On Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel

The application of materialist analysis to the study of societies is at the core of Jared Diamond’s seminal work, Guns, Germs, and Steel.  As a scientist trained in biology, Diamond has proven adept at applying this material analysis in describing broad patterns related to the rise and fall of civilizations, in contrast to some social scientists who argue that human ingenuity and other factors, such as genetics, played a more central role in these events. 

Describing the modern-day agrarian societies of the Polynesians, Diamond notes that “a political unit's population size interacted with its population density to influence Polynesian technology and economic, social, and political organization. In general, the larger the size and the higher the density, the more complex and specialized were the technology and organization [of these societies].”[1]  Similarly, Professor W. Crosby in his journal article “Notes and Documents: Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” proffers the thesis that “epidemics have been chiefly responsible for the awesome diminution in the number of native American,”[2] outlining the great death toll among indigenous North American peoples due to first contact with diseases such as smallpox and measles.  In both cases, proximate causes including geography and access to natural resources represent material facts that strongly influenced the relative failures of those societies, in contrast to some Western European societies, such as Spain, France, and England.

Further analyzing materialistic, proximate causes regarding the inability of indigenous peoples to overcome conquerors in 16th-18th century North America and ultimately form industrialized societies, scholar Pekka Hämäläinen in her essay “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures” notes the “reinvention…as equestrian people” of the Great Plains Indians resulted in “one of history’s most renowned horse cultures.”[3]  But also that the “success story has a bleak undercurrent…[including] the harmful effects of horses on socioeconomic systems and the environment…,[the disruption of] subsistence economies, [the undermining of] traditional political hierarchies, and [the intensification of] resource competition and warfare.”[4]  As a result, she theorizes, “North American history is best understood along longitudinal lines.”[5] 

Horses, having been introduced to North American indigenous peoples by the Spanish in the 15th century became a resource allowing for greatly heightened mobility and an instrumental tool used in highly successful hunting and endeavors of war.  In the end, after a survey of Southern, Northern, and Eastern Plains’ civilizations use and adoption of the horse, Hämäläinen concludes that only the Lakota, uniquely situated geographically, were able to strike a balance in absorbing this domestic beast, the horse, “finding a functional equilibrium among horse numbers, ecological constraints, and economic, cultural, and military imperatives.”[6]  Geological features including the Rocky Mountains in the West, bitterly cold climates in the North, competition for, and the ultimate denuding of, grazing pastures in the South, and economic constraints resulting from capitalist motivations of European settlers in the East ultimately made the horse nonviable as a decisive tool in establishing any sort of hegemony over the Indians’ conquerors.

Taken together these imminent scholars produce a materialist interpretation of the causal effects of geography, microbes, and natural resources that offer a modern perspective on the rise and fall of civilizations all over the world and throughout the history of humankind.

Bibliography

Crosby, Alfred W. “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3 ser. 33 (April 1976), 289-299.

Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York, NY: W.W. Norton &, 1997.

Nichols, Roger L., ed. The American Indian: Past and Present. 6th ed. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008

[1] Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human, 52.

[2] Crosby, Alfred W. “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” 290.

[3] Nichols, Roger L., ed. The American Indian: Past and Present, 53

[4] Ibid,. 54.

[5] Ibid., 55.

[6] Ibid., 74