Guns, Germs, and Steel: Epilogue - Afterword

I expect that if the populations of Aboriginal Australia and Eurasia could have been interchanged during the Late Pleistocene, the original Aboriginal Australians would now be the ones occupying most of the Americas and Australia, as well as Eurasia, while the original Aboriginal Eurasians would be the ones now reduced to downtrodden population fragments in Australia.

For both of those reasons, all developments of economically complex, socially stratified, politically centralized societies beyond the level of small nascent chiefdoms were based on food production.

The Americas, despite their large aggregate area, were fragmented by geography and ecology and functioned effectively as several poorly connected smaller continents.

But mention of these environmental differences invites among historians the label “geographic determinism,” which raises hackles.

Compressing 13,000 years of history on all continents into a 400-page book works out to an average of about one page per continent per 150 years, making brevity and simplification inevitable.

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.

The region’s transformation from fertile woodland to eroded scrub or desert has been elucidated by paleobotanists and archaeologists.

They were then suspended as a result of a typical aberration of local politics that could happen anywhere in the world: a power struggle between two factions at the Chinese court (the eunuchs and their opponents).

China’s heartland is bound together from east to west by two long navigable river systems in rich alluvial valleys (the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers), and it is joined from north to south by relatively easy connections between these two river systems (eventually linked by canals).

For instance, the Fertile Crescent, China, and Europe differed in their exposure to the perennial threat of barbarian invasions by horse-mounted pastoral nomads of Central Asia.

A minor cultural feature may arise for trivial, temporary local reasons, become fixed, and then predispose a society toward more important cultural choices, as is suggested by applications of chaos theory to other fields of science.

Why was proselytizing religion (Christianity and Islam) a driving force for colonization and conquest among Europeans and West Asians but not among Chinese?

These examples illustrate the broad range of questions concerning cultural idiosyncrasies, unrelated to environment and initially of little significance, that might evolve into influential and long-lasting cultural features.

Less well known but even more fateful was a traffic accident in the summer of 1930, over two years before Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany, when a car in which he was riding in the “death seat” (right front passenger seat) collided with a heavy trailer truck.

Most historians do not think of themselves as scientists and receive little training in acknowledged sciences and their methodologies.

The sense that history is nothing more than a mass of details is captured in numerous aphorisms: “History is just one damn fact after another,” “History is more or less bunk,” “There is no law of history any more than of a kaleidoscope,” and so on.

In historical sciences, one can provide a posteriori explanations (e.g., why an asteroid impact on Earth 66 million years ago may have driven dinosaurs but not many other species to extinction), but a priori predictions are more difficult (we would be uncertain which species would be driven to extinction if we did not have the actual past event to guide us).

Natural experiments in any field, whether in ecology or human history, are inherently open to potential methodological criticisms.

The origins of their language are among the most disputed questions of linguistics: for not a single other one of the world’s major languages are the affinities to other languages still in doubt.

My minimal coverage of Japan in previous editions of Guns, Germs, and Steel constituted the most important geographic lacuna of my book.

Excavation of the tombs is forbidden because it would constitute desecration—and it might also shed undesired light on where Japan’s imperial family really came from (e.g., perhaps Korea?).

As just one example of how seemingly arcane archaeological disputes can arouse passion, consider the best-known archaeological relic of pre-chronicle Japan: the Eta-Funayama sword of the 5th century A.D., designated a national treasure and held in the Tokyo National Museum.

In 1966, however, the Korean historian Kim Sokhyong shocked Japanese scholars with the suggestion that the missing name was actually King Kaero of Korea, and that the named official was one of his Korean vassals who were then occupying parts of Japan.

Those drawbacks make the precocity of the Ice Age Japanese all the more impressive: around 30,000 years ago, they were among the earliest people in the world to develop stone tools with edges ground to a sharp edge instead of just chipped or flaked.

Jomon villages and cemeteries do not consist of a few richly decorated houses and graves contrasting with numerous spartan ones but are instead rather uniform—suggesting that there was little social stratification into chiefs and commoners.

Massive Korean influences on Japan during the Kofun era—whether through Korean conquest of Japan (the Korean view) or Japanese conquest of Korea (the Japanese view)—transmitted Buddhism, writing, horse riding, and new ceramic and metallurgical techniques to Japan from the Asian mainland.

I suggested that the underlying reason behind Europe’s overtaking China was something deeper than the proximate factors suggested by most historians (e.g., China’s Confucianism vs. Europe’s Judeo-Christian tradition, the rise of western science, the rise of European mercantilism and capitalism, Britain’s deforestation coupled with its coal deposits, etc.).

Fragmentation itself is a multifaceted rather than a monolithic concept: its effect on innovation depends on factors such as the freedom with which ideas and people can move across the boundaries between fragments, and whether the fragments are distinct or just clones of each other.

Whether fragmentation is “optimal” may also vary with the measure of optimality used; a degree of political fragmentation that is optimal for technological innovation may not be optimal for economic productivity, political stability, or human happiness.

It remains a challenge for historians to reconcile these different approaches to answering the question “Why Europe, not China.” The answer may have important consequences for how best to govern China and Europe today.

For example, from Lang’s and my perspective, the disaster of China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when a few misguided leaders were able to close the school systems of the world’s largest country for five years, may not be a unique one-time-only aberration, but may presage more such disasters in the future unless China can introduce far more decentralization into its political system.

They apply to the organization of entire countries: remember the perennial arguments about whether the best form of government is a benign dictatorship, a federal system, or an anarchical free-for-all.

We Americans often fantasize that German and Japanese industries are super-efficient, exceeding American industries in productivity.

Since the publication of GGS, I’ve spent much time talking with people from Silicon Valley and from Route 128, and they tell me that these two industrial belts are quite different in terms of corporate ethos.

Obviously, part of the answer depends on differences in human institutions. The clearest evidence for this view comes from pairs of countries that divide essentially the same environment but have very different institutions and, associated with those institutions, different per-capita GNPs.