Has anyone rebuted Jared Diamond's: Guns, Germs n Steel?

[R_P_A_S]

Hey guys... Most of us here know about this book. Guns, Germs and Steel. Jared Diamond's explination or theory I guess. to why some civilizations i.e. the Europeans got the upper hand on others around the glove, South America and Africa most notably...

I personally feel he makes great and accurate points. I consider his theory or studies pretty much facts of the matter. BUT is there anyone out there with a different theory or a better one? anything of that sort?

[Yuppie Grinder]

I read the book when I was 13 and most of it went way over my head. From what I remember it was excellent and very compatible with a Marxist understanding of global economy and history.

[#FF0000]

I thought it was pretty good but it was a little too deterministic, I thought. The whole thing sort of acts like Europe's dominance was a foregone conclusion which really isn't the case.

[ckaihatsu]

Hey guys... Most of us here know about this book. Guns, Germs and Steel. Jared Diamond's explination or theory I guess. to why some civilizations i.e. the Europeans got the upper hand on others around the glove, South America and Africa most notably...

I personally feel he makes great and accurate points. I consider his theory or studies pretty much facts of the matter. BUT is there anyone out there with a different theory or a better one? anything of that sort?


As fascinating, and even fun, as Diamond's presentation is, it puts the cart in front of the horse, and is basically the tabloid-journalism of history.

Any approach to history that's too technology-focused will just wind up being arbitrary in its analysis, even with terrific empirical evidence and objective facts on its side. This is because history doesn't move in fits and starts according to the next "killer app", but rather is determined on the broadest of scales by the *social organization* that underlies its outlook and capabilities at any given point.





Europe’s very backwardness encouraged people to adopt new ways of wresting a livelihood from elsewhere. Slowly, over many centuries, they began to apply techniques already known in China, India, Egypt, Mesopotamia and southern Spain. There was a corresponding slow but cumulative change in the social relations of society as a whole, just as there had been in Sung China or the Abbasid caliphate. But this time it happened without the enormous dead weight of an old imperial superstructure to smother continued advance. The very backwardness of Europe allowed it to leapfrog over the great empires.

Economic and technical advance was not automatic or unhampered. Again and again old structures hindered, obstructed and sometimes crushed new ways. As elsewhere, there were great revolts which were crushed, and movements which promised a new society and ended up reproducing the old. Fertile areas were turned into barren wastes and prosperous cities ended up as desolate ruins. There were horrific and pointless wars, barbaric torture and mass enslavement. Yet in the end a new organisation of production and society emerged very different to anything before in history.

The first changes were in cultivation. Those who lived off the land during the Dark Ages may have been illiterate, superstitious and ignorant of the wider world. But they knew where their livelihood came from and were prepared, slowly, to embrace new methods of cultivation that enabled them more easily to fill their bellies if they got the chance. In the 6th century a new design of plough, ‘the heavy wheeled plough’ capable of coping with heavy but fertile soil, appeared among the Slav people of eastern Europe and spread westwards over the next 300 years.91 With it came new methods of grazing, which used cattle dung to fertilise the land. Together they allowed a peasant family to increase its crop yield by 50 percent in ‘an agrarian pattern which produced more meat, dairy produce, hides and wool than ever before, but at the same time improved the harvest of grain’.92 One economic historian claims, ‘It proved to be the most productive agrarian method, in relation to manpower, that the world had ever seen’.93




Harman, _People's History of the World_, Chapter 6, 'European feudalism,' pp. 141-142

[khad]

Louis Proyect's blog has some extensive criticism of Diamond's work and methods. Just google it.

[Ismail]

This reminds me of a discussion I had with one guy, who summed up the book:

Guy: The first half, which deals with the development of agriculture, animal husbandry, and metallurgy, is brilliant, carefully written, wonderful stuff.
Guy: Then, in the second half, he sets out to explain the later development of society and makes an utter horse's ass of himself in what I can only suppose was a conscious attempt to avoid sounding Marxist.
Guy: He is talking about pre-capitalist class societies and he says they were divided into kings and slaves.
Guy: And I'm sitting there thinking, OK, Mr. Diamond, what do you do with a feudal landlord, or a slave-owning Athenian citizen.
Guy: The whole political struggle in ancient Rome was quite obviously first and foremost among various classes of Roman citizen, while the slaves were mostly kept on the sidelines.
Guy: The senate kicked the king out because the king was too democratic. Then the wider Roman public brought in the emperor.
Guy: You can't make sense of that with an analysis of kings and slaves.
Guy: And he simplifies it to this ridiculous extent.

[smellincoffee]

There's a recent book out that supposedly criticizes it (Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu) but it can't be that critical given that Diamond has a praiseful blurb on the back of it. I haven't read the book myself: I think it promotes free markets.