Weapons, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Society (also titled Weapons, Germs and Steels: A brief history of everyone for the last 13,000 years ) is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1998, Weapons, Germs and Steel won Pulitzer Prizes for common nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Books. A book-based documentary, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.
This book tries to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations survive and conquer others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to all inherent forms of intellectual Eurasia, morals, or genetic superiority. Intan argues that the gap in power and technology between human societies originates primarily in environmental differences, which are reinforced by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have been favored by Eurasians (eg, written language or developments among Eurasians who are resistant to endemic diseases), he insists that this advantage is due to geographic influence on society and culture (eg, by facilitating trade and different intercultural trade) and are not embedded in the Eurasian genome.
Video Guns, Germs, and Steel
Sinopsis
The prologue opened with Diamond's conversation account with Yali, a New Guinea politician. The conversation turned to a clear distinction in power and technology between the Yali people and the Europeans who dominated the land for 200 years, a distinction they did not consider because of the genetic superiority of Europeans. Yali asked, using the local term "cargo" for inventions and manufactured goods, "Why do you white people develop so much cargo and take it to New Guinea, but we blacks have our own little payload?" (p.Ã, 14)
Diamonds realize that the same question seems to apply elsewhere: "Eurasians... dominate... the world in wealth and power." Others, having thrown away colonial dominance, still lag behind in wealth and power. Still others, he says, "have been destroyed, subjugated, and in some cases even annihilated by European colonizers." (p.Ã, 15)
People from other continents (sub-Saharan Africa, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans, and native peoples of Southeast Asia) have been largely conquered, displaced and in some extreme cases - referring to Native Americans, The Australian Aborigines, and the indigenous Khoisan Communities of South Africa - were largely destroyed by agriculture-based societies such as Eurasia and Bantu. He believes this is due to the technological advantages and immunology of this society, which comes from the rise of agriculture early after the last Ice Age.
Title
The title of this book is a reference to the means used by agricultural-based societies to conquer populations in other regions and maintain dominance, albeit at times much less - superior weapons provide direct military advantage (rifles); Eurasian disease weakens and reduces local populations, which have no immunity, making it easier to maintain control over them (germs); and durable means of transport (steel) allow imperialism.
Intan argues that the geographic, climatic and environmental characteristics that support the early development of stable agricultural societies eventually lead to immunity to endemic diseases in farm animals and the development of a strong and organized state that is capable of dominating others.
Theoretical outline
Intan argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and need. That is, civilization is not created from superior intelligence, but is the result of a developmental chain, each made possible by a certain prerequisite.
The first step toward civilization is the shift from nomadic hunter-gatherers to deep-rooted agricultural societies. Some conditions are needed for this transition to occur: access to high-carbohydrate vegetation that survives storage; a fairly dry climate to allow storage; and access to animals is fairly benign for domestication and flexible enough to survive in captivity. Control of crops and livestock causes food surplus. Surplus free people to specialize in activities other than sustenance and support population growth. The combination of specialization and population growth leads to the accumulation of social innovations and technologies that build upon each other. Great societies developed the ruling class and supported the bureaucracy, which in turn led to the organization of nation-states and empires.
Although agriculture appears in some parts of the world, Eurasia earns early profits because of the availability of plant and animal species that are more suitable for domestication. In particular, Eurasia has barley, two varieties of wheat, and three pulses rich in protein for food; hemp for textiles; and goats, sheep, and cattle. Eurasian seeds are richer in protein, more easily sown, and more easily stored than American maize or tropical bananas.
When Western Asian civilization began to trade, they found additional useful animals in adjacent areas, especially horses and donkeys for use in transportation. Diamond identifies 13 species of large animals over 100 pounds (45 kg) domesticated in Eurasia, compared to just one in South America (counting the llama and alpaca as breeds in the same species) and none at all around the world. Australia and North America suffer from a shortage of useful animals due to extinction, possibly due to human hunting, shortly after the end of the Pleistocene, while the only pet in New Guinea originated from the mainland of East Asia during the Austronesian settlement around 4,000-5,000 years ago. Sub-Saharan biological relatives of horses including zebras and onagers proved unbearable; and although African elephants can be tamed, it is very difficult to breed them in captivity; Diamond describes a small number of pet species (14 out of 148 "candidates") as an example of Anna Karenina principle: many promising species have only one of the few significant difficulties preventing domestication.
Eurasia tamed goats and sheep for leather, clothing, and cheese; cow for milk; bulls for land preparation and transportation; and tame animals like pigs and chickens. Large domestic animals such as horses and camels offer considerable military and economic benefits from mobile transportation.
The vast land of Eurasia and the long east-west distance increase this advantage. Its vast territory provides more species of plants and animals suitable for domestication, and allows its people to exchange innovations and diseases. Its east-west orientation allows descendants to be domesticated in one part of the continent to be used elsewhere by means of similarities in climatic and seasonal cycles. The American continent has difficulty adapting plants that are domesticated in a latitude to be used at other latitudes (and, in North America, adapting plants from one side of the Rocky Mountains to the other). Similarly, Africa is fragmented by extreme variations in climate from north to south: plants and animals that thrive in one region never reach another area where they can flourish, because they can not survive in an intervening environment. Europe is the main beneficiary of Eurasian east-west orientation: in the first millennium BC, the European Mediterranean region adopted the animals, plants, and techniques of Southwest Asian agriculture; in the first millenium CE, the whole of Europe followed.
The abundant supply of food and the solid population it supports makes the division of labor possible. The emergence of non-agricultural specialists such as craftsmen and clerks accelerated economic growth and technological progress. This economic and technological advantage ultimately enabled the Europeans to conquer people from other continents in recent centuries using weapons and armor from the title of the book.
Eurasian solid populations, high trading rates, and living near farms result in widespread disease spread, including from animals to humans. Smallpox, measles, and influenza are the result of closeness between dense populations of animals and humans. Natural selection forces Eurasians to develop immunity against pathogens. When Europeans are in contact with America, European disease (which Americans have no immunity) affects the native population of America, rather than the opposite ("trade" in a slightly more balanced disease in Africa and southern Asia: endemic malaria and yellow fever make this area famous "white man's tomb", and syphilis probably originated in America). European disease - germs from the title of the book - a native population that has been destroyed so that the relatively small number of Europeans can maintain their dominance.
Diamond also proposes a geographical explanation of why western European societies, rather than other Eurasian powers such as China, have become the dominant occupiers, claiming European geography supports balkanization into smaller, closer, nation-states, constrained by natural barriers of mountains, rivers, and coastlines. The threat posed by immediate neighbors ensured that governments pressing economic and technological advancements soon remedy their mistakes or lose out to compete relatively quickly, while the region's leading powers change over time. Other developed cultures are developed in areas where the geography is conducive to large, monolithic, isolated, unchallenged monarchies that may have forced the state to reverse the wrong policies such as China which prohibits the construction of ships. Western Europe has also benefited from the more temperate climate of Southwest Asia where intense agriculture ultimately destroys the environment, encourages desertification, and injures soil fertility.
Agriculture
Weapons, Germs and Steel are of the opinion that cities need adequate supply of food, and thus depend on agriculture. Because farmers do food-providing jobs, the division of labor allows others to be free to pursue other functions, such as mining and literacy.
An important trap for agricultural development is the availability of wildly edible plant species suitable for domestication. Agriculture emerges at the beginning of the Fertile Crescent because it has many wild and nutritious wheat and wild varieties of wildlife. Instead, American farmers must strive to develop corn as a useful food from possible wild ancestors, teosinte.
Also important for the transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society of cities is the presence of 'big' pets, raised for meat, work, and long distance communication. Diamond identifies only 14 major mammal species cultivated worldwide. The five most useful (cows, horses, sheep, goats, and pigs) are derivatives of endemic species into Eurasia. Of the remaining nine, only two (llama and alpaca both South America) are derived from land outside the temperate Eurasian region.
Because of Anna Karenina's principle, surprisingly some animals are suitable for domestication. Diamond identifies six criteria including animals that are quite benign, gregarious, willing to breed in captivity and have a hierarchy of social dominance. Therefore, there are not many African mammals such as zebras, antelopes, cape buffalo, and African elephants ever tamed (although some can be domesticated, they are not easily raised in captivity). The Holocene extinction event eliminated many megafauna that, if they survived, may have been a candidate species, and Diamond argues that the extinction pattern is worse on the continent where animals with no previous human experience are exposed to humans who already have advanced hunting techniques (eg. America and Australia).
Smaller pets such as dogs, cats, chickens, and guinea pigs may be valuable in various ways to agricultural societies, but will not be sufficient in them to retain large-scale agrarian societies. Important examples are the use of larger animals such as cows and horses on plowing soils, allowing far greater plant productivity and the ability to farm soil types and soil types much more than is possible only by the strength of human muscles. Large domestic animals also have an important role in the transportation of goods and people remotely, giving the people who have them considerable military and economic benefits.
Geography
Diamond also argues that geography shapes human migration, not only by making travel difficult (especially by latitude), but by how climate affects where cultivable animals can easily travel and where plants can ideally grow easily because of the sun.
The dominant theory of Out of Africa states that modern humans develop in the east of the Great Rift Valley on the African continent at one time or another. The Sahara keeps people from migrating north to the Fertile Crescent, until later when the Nile River valley becomes accommodative.
Diamond continues to describe the story of human development to the modern era, through rapid technological developments, and its dire consequences on hunter-gatherer cultures around the world.
Diamond touches why the dominant force in the last 500 years is Western Europe and not East Asia (especially China). The Asian region in which the great civilization emerges has a geographical feature conducive to the formation of a large, stable, isolated empire that does not face the external pressures to change that cause stagnation. Many of Europe's natural barriers allow for the development of competing nation-states. Such competition forces European countries to encourage innovation and avoid technological stagnation.
Germs
In the context of European colonization in America, 95% of indigenous people are believed to have been killed by a disease carried by Europeans. Many are killed by infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles. Similar circumstances are observed in the History of Australia (1788-1850) and in the History of South Africa. Australian Aborigines and Khoikhoi residents are destroyed by smallpox, measles, influenza and other diseases.
Then how does the disease that comes from the Americas do not kill the Europeans? Diamond argues that most of these diseases are only developed and sustained in large populations of rural and urban populations; He also stated that most epidemic diseases evolved from similar diseases in pets. The combined effects of increased population density are supported by agriculture, and human proximity to pets leading to animal diseases that infect humans, resulted in European communities obtaining a much richer collection of harmful pathogens in which Europeans had gained immunity through natural selection ( see Black Death and other epidemics) for a longer time than happened to hunter-gatherers and Native American farmers.
He mentions tropical diseases (especially malaria) that limit European penetration to Africa as an exception. Endemic infectious diseases are also a hindrance to European colonization in Southeast Asia and New Guinea.
Success and failure
Weapons, Germs and Steel focuses on why some populations succeed. His final book, Collapse: How People Choose Fail or Success , focuses on environmental and other factors that have caused some populations to fail. This is a warning book.
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In the 1930s, Annales School in France undertook the study of long-term historical structures using the synthesis of geography, history, and sociology. Scholars examine the impacts of geography, climate, and land use. Although geography was almost eliminated as an academic discipline in the United States after the 1960s, several geographical-based geographical theories were published in the 1990s.
In 1991, Jared Diamond had considered the question "why do Eurasians dominate other cultures?" in Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of Human Animals (part four).
Reception
Weapons, Germs and Steel won the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa award in Science. In 1998, he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, in recognition of the powerful synthesis of many disciplines, and the Royal Society's RhÃÆ'Â'ne-Poulenc Prize for Science Books. The National Geographic Society produced a documentary of the same title based on a book aired on PBS in July 2005.
Academic review
In a review of Arms, Germs and Steel that ultimately praised the book, historian Tom Tomlinson wrote, "Given the magnitude of the task that he has set himself, it is inevitable that Professor Diamond uses a very large brush -the massage to fill his argument. "
Another historian, professor J. R. McNeill, is completely free, but thinks geography beyond Diamond's limits as an explanation for history and less-emphasized cultural autonomy.
In his last book published in 2000, anthropologist and geographer James Morris Blaut criticized weapons, germ and steel, among other reasons, to revive the theory of environmental determinism, and described Diamond as an example of the historian Modern Eurocentric. Blaut criticized the loose use of Diamond from the terms "Eurasia" and "innovative", which he believes misleads the reader into thinking that Western Europe is responsible for emerging technology discoveries in the Middle East and Asia.
Harvard International Relations Expert (IR) Stephen Walt called the book "exciting readings" and put it in a list of ten books that every IR student should read.
Berkeley economist, Brad DeLong, described the book as "a complete and total work of genius".
John BrÃÆ'¤tland, an Austrian school economist from the US Department of the Interior, complained in the Journal of Libertarian Studies that Weapons, Germs and Steel completely ignored individual actions. , concentrating only on a centralized state; fail to understand how societies are formed (judging that society does not exist or are formed without a strong government); and disregarding various economic institutions, such as monetary exchange that would allow society to "rationally calculate the scarcity and value of actions necessary to replace what is spent through human usage". Instead, the authors conclude that because there is no sophisticated division of labor, private property, and monetary exchange, such societies on Easter Island can never advance from the nomadic stage to a complex society. Those factors, according to BrÃÆ'¤tland, are very important, and at the same time ignored by Diamond.
Anthropologist Jason Antrosio describes Weapons, Germs and Steel as a form of "academic pornography". Diamond accounts make all the factors of European domination a product of a distant and unintentional history and almost no role for human agents - the ability people have to make decisions and influence results. The Europeans became the unintentional and unintentional conquerors. The natives surrender passively to their fate. "Jared Diamond has done a tremendous act of telling the story of human history, he has greatly distorted the role of domestication and agriculture in that history, but his ability to tell is so interesting that he has persuaded a generation of college-educated readers."
Another criticism has been made of the writer's position on the agricultural revolution. The transition from hunting and gathering to farming is not always a one-way process. It has been argued that hunting and gathering represent adaptive strategies, which can still be exploited, if necessary, when environmental change causes extreme food pressures for farmers. In fact, it is sometimes difficult to draw a clear line between agricultural societies and hunter-gatherers, especially since widespread agricultural adoption and cultural diffusion that have occurred in the last 10,000 years.
Publications
Weapons, Germs and Steel was first published by WW Norton in March 1997. It was later published in the United Kingdom under the title Weapons, Germs and Steel: A Brief History of Everyone for the Last 13,000 Years by Vintage in 1998 (ISBN 978-0099302780). It is a selection of Book of the Month Club, Historical Book Club, Quality Paperback Book Club, and Newbridge Book Club.
In 2003 and 2007, the author published a new English edition that included information collected since the previous edition. The new information does not change the conclusions of the original edition.
See also
- Alfred W. Crosby
- Need expansion
- Environmental determinism
- Hunter-gatherer
- James Burke (science historian)
- Malcolm Gladwell
- Marvin Harris
- History of Indigenous Peoples of America
- Scramble for Africa
- Country and Power in Africa
Umum:
- determinisme iklim
- Historical historism
- determinism geographies
- Greenland Ecology
- Materialism budaya
Books and television:
- Collapse: How People Choose Failed or Successfully
- Connection (TV series)
- Caller (book)
- Ismael (novel)
- The rise of the West
- The Fate of the Nations
- Wealth and Poverty of the Nation
Notes and references
Further reading
- William McNeill (1976), Plague and People , New York: Anchor/Doubleday (ISBNÃ, 0-385-12122-9).
External links
- Weapons, Germs and Steel in the Open Library on the Internet Archive
- PBS - Weapons, Germs and Steel
- ABC Radio Transcript: Why Society Crumbles: Jared Diamond at Princeton University
- Weapons, Germs and Steel at IMDb
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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