Criticisms of Guns, Germs and Steel

There are many criticisms of Jared Diamond’s book, Guns Germs and Steel online, often by historians. Even after reading those criticisms, many people continue to defend Diamond. They tell the historians “you’re missing the point” or “that doesn’t invalidate his general thesis”. I think both sides have a point.

Click here to read my full summary of Guns, Germs and Steel. You can also buy the book at: Amazon | Kobo (affiliate links)

In this post, I intend to summarise, in what is hopefully a fair and balanced way, the main criticisms I’ve found and some responses to that criticism. First off, a few disclaimers:

• My aim in summarising the key criticisms of Guns, Germs and Steel is to save you time. While I have spent a few hours online seeking out such criticism, I am sure I have missed some. Please let me know if you have found other points raised that have not been summarised here.
• I am not a historian, anthropologist, or epidemiologist and am not able to personally judge the factual accuracy of the criticisms I have found. I can only comment on the coherence and persuasiveness of the points raised.

Key criticisms

1. Diamond is too simplistic and ignores the role of human agency

In some versions of this argument, I think Diamond’s critics mischaracterise his argument, or at least they understood it in a different way from me. Sometimes critics claim that Diamond oversimplifies and uses environmental factors to explain everything.

However, while environmental factors are certainly the focus of his book, Diamond never claims they are the only factors. In the epilogue, he explicitly recognises that his analysis leaves unanswered many important questions about cultural and individual idiosyncrasies. He doesn’t dismiss them, they’re just not the focus of his book.

It seems ludicrous to suggest that environmental factors play no role. Surely it is easier to start farming in a mild, wet, relatively flat climate than on a small, deserted island. Diamond argues that these factors are more important than people usually think (at least back when he was writing); others would say that Diamond has overweighted those factors.

But how important environmental factors are is something on which reasonable people can disagree. This is not something that can be proved either way. You can’t ever prove that environment factors contributed 30% to an outcome, human agency contributed 20%, and random chance and other factors contributed 50%. That’s just impossible. As a result, a lot of the online debate around Guns, Germs and Steel consists of Diamond supporters arguing “you haven’t proved that Diamond’s overall argument is wrong” and Diamond critics arguing “that’s impossible to prove, and he hasn’t proven that his argument is correct, either”.

And they’re both right, really. While I think that a person seeking to make a point bears the burden of proving it, the standard of proof may not be very high. An argument that sounds logical and persuasive may be enoguh to shift the burden of proof back onto the other party.

2. Diamond’s argument is too deterministic

Some criticisms of Guns, Germs and Steel are that it portrays the rise of Europe (or at least Eurasia) as being inevitable.

Personally, I did not get that impression. Diamond was just pointing out that Eurasia had certain advantages (or, more importantly, Australia and the Americas had certain disadvantages) that made the dominance of its people more likely. I think he viewed those advantages as a probabilistic cause of Eurasian dominance rather than a sufficient one.

3. Diamond is not a historian or anthropologist

This criticism is true, although by itself it does not convince most Diamond supporters. For good reason, too, as it is an ad hominem argument that comes with an air of elitism. (“Only real historians are allowed to write about history.”)

However, sometimes critics elaborate on this by explaining that their real objection is that Diamond did not engage in careful historical analysis. For example, he read primary texts uncritically and relied on outdated sources. In other words, his methods were poor (at least for chapter 3). Those criticisms are fair.

4. Guns, Germs and Steel is factually incorrect

The factual inaccuracies I have found online mostly focus on Chapters 3 (Collision at Cajamarca) and 11 (The Lethal Gift of Livestock).

One other criticism I have seen is that some crops native to the Americas had much more nutritional value than Diamond indicated. The potato in particular is apparently somewhat of a superfood. Unfortunately, I didn’t see enough detailed discussion of this point to form any view on it.

Chapter 3 errors

Most of the criticism I have found online focuses on this chapter. I am not sure if Diamond’s most egregious errors were largely in this chapter, or if more readers are knowledgeable about the Spanish conquest of the Americas than the other areas Diamond writes about.

The errors in this chapter could be summarised as follows:

• Diamond incorrectly suggests that technology such as guns, steel and writing were the key reasons why the Spanish won. Germs, the Incan civil war (which was caused by germs), and native alliances were much bigger factors. Other Spanish conquistadors, who had exactly the same guns, steel and writing, had previously failed. Native allies were what made helped Cortes and Pizarro win when others had failed.
• Diamond takes the Spanish conquistador’s accounts at face value, even though they are very unreliable and biased accounts.
  • For example, they greatly downplay the role of the Spanish’s Native American allies, and exaggerate their own roles.
  • They also claim to have killed thousands of Indians while in reality it was more likely in the hundreds.
  • There wasn’t actually a battle at Cajamarca. It was more of a kidnapping than a battle. The Incan army was not present. The Spanish killed unarmed Incan civilians.
• Diamond’s account unfairly paints the Native Americans as being naïve.
  • For example, he suggests that the Incans worshipped Atahualpa as a sun-god, which was partly what led to their demise. In reality, Atahualpa’s authority was much more tenuous. He had just won a civil war against his brother and the Incans were a divided force.
  • Diamond also claims that the reason some Native Americans aligned with Pizarro was because they were impressed by their guns and horses. But actually they had aligned with Pizarro because they thought he could be useful to helping them win their civil war.
  • Diamond also claims that Montezuma mistook Cortes for a God. That myth has been thoroughly debunked.

Chapter 11 errors

I found a bit of discussion on this chapter but have not been able to work out exactly how wrong Diamond was.

It seems clear that he made at least a few mistakes:

• For example, Diamond suggests we got smallpox (cowpox) from cattle when, as far back as 1977, we knew it was much more likely we got it from rodents or camels.
• He also guesses that we got malaria from ducks or chickens, which is clearly wrong (although he does indicate that it’s a guess).

Other points seem more debatable:

• Diamond suggests that the infectious crowd diseases prevalent in agricultural communities gave such communities an advantage over other populations. Because agricultural communities were so dense, they were able to develop immunity to such diseases while passing them on to other societies (e.g. the Native Americans) that had not developed immunity. At least one person has argued that germs were actually a disadvantage to agricultural communities as it slowed down their population growth and development. This point is arguable, but it seems like agricultural populations increased fast enough that this didn’t end up being that much of a disadvantage. I think what is likely true is that there were pros and cons to having infectious crowd diseases. Overall I found Diamond’s argument on this point more convincing.
• Some of the diseases Diamond mentioned, like tuberculosis, smallpox and pertussis, pre-dated agriculture, and arose from interaction with wildlife. But a response to this says that the fact that these diseases arose earlier has nothing to do with when it crossed over to humans.
• Other diseases, like measles, did not appear until 9,500 years after domestication of cattle. But a response says that there’s no reason to expect that the disease would spread early on after domestication, and that Diamond does not argue that it did.

Do the factual errors invalidate Diamond’s overall argument?

Once Diamond’s factual errors – usually about the Spanish conquest – have been pointed out, a second debate arises. That is over whether those factual errors invalidate Diamond’s overall argument.

In my view, they do not, but they do significantly undermine Diamond’s general credibility.

Diamond’s overall argument is quite simple:

• Some environments are more suited to agriculture than others.
  • Humans were more likely to develop agriculture earlier in areas more suited to it.
  • Agriculture enabled larger populations.
  • Larger populations generally have more technologies.
  • Larger populations could also develop immunity to infectious crowd diseases where small bands could not.
• Some societies could connect to other societies more easily because of their geography:
  • More connected societies generally have more technologies.
• Societies that had these technological advantages and immunity to infectious crowd diseases were more able to conquer, or out-reproduce, societies that did not.

All of these sound quite reasonable. The most contested of these points is probably the idea that more advanced technology is what enabled some societies to conquer others. But even that does not seem particularly objectionable, at least as a general proposition.

What people do object to is that more advanced technology did not seem to be what helped the Spanish to conquer the Native Americans in that particular instance. And that’s fair enough. Diamond refers to the Cajamarca example multiple times in the book, and discusses it in detail quite early on. No doubt he did this to capture the reader’s attention – the numbers disadvantage he describes the Spanish as facing is simply incredible. You would also expect an American audience reading Guns, Germs and Steel would pay more attention to this chapter. So it’s completely fair to call him out on it.

But that doesn’t invalidate Diamond’s other, quite reasonable-sounding, points I noted above. And I think those points are more integral to Diamond’s overall argument than the particular instance of how things played out in the Cajamarca example, or whether the Spanish were even more technologically advanced, in fact, than the Incans. The Cajamarca example certainly did not feature in my Key Takeaways for the book, written before I’d read any criticism of Guns, Germs and Steel.

In fact, Yali’s question, the question Diamond focuses on throughout the book, is simply why white people had developed so much more “cargo” (material goods and technology) than the New Guineans. It doesn’t assume that the cargo allowed, or gave white people justification to, conquer the New Guineans.

All that being said, the factual inaccuracies are incredibly sloppy, and diminish Diamond’s credibility. I can also understand why many historians find this book infuriating given its popularity, its Pulitzer Prize, and the fact that it is commonly taught in schools. Some of the criticisms of Guns, Germs and Steel is perhaps a little overblown as a result. But I can understand why. I certainly get very frustrated when I come across widespread mistaken beliefs in a field I know a lot about. A non-historian will likely only come across a debate over Guns, Germs and Steel once or twice, and will probably have sought out those opposing views. A historian is likely to come across those same debates time and time again, in their everyday life. It surely gets old.

Conclusion

To conclude, I think Guns, Germs and Steel is still worth a read, but you should bear in mind that it does contain factual errors. In particular, you should take the Cajamarca chapter with a grain of salt – or perhaps skip it altogether.

Also remember that Diamond’s overarching theory is just a theory. People can make arguments for or against it, but it could never be definitively proven.

You can get Guns, Germs and Steel at: Amazon | Kobo. These are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy through these links. I’d be grateful if you considered supporting the site in this way! 🙂

Other recommended reading

Some other books that people have suggested as a counterpoint to Guns, Germs and Steel (I have not read any of these yet, myself):

• Ecological Imperialism by Alfred Crosby
• Why the West Rules, for Now by Ian Morris
• 1491 by Charles Mann
• Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest by Matthew Restall

Sources

• Reddit: Historians’ views of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”
• Reddit: Did European conquerors suffer from new diseases contracted from the indigenous peoples of the Americas, or was it not a reciprocated problem?
• Inside Higher Ed: Guns, Germs and Steel reconsidered
• Reddit: A detailed reubttal/alternative to the one that shall not be named
• Criticisms of Spanish conquest chapter:
  • YouTube: Guns, Germs and Steel: A Historical Critique by Bad Empanada
  • Reddit: Guns, Germs and Steel – Chapter 3: Collision at Cajamarca
• Criticisms of the infectious diseases chapter: Reddit: Guns, Germs and Steel – Chapter 11: Lethal Gift of Livestock
  • Response to that critique here: /u/anthropology_nerd writes an extensive critique on Diamond’s arguments in Guns, Germs and Steel regarding lifestock and disease