The key ideas

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Jared Diamond, 1997

Why did the Spanish sail to Peru, and not the Incas to Spain? Jared Diamond looks for the answer not in the intelligence or character of peoples but in grains, animals and the shape of continents. He follows the chain from a wild grass to steel swords and deadly epidemics and shows how, thirteen thousand years ago, it was being decided who would become the conqueror.

Who it is for

For anyone who wonders why some countries are rich and others poor. And for anyone who loves history that actually answers the question "why".

Invention is often the mother of necessity, rather than vice versa.

A question on a New Guinea beach

In July 1972 the American biologist Jared Diamond was walking along a beach on the island of New Guinea, where he was studying birds. A local politician named Yali came up to him, a clever and curious man. After a long conversation Yali asked a question the scientist could never forget. Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it here, but we black people had so little cargo of our own? Cargo here meant everything that arrived by ship: steel axes, matches, medicine, clothes, umbrellas.

Diamond is a physiologist, ecologist and geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles. His book Guns, Germs, and Steel came out in 1997, and a year later it won the Pulitzer Prize. In the book, Yali's question grows into a question about the whole world. Why did Europeans conquer the Americas and Australia, while the Incas or the Aboriginal Australians never sailed off to conquer Europe?

Many people carry the simplest answer around in their heads without saying it out loud: some peoples must be cleverer than others. Diamond rejects it from the first pages. His answer is different: the histories of peoples took different paths because of differences in their environments, not in their biology. The continents were dealt different cards at the start: different wild plants, different animals and a different shape of land.

In these twenty-five minutes you'll follow Diamond's chain from the seed of a wild grass to Spanish steel. You'll see how a handful of men crushed an empire, why nobody ever harnessed the zebra, why people in Mexico put wheels on toys and why China once chose to give up its fleet.

One hundred and sixty-eight men against eighty thousand

On 16 November 1532, in the Peruvian town of Cajamarca, two worlds met. On one side stood the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro and his 168 soldiers, cut off from any help. On the other stood Atahualpa, ruler of the empire of the Incas, the largest and richest state in the Americas, surrounded by around eighty thousand warriors.

Pizarro hid his men around the square. When Atahualpa rejected the Bible he was offered and threw it to the ground, the Spanish struck: gunshots, trumpets, horsemen, steel swords. The Indians died by the thousands, and the Spanish did not lose a single man. Atahualpa was taken prisoner. He promised to fill a room with gold in exchange for his freedom. The Spanish got the gold and executed their prisoner anyway.

Diamond opens the book with this scene because it shows every direct cause of the Spanish advantage. Steel against clubs of stone and wood. Horses against warriors on foot. Ships that carried the Spanish across the ocean. Writing: Pizarro knew from written accounts how Cortés before him had captured the ruler of the Aztecs. And smallpox, which shortly before had killed the previous Inca ruler and split the empire in a civil war.

But why did things turn out this way and not the other way round? Why didn't Atahualpa sail to Spain and capture the Spanish king? That is the real question of the book, and its answer lies far from Cajamarca.

Read in Livria

About the author

Jared Diamond is an American physiologist, ecologist and geographer, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. For many years he studied the birds of New Guinea. This book won him the Pulitzer Prize.

All books by this author: Jared Diamond

Terms from the book

  • Edison
  • Columbus
  • Cortés
  • Samurai
  • Pulitzer Prize
  • natural experiment
  • Tolstoy
  • New Guinea: A large island north of Australia. Its eastern half is the state of Papua New Guinea, and the western half belongs to Indonesia.
  • Yali: A politician from New Guinea whom Diamond talked to in 1972. His question about cargo became the starting point of the book.
  • cargo: Here: the goods and things Europeans brought to New Guinea by ship and by plane, from steel axes to medicine.
  • Incas: The people who built the largest empire of pre-Columbian America, in the Andes of South America. The Spanish conquered the empire in the 1530s.
  • Cajamarca: A town in the mountains of Peru where, on 16 November 1532, Pizarro's band captured the Inca ruler Atahualpa.
  • Pizarro: Francisco Pizarro (c. 1478 to 1541), a Spanish conquistador who conquered the Inca Empire.
  • Atahualpa: The last independent ruler of the Inca Empire. He was captured by the Spanish at Cajamarca in 1532 and executed in 1533.
  • Aztecs: The people who, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, ruled a vast state in central Mexico with its capital at Tenochtitlan.
  • smallpox: A severe contagious viral disease that killed huge numbers of people for centuries. It was defeated by worldwide vaccination: the last natural case was in 1977.
  • proximate causes: Diamond's term: the immediate reasons one society gained the upper hand over another, such as weapons, horses, diseases and writing.
  • ultimate causes: Diamond's term: the deep reasons why some societies ended up with guns, germs and steel and others did not. Above all, geography and the set of wild plants and animals.
  • domestication: Turning wild plants and animals into crops and livestock that grow and breed under human care.
  • Maori: The indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand.
  • Moriori: The indigenous people of the Chatham Islands, descendants of Polynesians. In 1835 they were attacked by the Maori.
  • Chatham: A group of small islands in the Pacific Ocean, about 800 kilometres east of New Zealand.
  • hunter-gatherers: People who get their food by hunting, fishing and gathering wild plants, without growing crops or keeping livestock.
  • almonds: A tree and its nuts. Wild almonds are bitter and contain a substance that turns into poisonous cyanide in the body.
  • selection: Choosing plants or animals with the desired traits for further breeding.
  • Fertile Crescent: An arc of fertile land in the Middle East, from Israel and Lebanon through Syria and southern Turkey to Iraq. One of the first centres of farming.
  • teosinte: A wild plant from Mexico, the ancestor of maize. Its ear is tiny and looks almost nothing like a corn cob.
  • llama: A domestic animal from the Andes of South America, a relative of the camel. It is used to carry loads and for its wool.
  • Anna Karenina principle: An image from Diamond's book, not a scientific law: success needs many conditions to line up at once, while failure needs only one that does not.
  • Sumerians: An ancient people of southern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq. Around 3000 BC they created one of the first writing systems.
  • Mesoamerica: A historical region covering southern Mexico and part of Central America, home to the Olmecs, the Maya and the Aztecs.
  • Sequoyah: A Cherokee man (c. 1770 to 1843) who, around 1820, created a syllabary for the Cherokee language without being able to read any language.
  • Cherokee: A Native American people of what is now the southeastern United States.
  • phonograph: The first device for recording and playing back sound, built by Edison in 1877.
  • Tasmania: A large island south of Australia. About ten thousand years ago the sea cut it off from the mainland.
  • chiefdom: An anthropological term: a society of thousands of people in which a hereditary chief holds power over many villages.
  • kleptocrats: Diamond's word for rulers who take a share of other people's labour for themselves. Literally "ruling thieves".

All terms

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