization and enabled Spain to finance, build, staff, and equip the ships
The systems of writing “Atahuallpa remained entirely ignorant about Spain’s conquests of Central America’s most powerful and populous Indian societies” (79).
“In short, literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history” (80).
Atahuallpa had very little information about the Spaniards, their military power, and their intent.
Diseases (77-78).
“Long before anyone began manufacturing guns and steel, others of those same factors had led to the expansions of some non-European peoples, as we shall see in later chapter” (81).
Part Two: The Rise and Spread of Food Production
How food production arose in a few centers, and how it spread at unequal rates from there to other areas
Chapter 4: Farmer Power
“Domesticating wild animals and plants and eating the resulting livestock and crops” (86).
“As we’ll see, food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel” (86).
“To understanding how geographical differences in food production arose, this chapter will trace the main connections through which food production led to all the advantages that enabled Pizarro to capture Atahuallpa, and Fred Hirschy’s people to dispossess Levi’s” (86).
“That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-production tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes” (88).
“In practice, nomadic hunter-gatherers space their children about four years apart by means of lactational amenorrhea, sexual abstinence, infanticide, and abortion. By contrast, sedentary people, unconstrained by problems of carrying young children on treks, can bear and raise as many children as they can feed” (89).
“Lets them achieve much higher population densities than hunter-gatherers” (89).
“In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage full-time in political activities” (90).
“Those complex political units are much better able to mount a sustained war of conquest that is an egalitarian band of hunters” (90).
“People with domestic horses enjoyed an enormous military advantage over those without” (91).
“In short, plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human populations. The resulting food surpluses and the animal-based means of transporting those surplus, were a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies” (92).
Chapter 5: History’s haves and have nots
“Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have nots: between people with farm power and those without it” (because the comparison 93).
questions pg 93-94
“Those imported domesticates may be thought of as “founder” crops and animals, because they founded local food production. The arrival of founder domesticates enabled local people to become sedentary, and thereby increased the likelihood of local crops’ evolving from wild plants that were gathered, brought home and planted accidentally, and later planted intentionally” (100).
“The people of areas with a head start on food production thereby gained a head start on the path leading toward guns, germs, and steel, The result was a long series of collisions between the haves and the have-nots of history” (103).
Chapter 6: To farm or not to Farm----
explaining geographic differences in times and modes of onset of food production
Hunter-gathers: “They seemed to have to work hard, to be driven by the daily quest for food, often to be close to starvation, to lack such elementary material comforts as soft beds and adequate clothing, and to die young” (104).
“The first people who adopted food production could obviously not have been making a conscious choice or consciously striving toward farming as a goal, because they had never seen farming and had no way of knowing what it would be like” (105).
“Food production evolved as a by-product of decisions made without awareness of their consequences” (106).
“Throughout human history farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both. All these elements come into play in people’s separate decisions about how to obtain their food” (108).
“We must consider food production and hunting-gathering as alternative strategies competing with each other” (109).
Decline in availability of wild foods
Increased availability of domesticable wild plants
Cumulative development of technologies on which food production would eventually depend---technologies for collecting, processing, and storing wild foods.
Two-way link between the rise in human population density and the rise in food production (an autocatalytic process--- one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle)
Chapter 7: How to make an Almond
“Plant domestication may be defined as growing a plant and thereby, consciously or unconsciously, causing it to change genetically from its wild ancestor in ways making it more useful to human consumers” (114).
“Hence they couldn’t have known that, whatever they were doing, they would enjoy a tasty treat as a result” (115).
“Almonds provide a striking example of bitter seeds and their change under domestication” (118 Aren’t we just like the almonds, changing to our environment’s needs, surviving under the burden of evolution?).
“Those principles of crop development by artificial selection still serve as our most understandable model of the origin of species by natural selection” (130).
Chapter 8: Apples or Indians
“Why, among the areas where ag did arise independently, did it develop much earlier in some than in others?” (131).
“How, in short, do we access the potential of an entire local flora for domestication? For those Native Americans who failed to domesticate North American apples, did the problem really lie with the Indians or with the apples?” (134).
Advantages of the Fertile Crescent flora pg 136-38
Lies within a zone of Mediterranean climate, a climate characterized by mild, wet, winter and long, hot, dry summers.
Fertile Crescent flora’s wild ancestors of Fertile Crescent crops were already abundant
Includes a high percentage of hermaphroditic, “selfers”, plants that usually pollinate themselves
“It included an unusually high percentage of wild plants suitable for domestication” (138).
Other Mediterranean zones but these five reasons paved the path for its significance
Western Eurasia has the world’s largest zone of Mediterranean climate
Among Mediterranean zones, western Eurasia’s experiences the greatest climatic variation from season to season and year to year
“A high diversity of species and a high percentage of annuals” (139).
It provides a wide range of altitudes and topographies within a short distances. Its range of elevation, from the lowest spot on Earth to mountains of 18,000 feet, ensures a corresponding variety of environments, hence a high diversity of the wild plants serving as potential ancestors of crops
Wealth in ancestors not only of valuable crops but also of domesticated big mammals
A final advantage of early food production in the Fertile Crescent is that it may have faced less competition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle than that in some other areas.
I am unaware of anyone’s even seriously suggesting any supposed distinctive biological features of the region’s peoples that might have contributed to the potency of its food production package. Instead, we have seen that the many distinctive features of the Fertile Crescent’s climate, environment, wild plants, and animals together provide a convincing explanation. (143).
“Indigenous crops from different parts of the globe were not equally productive” (147).
“Thus, the limits on indigenous food production in New Guinea had nothing to do with New Guinea peoples, and everything with the New Guinea biota and environment” (150).
“Hence these local failures or limitations of food production cannot be attributed to competition from bountiful hunting opportunities” (154).
“That suite’s modest potential for domestication was responsible for the late start of food production in North America” (156).
Chapter 9: Zebras, Unhappy marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle
“We tend to seek, easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure” (157).
“The anna karenina principle explains a feature of animal domestication that had heavy consequences for human history” (example 157).
Domestication definition and significance: pg 159
The unequal distribution of wild ancestral species
“Surely, if some local wild mammal species of those continents had been domesticable, some Australian, American, and African peoples would have domesticated them and gained great advantage from them” (164).
“To be domesticated, a candidate wild species must possess many different characteristics. Lack of any single required characteristic dooms efforts at domestication” (169).
Diet
Growth rate
Problems of captive breeding
Nasty disposition
Tendency to panic
Social structure
Summary: pg 174
Chapter 10: Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes
What effect, if any, did those differences in the orientation of the continents’ axes have on human history?
“Axis orientations affected the rate of spread of crop and livestock, and possibly also writing, wheels, and other inventions” (176).
“Rapid spread of a crop may preempt domestication not only of the same wild ancestral species somewhere else but also of related wild species” (180).
The constant use of preempt - perhaps the author means something
Crop matters, please review pg 182 and 183
Why was the spread of crop from the Fertile Crescent so rapid?
“The answer depends partly on that east-west axis of Eurasia. Localities distributed east and west of each other at the same latitude share exactly the same day length and its seasonal variations” (183).
“To a lesser degree, they also tend to share similar diseases, regimes of temperature and rainfall, and habitats or biomes” (183).
“But germination, growth, and disease resistance of plants are adapted to precisely those features of climate” (184).
“That’s part of the reason why the Fertile Crescent domesticates spread west and east so rapidly: they were already well adapted to the climates of the regions to which they were spreading” (185).
“Thus, Eurasia’s west-east axis allowed Fertile Crescent crops quickly to launch agriculture over the band of temperate latitudes from Ireland to the Indus Valley, and to enrich the agriculture that arose independently in eastern Asia” (185).
“Africa and the Americas are thus the two largest landmasses with a predominantly north-south axis and resulting slow diffusion” (188).
“Topographic and ecological barriers, much more pronounced on some continents than on others, were locally important obstacles to diffusion” (189).
“Continental differences in axis orientation affected the diffusion not only of food production but also of other technologies and inventions” (190).
“That faster spread of Eurasian agriculture, played a role in the more rapid diffusion of Eurasian writing, metallurgy, technology, and empires” (191).
Part Three: From Food to Guns, Germs, and Steel:
Explore how the ultimate cause of food production led to the proximate causes of germs, literacy, technology, and centralized government.
Chapter 11: Lethal Gift of Livestock (pg 197)
“Those geographic differences constitute important ultimate answers to Yali’s question about why different people ended up with disparate degrees of power and affluence” (195).
Why was the exchange of nasty germs between the Americas and Europe so unequal? Why didn’t Native American diseases instead decimate the Spanish invaders?
“For a microbe, spread may be defined mathematically as the number of new victims infected per each original patient...” (198 more info).
“The germ that spreads better leaves more babies and end up favored by natural selection” (198).
Medical interests in germs and body process pg 197-199 (not necessary)
“That’s the principle of vaccination: to stimulate our antibody production without our having to go through the actual experience of the disease, by inoculating us with a dead or weakened strain of microbe” (200).
“Our slowest defensive response is through natural selection, which changes our gene frequencies from gen to gen. For almost any disease, some people prove to be genetically more resistant than are others” (201).
“So-called epidemic diseases, though, produce no cases for a long time, than a whole wave of cases, then no more cases again for a while” (202).
Spread quickly and efficiently, with the result that the whole population gets exposed within a short time
They are “acute illnesses”, you either die or recover completely
The fortunate ones who do recover develop antibodies that leave us immune against a recurrence of the disease
Restricted to humans
To sustain themselves, they need a human population that is sufficiently numerous, and sufficiently densely packed.
Crowd diseases could not sustain themselves in small bands of hunter-gatherer and slash-and-burn farmers
“Because no one in the tribelet had any antibodies against the microbe” (203).
“The small population size of tribelets explains not only why they can’t sustain epidemics introduced from the outside, but also why they never could evolve epidemic diseases of their own to give back to visitors” (204).
Why did the rise of agriculture launch the evolution of our crowd infectious diseases?
“If the rise of farming was thus a bonanza for our microbes, the rise of cities was a greater one, as still more densely packed human populations festered under even worse sanitation conditions”
The rise of civilization plagues the indigenous people by a sense of “social cleansing”
“Given our proximity to the animals we love” (207).
“The importance of lethal microbes in human history is well illustrated by Europeans’ conquest and depopulation of the New World. Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords” (210).
“For the New World as a whole, the Indian population decline in the century or two following Columbus arrival is estimated to have been as large as 95 percent” (211).
“The three most densely populated American centers--- the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the Mississippi Valley--- never became connected by regular fast trade into one huge breeding ground for microbes, in way that Europe, North Africa, India, and China became linked in Roman times” (212).
Chapter 12: Blueprints and Borrowed Letters
“The history of writing illustrates strikingly the similar ways in which geography and ecology influenced the spread of human inventions” (238).
“Tended to interpret history as a progression from savagery to civilization. Key hallmarks of this transition included the development of agriculture, metallurgy, complex technology, centralized government, and writing” (215).
“As a result of that confined distributio, people who pride themselves on being civilized have always viewed writing as the sharpest distinction raising them above “barbarians” or “savages” (215).
“Hence writing brings power to modern societies, by making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and in far greater quantity and detail” (215).
“Writing made the transmission easier, more detailed, more accurate, and more persuasive” (216).
“The three basic strategies underlying writing systems differ in the size of the speech unit denoted by one written sign: either a single basic sound, a whole syllable, or a whole word” (217).
“Inventing a writing system from scratch must have been incomparably more difficult than borrowing and adapting one” (217).
“They had to learn to recognize the same sound or speech unit through all our normal variations in speech volume, pitch, speed, emphasis, phrase grouping, and individual idiosyncrasies of pronunciation” (218).
“Thus, Sumerian writing came to consist of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word or name; phonetic signs (lacking a complete syllabary or alphabet), used in effect for spelling syllables, letter, grammatical elements, or parts of words; and determinatives, which were not pronounced but were used to resolve ambiguities” (222).
“All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity” (222).
Explanation for why writing evolved, what were the prerequisites…
“Blueprint copying”, when you copy or modify an available detailed blueprint
-Ex. Cuneiform and the early mesopotamian writing to independent invention
“Idea diffusion”, when you receive little more than the basic idea and have to reinvent the details” (224).
-Ex. “Cherokee writing remains one of the best-attested examples of a script that arose through idea diffusion” (229).
“Early scripts were incomplete, ambiguous, or complex, or all three” (233).
“Main function was to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings” (235).
“All of the likely or possible independent inventions of writing, and all of the early adaptations of those invented systems, involved socially stratified societies with complex and centralized politically institutions, whose necessary relation to food production” (236).
“Early writing served the needs of those political institutions, and the users were full-time bureaucrats nourished by stored food surpluses grown by food-producing peasants. Writing was never developed or even adopted by hunter-gatherer societies, because they lacked both the institutional uses of early writing and the social and agricultural mechanisms for generating the food surpluses required to feed scribes” (236).
Chapter 13: Necessity’s Mother : why technology did evolve at different rates
“If inventions are as idiosyncratic and unpredictable as the disk seems to suggest, then efforts to generalize about the history of technology may be doomed from the outset” (241).
“Technology, in the form of weapons and transport, provides the direct means by which certain peoples have expanded their realms and conquered other peoples” (241).
“All those facts explain why so many laypeople assume that Eurasians are superior to other peoples in inventiveness and intelligence” (241).
Was it because of the society? “That they were hopelessly conservative, inward looking, and hostile to change” (242)?
“Necessity is the mother of invention” “Inventions supposedly arise when a society has an unfulfilled need: some technology is widely recognised to be unsatisfactory or limiting” (242).
“In fact, many or most inventions were developed by people driven by curiosity or by a love of tinkering, in the absence of any initial demand for the product they had in mind. Once a device had been invented, the inventor then had to find an application for it. Still other devices, invented to serve one purpose, eventually found most of their use for other, unanticipated purpose” (243).
“Thus, invention is often the mother of necessity rather than vice versa” (243).
“The form of the invention eventually adopted might have been somewhat different without the recognized inventor’s contribution.” (245).
“All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product” (245).
“My main two conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need” (246).
What is it that promotes an invention’s acceptance by a society?
Relative economic advantage compared with existing technology
Social value and prestige
Compatibility with vested interests
Advantages can be observed
“We are all familiar with the supposed generalization that rural Third World societies are less receptive to innovation than are Westernized industrial societies” (249).
How do differences in receptivity among societies arise?
Long life expectancy
(Econ) availability of cheap slave labor lessen innovation while high wages encourage
(Econ) Patents and property laws
(Econ) Industrial training
(Econ) Individualism keeps money to themselves
(Econ) capitalism invest capital
(Ideo) Risk-taking behavior
(Ideo) Scientific outlook
(Ideo) Tolerance of diverse views
(Ideo) Religion tolerance
Warfare “Throughout history, war has been a leading stimulant of technological innovation”
Centralized government
Climate “benign environ leave people free from struggle for existence, free to devote to innovation”
Abundance or scarcity of environmental resources
“I shall now argue that the diversity of independent factors behind tech innovation actually makes it easier to understand history’s broad pattern” (251).
“The result, with the arrival of Western technology, is that the more entrepreneurial societies are not exploiting Western technology to overwhelm their conservative neighbors” (252).
“The relative importance of local invention of and of borrowing depends mainly on two factors: the ease of invention of the particular technology, and the proximity of the particular society to other societies” (254).
“Such complex inventions were usually acquired by borrowing, because they spread more rapidly than they could be independently invented locally” (255).
“When a widely useful invention does crop up in one society, it then tends to spread in either of two ways. One way is that other societies see or learn of the invention, are receptive to it, and adopt it. The second is that societies lacking the invention find themselves at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the inventing society, and they become overwhelmed and replaced if the disadvantage is sufficiently great” (255).
“The societies most accessible to receiving inventions by diffusion were those embedded in the major continents” (257).
“Illustrate well the roles of geography and of diffusion in the history of technology. Without diffusion, fewer technologies are acquired, and more existing technologies are lost” (258).
“Because technology begets more technology, the importance of an invention’s diffusion potentially exceeds the importance of the original invention. Technology’s history exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process: that is, one that speeds up at a rate that increases with time, because the process catalyzes itself” (258).
‘Advances depend upon previous mastery of simpler problems’ (259).
‘The other main reason for autocatalysis is that new technologies and materials make it possible to generate still other new technologies by recombination’ (259).
“That consideration tended to cause technology to develop most rapidly on continents with few geographic and ecological barriers to diffusion, either within that continent or on other continents. Technology develops fastest in large productive regions with large human populations, many potential inventors, and many competing societies” (261).
Time onset of food production
Barriers to diffusion
Human population size
Pg 262 Why Europe? Reasons here
“All these effects that continental differences in area, population, ease of diffusion, and onset of food production exerted on the rise of technology became exaggerated, because technology catalyzes itself” (264).
Chapter 14: From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy
“The combination of government and religion has thus functioned, together with germs, writing, and technology, as one of the four main sets of proximate agents leading to history’s broadest pattern. How did government and religion arise?” (267).
Bands
-5 to 80 people
-close relatives by birth or by marriage
- African Pygmies, Inuit
- nomadic hunters
- no single base of residence
- joint used land, no econ specialization, no formal institutions to resolve conflict
-egalitarian: there is no formalized social stratification into upper and lower classes, no formalized or hereditary leadership, and no formalized monopolies of information and decision making.
-leadership through personality, strength, intelligence, and fighting skills
-The band is the political, economic, and social organization that we inherited from our millions of years of evolutionary history. Our developments beyond it all took place within the last few tens of thousands of years
Tribes
- hundreds rather than dozens of people
- fixed settlements
- group that shares language and culture
- each hamlet was involved in a kaleidoscopically changing pattern of war and shifting alliances with all neighboring hamlets.
- a prerequisite for living in settlements is either food production or else a productive environment with especially concentrated resources that can be hunted and gathered within a small area (271)
- consists of more than one recognized kinship group, termed clans, which exchange marriage
“One reason why the organization of human government tends to change from that of a tribe to that of a chiefdom in societies with more than a few hundred members is that the difficult issue of conflict resolution between strangers becomes increasingly acute in larger groups” (271).
“The ties of relationship binding all makes institutions unnecessary” (271).
-lack bureaucracy
-economy is based on reciprocal exchanges between families
- distinctive with chiefdom of the lack of temples
Chiefdom
Disappeared by early twentieth century
Size create internal conflict
How to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them
One chief, to exercise a monopoly on the right to use force, centralized authority, on critical information
Multiple hereditary lineages living at one site
“While continuing reciprocal exchanges and without marketing or money, chiefdoms developed an additional new system termed a redistributive economy” (275).
“The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesman, between a robber baron and a public benefactor, is merely one of degree: a matter of just how large a percentage of the tribute extracted from producers is retained by the elite, and how much the commoners like the public uses to which the redistributed tribute is put” (276).
“Use the monopoly of force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing violence” (277).
“To gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy---
When supernatural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion” (278).
States
Cities differ from villages in their monumental public works, palaces of rulers, accumulation of capital from tribute or taxes, and concentration of people other than food producers” (279).
Central control, redistribution in taxes more extensive
Economic specialization is more extreme
Adopted slavery (greater economic specialization of states)
Writing
The most fundamental distinction is that states are organized on political and territorial lines, not on the kinship lines that defined bands, tribes, and simple chiefdoms.
Multiethnic and multilingual
Food production dilly-dally Pg 285
Conflict
Decisions
Economic
Space
“Considerations of conflict resolution, decision making, economics, and space thus converge in requiring large societies to be centralized” (288).
“Societies with effective conflict resolution, sound decision making, and harmonious economic redistribution can develop better technology, concentrate their military power, seize larger and more productive territories, and crush autonomous smaller societies one by one” (288).
“Where population densities are high, as in regions occupied by states or chiefdoms, the defeated still have nowhere to flee, but the victors now have two options for exploiting them while leaving them alive. … the victors can leave the defeated in place but deprive them of political autonomy, make them pay regular tribute in food or goods, and amalgamate their society into the victorious state or chiefdom” (292).
“Thus, food production, and competition and diffusion between societies, led as ultimate causes, via chains of causation that differed in detail but that all involved large dense populations and sedentary living, to the proximate agents of conquest: germs, writing, technology, and centralized political organization” (292).
Part Four: Around the World in Five Chapters:
Chapter 15: Yali’s People
“They are the most miserable people of the world, and the human beings who approach closest to brute beasts” (297).
“How else can one account for the fact that white English colonists created a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy..” (300).
“Thus, the human societies of Australia and New Guinea developed in substantial isolation from the Asian societies that founded them” (301).
“Doesn’t that constitute a perfectly controlled experiment in the evolution of human societies, forcing us to a simple racist conclusion? (321).
“White English colonists did not create a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy in Australia. Instead, they imported all of the elements from outside Australia: the livestock, all of the crops, metallurgical knowledges, steam engines, the guns, the alphabet, the political institutions, even the germs. All these were the end products of 10,000 years of developments in Eurasian environments” (321).
Chapter 16: How China became Chinese
“Today, China appears politically, culturally, and linguistically monolithic” (323).
Chapter 17: Speedboat to Polynesia
“Like the rest of the world, most of the present Austronesian realm --- Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and many Pacific islands--- was originally occupied by hunter-gatherers lacking pottery, polished stone tools, domestic animals, and crops” (339).
“Depending on their geographic homeland, East Asian and Pacific peoples differed in their access to domesticable wild plant and animal species and in their connectedness to other peoples. Again and again, people with access to the prerequisites for food production, and with a location favoring diffusion of technology from elsewhere, replaced peoples lacking these advantages” (352).
“However, indigenous germs and food producers prevented Europeans from settling most of this region in significant numbers” (353).
“Thus, unlike Australia and the Americas, East Asia and most Pacific islands remain occupied by East Asian and Pacific peoples” (353).
Chapter 18: Hemispheres colliding
“If if had not been for those extinctions, modern history might have taken a different course” (355).
“These differences stemmed ultimately from Eurasia’s much longer history of densely populated, economically specialized, politically centralized, interacting and competing societies dependent on food production” (359).
“Writing empowered European societies by facilitating political administration and economic exchanges, motivating and guiding exploration and conquest, and making available a range of information and human experience extending into remote place and times” (360).
Eurasia’s long head start on human settlement
More effective food production
Less formidable geographic and ecological barriers to intracontinental diffusion
Writings and wheels
Chapter 19: How Africa Became Black
“Namibia as well is struggling to deal with its colonial past and establish a multiracial society. Namibia illustrated for me fow inseparable Africa’s past is from its present” (377).
Near East--- barley, wheat
Sahel --- Sorghum, pearl millet
West Africa --- african yams, kola nut
Ethiopia -- coffee, tef
“The remaining surprise is that all of Africa’s indigenous crops--- those of the Sahel, Ethiopia, and West Africa --- originated north of the equator. Not a single African crop originated south of it” (389).
“The failure of the Khoisan and Pygmies to develop agriculture was due not to any inadequacy of theirs as farmers but merely to the accident that southern Africa’s wild plants were mostly unsuitable for domestication” (389).
“In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography--- in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate” (401).
Epilogue : The Future of Human History as a Science
Continental differences in wild plant and animal species
Diffusion and migration within
Diffusion between continents
Total population size
“One can, of course, point to proximate factors behind Europe’s rise: its development of a merchant class, capitalism, and patent protection for inventions, its failure to develop absolute despots and crushing taxation, and its greco-Judeo-Christian tradition of critical empirical inquiry” (410).
The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China also hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy” (417).
“Some of that cultural variation is no doubt a product of environmental variation” (417).
“Observation, comparison, and natural experiments” (422).
“Still another way of describing the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science” (423).
“Advanced technology, centralized political organization, and other features of complex societies could emerge only in dense sedentary populations capable of accumulating food surpluses---populations that depended for their food on the rise of agriculture that began around 8500 BC.” (423).
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