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The essential argument is very clear and simple. Almost all of history after the Ice Ages happened in the temperate midlatitudes of Eurasia. The natural environment of this large region is better for human progress than are the tropical environments of the world, and the other temperate (or midlatitude) regions -- South Africa, Australia, and midlatitude North and South America -- could not be central for human progress because they are much smaller than Eurasia and are isolated from it and from each other. Although many civilizations arose and flourished in temperate Eurasia, only two were ultimately crucial, because of their especially favorable environments: China and Europe. Finally: Some 500 years ago China's environment proved itself to be inferior to Europe's in several crucial ways. Therefore Europe in the end was triumphant. Diamond distinguishes between the "ultimate factors" that explain "the broadest patterns of history" and the "proximate factors," which are effects of the "ultimate factors" and explain short-term and local historical processes. (p. 87). The "ultimate" factors are environmental. The most important of these "ultimate" factors are the natural conditions that led to the rise of food production. Those world regions that became agricultural very early gained a permanent advantage in history. The "ultimate" causes led, in much later times, to regional variations in technology, social organization, and health; these, then, were the "proximate" causes of modern history. More than half of Guns, Germs, and Steel is devoted to elucidating the "ultimate" causes, explaining why differing environments led to differing rates in the acquisition of agriculture, and explaining how the resulting differences largely determined the "fate" (his word) of different peoples. . . . . . . Most of the argument of Guns, Germs, and Steel is devoted to proving the primacy throughout history of midlatitude Eurasia, and within this region of Europe (supposed heir to the Fertile Crescent) and China. If the argument stopped there, we would have a sort of Eurasia-centrism, not Eurocentrism. But Diamond's purpose is to explain "the broadest patterns of history," and so he must answer this final question: Why did Europe, not Eurasia as a whole, or Europe and China in tandem, rise to become the dominant force in the world? Diamond's answer is, predictably: the natural environment. The "ultimate" causes of Europe's rise, relative to China, are a set of qualities that Europe's environment possesses and China's environment lacks, or China's possesses but in lesser degree. The "ultimate" environmental causes then produce the "proximate" causes -- which are cultural: [The] proximate factors behind Europe's rise [are] its development of a merchant class, capitalism, and patent protection for inventions, its failure to develop absolute despots and crushing taxation, and its Graeco-Judeo-Christian tradition of empirical inquiry (p. 410). This is, of course, utterly conventional Eurocentric history. There is now a huge literature that systematically questions each of these economic, political, and intellectual explanations for the rise of Europe, much of this literature consisting of Eurocentric arguments of one sort attacking Eurocentric arguments of some other sort -- yet Diamond ignores all this scholarship and simply announces that these (and a few other cultural things) are the true "proximate" causes of the rise of Europe. Evidently he views the matter as settled. The problem, for him, is to find the underlying environmental causes. Topography is the key; or more precisely topographic relief and the shape of the coastline. Europe has a highly indented coastline, with five large peninsulas that approach islands in their isolation...China's coastline is much smoother...Europe is carved up...by high mountains (the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and Norwegian border mountains), while China's mountains east of the Tibetan Plateau are much less formidable barriers (p.414). These somewhat inaccurate observations about physical geography lead into one of the truly classical arguments of Eurocentric world history: the theory of Oriental despotism. This is the belief that the so-called "Oriental" civilizations -- essentially China, India, and the Islamic Middle East -- have always been despotic; that Europeans alone understand and enjoy true freedom; that Europe alone, therefore, has had the historical basis for intellectual innovation and social progress. Diamond invokes a pair of well-known environmentalistic theories, adding nothing new to them, about how physical geography is the main reason why Europe, not China, acquired the cultural attributes that gave it ultimate hegemony: "a merchant class, capitalism...patent protection for inventions...failure to develop absolute despots and crushing taxation," and the rest. Here is how it works: China is not broken up topographically into isolated regions, because it does not have high mountains like the Alps and does not have a coastline sufficiently articulated to isolate nearby coastal regions from one another. This explains the fact that China became unified culturally and politically 2,000 years ago. Europe, on the other hand, could not be unified culturally and politically because of its indented coastline (its "capes and bays," in the traditional theory) and because of its sharply differentiated topographic relief (its "many separate geographical cores" in the traditional theory). Europe therefore developed into a mosaic of separate cultures and states. China's geographically determined unity led it to become a single state, an empire; and an empire must, by nature, be despotic. Why? Because a person cannot leave one state and emigrate to another to avoid oppression, since there is only the one state, the Chinese empire. Hence there is continued oppression of the populace and centralized manipulation of the economy. So: no freedom, little development of individualism, little incentive to invent and innovate (taxation, political control, etc.), no development of free markets, and no development of a polity resembling the modern democratic nation-state. These "harmful effects of unity" (p. 413) led China to, in essence, stagnate after the 14th or 15th century. Europe, by comparison, continued to forge ahead. Hence Europe triumphed. The geography is wrong and so is the history. Southern Europe has the requisite "capes and bays" and separate "geographic cores." But the historical processes that Diamond is discussing here pertain to the last five or six hundred years of history, and most of the major developments during this period, those that are relevant to his argument, occurred mainly in northern and western Europe, which is flat: the North European Plain from France to Russia; the extension of that plain across France almost to the Spanish border; southern England. Even Central Europe is not really isolated from northern and western Europe. There are no serious coastline indentations between Bordeaux and Bremen. If we look at the distribution of population throughout this region, there is no isolation and not very much development of cores. The crystallization of northern Europe's tiny feudal polities into modern states occurred for reasons that had little to do with topographic differentiation; the boundaries of most of these states do not reflect topographic barriers and most of their cultural cores are not ecological cores. The idea that the pattern of multiple states somehow favored democracy is (in my view) a Eurocentric myth: each of these states was as despotic as -- indeed, usually much more despotic than-- China, and emigration from one polity to another was not substantial enough to have had any effect on the development of democracy. Further: what Diamond calls Europe's "competing" states often were warring states; probably China was more peaceful during most centuries than Europe was, and an environment of peace surely is more conducive to development than one of war. And finally, Diamond's view of Chinese society is based on outdated European beliefs. China did not stagnate in the late Middle Ages: Chinese development continued without interruption, and Europe did not outdo China in technology, in the development of market institutions, and indeed in the ordinary person's standard of living, until the later 18th century. In short, the idea that China's topography led to China's achievement of a unified society and polity, and that this unity somehow led to despotism and stagnation, is simply not supported by the facts. Diffusion is also supposed by Diamond to have played a large role in the triumph of Europe over China. Throughout Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond argues that geographical barriers to diffusion are one of the main reasons why some societies failed to progress. But China, he argues, had fewer barriers to diffusion than Europe had. Shouldn't China, therefore, have progressed more rapidly than barrier-ridden Europe? How does he get around this contradiction? First, he introduces a tortuous theory to the effect that, not only is too little diffusion a hindrance to development, but so, too, is too much diffusion. Like the second of the Three Bears, Europe had just the right balance between too little differentiation and too much, and this, mysteriously, led to more intense diffusion of innovations in Europe than in China. Second, he claims -- another traditional argument -- that Europe's lack of political unity somehow favored the diffusion of innovations, whereas it certainly did the opposite. Political boundaries are barriers to human movement; also, they frequently correlate with linguistic boundaries and thus can be barriers to communication. The third argument is largely an implicit one, though clearly evident nonetheless. Diamond claims that social and technological development moved steadily westward from the Fertile Crescent to Europe. He states (incorrectly) that writing, invented in the Fertile Crescent, was merely a tool of the ancient despotic bureaucracies until the alphabet diffused westward to Greece, where, he says (again incorrectly), the Greeks added the vowels and thereby transformed it into an instrument of creative writing: of innovation, abstract thought, poetry, and the rest. In essence: an argument that intellectual progress diffused westward and became consequential when writing reached Europe. This must be the basis for his argument that "the Graeco-Judeo-Christian tradition of empirical inquiry" is one of the reasons why Europe triumphed. Yet throughout Guns, Germs, and Steel Diamond insists (rightly) that all peoples are equally creative, equally rational. This is a contradiction but not really a historical problem, since "empirical inquiry" was not invented by Europeans and was as highly developed in China, and other civilizations, as in Europe. Guns, Germs, and Steel is influential in part because its Eurocentric arguments seem, to the general reader, to be so compellingly "scientific." Diamond is a natural scientist (a bio-ecologist), and essentially all of the reasons he gives for the historical supremacy of Eurasia and, within Eurasia, of Europe, are taken from natural science. I suppose environmental determinism has always had this scientistic cachet. I dispute Diamond's argument not because he tries to use scientific data and scientific reasoning to solve the problems of human history. That is laudable. But he claims to produce reliable, scientific answers to these problems when in fact he does not have such answers, and he resolutely ignores the findings of social science while advancing old and discredited theories of environmental determinism. That is bad science. Notes and references deleted. |