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Diamond guns germs and steel. Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel

How many times have I promised myself to write down my impressions of the book as I read it, and not a month after I read it! And even more so this should apply to books like Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. We'll have to feverishly catch up. Write less yourself, quote more.

So, the main idea of \u200b\u200bDiamond is that the difference between the levels of development of various civilizations is explained by the difference in the conditions of their habitation, the geographical features of the regions where they developed:

According to another approach, it is not a matter of the ingenuity of individuals, but of how receptive to the new society as a whole. There are societies that seem hopelessly conservative, insular, and hostile to change. Such a feeling, for example, arises among many Westerners, for whom the experience of helping the peoples of the Third World brought only a feeling of doom and disappointment. Since the individual people they helped give the impression of quite intellectually developed individuals, it is concluded that the problem must lie in the specifics of their collective being. How else can explain the fact that the Aborigines of Northeast Australia never mastered the bow and arrow, despite the opportunity to observe these weapons in the hands of permanent trading partners - the inhabitants of the Torres Strait Islands? Could the hindered technological development of a continent be explained by the fact that all societies inhabiting it turn out to be deaf to the new? In this chapter, we will finally come close to answering the central question of the book - the question of why technology has evolved at such different rates on different continents.

Why, in general, do different societies develop different attitudes towards innovation?

Historians of technology have proposed at least fourteen factors to answer this question. One of them is the high life expectancy, which, in theory, provides a potential inventor with enough time to accumulate technical knowledge, as well as patience and confidence in the future to engage in long-term development with a delayed result. Consequently, the significant increase in life expectancy caused by the success of modern medicine may well have played a role in the recent acceleration in the pace of innovation.

The next five factors relate to the economy and the characteristics of the social structure. (1) If in the classical era the availability of cheap slave labor supposedly held back innovation, today high wages and labor shortages, on the contrary, stimulate the search for technological solutions. For example, the prospect of a change in immigration policy that threatened to drastically reduce the influx of Mexican seasonal workers to California farms gave immediate impetus to the development of a tomato variety suitable for machine harvesting in California. (2) The system of patent laws and other property rights that protect the inventor creates favorable conditions for innovation in the modern West, while the lack of such protection in modern China is, on the contrary, unfavorable. (3) Modern industrialized societies provide extensive opportunities for technical education, which makes them akin to medieval Islamic states and distinguishes them, for example, from modern Zaire. (4) Device modern capitalism, unlike, say, the economy of ancient Rome, makes it potentially profitable to invest in technical development. (5) Individualism, deeply rooted in American society, allows successful inventors to keep their profits in their hands, while nepotism, deeply rooted in New Guinean societies, ensures that a person who starts earning will soon be joined by a dozen relatives will need to be sheltered and dependent.

The other four proposed explanations are less about economics or social organization than about worldviews. (1) Willingness to take risks, a type of behavior that is fundamentally important for innovation, is more prevalent in some societies than in others. (2) The scientific worldview is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society, which has largely ensured its modern technological superiority. (3) A tolerant attitude towards a variety of points of view and dissent creates a favorable climate for innovation, while deep traditionalism (for example, the unquestioning reverence of the Chinese for ancient Chinese classics) is destructive for them. (4) The religious context influences technological development in very different ways: it is believed that some offshoots of Judaism and Christianity are especially well combined with it, especially some offshoots of Islam, Hinduism and Brahmanism.

All ten of these hypotheses are not devoid of credibility. But none of them is fundamentally tied to geography. If patent laws, capitalism, and some religions really stimulate technological progress, what worked to select these factors in post-medieval Europe and to filter them out in modern China or India?

In any case, we at least understand the vector of the impact of these ten factors on the development of technology. As for the four remaining - war, centralized power, climate and resource abundance - their impact is not so clear: sometimes they encourage technological growth, sometimes, on the contrary, they slow down. (1) Throughout history, war has often been the main driver of technical renewal. Thus, huge investments in the development of nuclear weapons during the Second World War and in the development of aircraft and automobile construction during the First World War led to the birth of entire branches of applied knowledge. However, wars are also capable of causing enormous, even irreparable damage to technological progress. (2) A strong centralized state gave a powerful impetus to the development of technology in the late 19th century. in Germany and Japan - but it also crushed it in China after 1500 (3) According to the opinion popular among the inhabitants of Northern Europe, technological prosperity is inherent in a harsh climate (where you simply cannot survive without a creative approach), and technological stagnation is inherent in a warm climate (where you can walk naked and bananas almost fall from the trees by themselves). There is also an opposite point of view, according to which a mild climate, freeing people from the need to wage a constant struggle for existence, leaves them enough free time to engage in creativity. (4) There is also debate over whether abundance or scarcity of natural resources is more conducive to technological progress. The abundance of resources, in theory, should stimulate the emergence of inventions that use these resources - for example, it is quite understandable why watermill technology appeared in rainy and river-rich Northern Europe. On the other hand, why did this technology not emerge even faster in an even rainy New Guinea? Mass deforestation in Britain has been cited as the reason for its leadership in coal mining technology - but why has a similar scale not had the same effect in China?

The above does not exhaust the list of reasons proposed to explain the different attitudes of human societies towards new technologies. Worse, all these direct explanations do not lead us to the original causes. Since technology has undoubtedly been and is one of the most powerful driving forces in history, it may seem that in our attempt to see the direction of world-historical movement, we have reached an unexpected dead end. However, now I will try to prove that in the presence of many independent factors influencing the development of innovations, our task of understanding the broadest context of human history not only does not become more complicated, but, on the contrary, becomes easier.

The first group consists of differences in the composition of wild plants and animals available as starting material for domestication.

The second most important group of intercontinental differences is associated with factors influencing the rate of cultural diffusion and population migration.

The factors influencing the rate of intracontinental diffusion intersect with the third group of factors, which influenced the possibility and nature of intercontinental diffusion, another source of the formation of regional complexes of domesticated materials and technologies.

The fourth, and last, group of factors concerns the differences between continents in area and total population.

Despite my dislike of theories that explain history, I really wanted to argue with the author, Diamond diligently denies any suspicions of determinism:

So, the observer moved to the XI millennium BC. e., could not predict on which continent human societies was destined to develop faster than others, but, on the contrary, could make a compelling case for any of them. Of course, in retrospect, we know that Eurasia was in the lead in the race. However, it turns out that the real reasons for the overtaking development of Eurasian societies were not those that first occurred to our imaginary archaeologist 13 thousand years ago.

The Phaistos disc anticipates the later attempts of mankind to capture texts using letters or hieroglyphs cut out in letters - however, the next time they were not pressed into soft clay, but covered with ink and pressed to paper. However, the next time came only two and a half thousand years later in China and three thousand one hundred years later in medieval Europe. Why did the pioneering technology used by the author of the disc never take root in his homeland or somewhere else in the ancient Mediterranean? Why was this printing method invented around 1700 BC? e. in Crete, and not later or earlier in Mesopotamia, Mexico or another ancient center of writing? Why did it take several more millennia for the addition of the ink idea and the press idea to result in the printing press idea? In short, the Fest disc poses a serious challenge to historians. If inventions are truly as unique and unpredictable as we should probably conclude from his example, then any attempt to generalize in the history of technology is initially doomed.

He believes that historical events cannot be predicted, but can be explained. In general, he is probably right, but what is the point in such explanations?

The result is a book, the main idea of \u200b\u200bwhich is quite obvious and does not even cause any desire to argue with it, but interesting due to the details, details, examples. For example, curious fact from the history of writing:

We, modern people, naturally want to ask why the societies that owned the first writing systems resigned themselves to the ambiguity of symbols, because of which writing was limited to several functions and remained the prerogative of a few scribes. However, by doing so, we are only demonstrating what a gulf separates the attitudes of ancient people and our perception of mass literacy as a norm. The fact is that the narrowness of the use of early writing systems was deliberate, and their development in the direction of greater comprehensibility went against the idea of \u200b\u200btheir role. The kings and priests of ancient Sumer needed writing to serve professional scribes to keep track of the number of sheep lost to the treasury, and not to the masses for writing poetry and composing stories. In ancient times, as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it, writing was primarily "a means of enslaving another person." Private, non-public service literacy dates back to much later times, when writing systems began to become simpler and more expressive.

For example, when in the VII century. BC e. writing returned to Greece - after a protracted non-literate era, which began with the fall of the Mycenaean civilization and the disappearance of Linear B (about 1200 BC) - the new writing system, the range of its users and its scope have radically changed. Now it was not a polysemantic syllabic letter mixed with logograms, but an alphabet modeled on the Phoenician consonant alphabet and improved through the invention of symbols for vowels. Instead of lists with the number of sheep, which were only sorted out by scribes and read only in palaces, the Greek alphabet, from the moment of its appearance, functioned as a carrier of poetry and humor and was designed to be read in private homes. No wonder the earliest extant text in this alphabet, scrawled on a wine vessel from Athens around 740 BC. e., is a poetic line with the announcement of a dance competition: "Of all the dancers, the one who performs faster than the rest will receive this jug as a reward." The next example is three lines of a dactylic hexameter scrawled on a bowl: “I am Nestor's goblet, easy to drink. Whoever drinks from this goblet will immediately seize the passion of the beautifully crowned Aphrodite. " The earliest surviving examples of the Etruscan and Roman alphabets are also inscriptions on cups and vessels for wine. Only over time, the alphabet, which existed as a means of private communication, was also adopted in public and administrative affairs. As we can see, in contrast to earlier logographic and syllabic systems, the evolutionary sequence of usage was reversed in the alphabetical writing.

From it, from this fact, one can draw very far-reaching conclusions. Or here's another:

As the leading cause of death, disease has played a critical role in the way human history has developed. Suffice it to say that before the Second World War, people more often in wartime died from pathogens carried by the movement of human masses than from actual battle wounds. Treatises on military history, habitually glorifying the merits of commanders, obscure the truth that is inconvenient for our self-esteem: armies that had the best command and weapons did not always become winners in the wars of the past - quite often those who were able to infect the enemy with more dangerous infections took over.

Apparently, Diamond has staked out a niche in popular science literature and will continue to study it in the future. I am not without pleasure reading, for example, this next book of his:

Another natural sequel to this book could be research focused on events of a smaller geographic and temporal scale. For example, I admit that the following obvious question has already occurred to readers: “Why, among the societies of Eurasia, it was European, and not the Middle Eastern, Chinese or Indian societies that colonized America and Australia, advanced in technological development and achieved economic and political dominance in modern world? " If a historian who lived at any time between 8500 BC. e. and 1450 AD e., undertook to predict the historical trajectories of these regions of the Old World, he would certainly call the worldwide triumph of Europeans the least plausible scenario - after all, for most of these ten thousand years, Europe was behind everyone else. From the middle of the 9th millennium to the middle of the 1st millennium BC. e. (the beginning of the rise of Greek and somewhat later Italian societies) almost all the innovations that appeared in Western Eurasia - animal husbandry, cultivated plants, writing, metallurgy, the wheel, government, etc., came from the Fertile Crescent or adjacent areas. Before the spread of water mills dating back to the X century. n. BC, Europe to the north and west of the Alps did not make any significant contributions to the development of technology and civilization, only accumulating the achievements of the societies of the eastern Mediterranean, the Fertile Crescent and China. Even between 1000 and 1450. scientific and engineering innovations more often came to Europe from Muslim countries than vice versa, and the most technologically advanced region at that time was China, whose civilization was based on agriculture almost as ancient as the Middle East.

Modern thinkers, striving to "cover with a single gaze" the entire history of mankind, can be conditionally divided into two large groups. Some work in the paradigm of world-systems analysis, which prioritizes regional and global division of labor. The second, predominantly Anglo-American authors, give out products in the spirit of the good old 19th century, where world history thought of as a result of the determining influence of one or two factors. McLuhan has a communications technology, McNeill has an arms race and the social structures that support it, Diamond has landscape-geographical resources.

Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel" is interesting for its attempt to revive, taking into account the latest data, geographical determinism, to the glory of the idea of \u200b\u200bequal gratitude of all races and peoples. And he really managed to prove in detail that the primacy of the Old World was associated precisely with serious geographic bonuses. "If Australia and Eurasia exchanged peoples in the late Pleistocene, Australian Aborigines would today inhabit not only Eurasia, but most of America and Australia, and only scattered population fragments would remain of the Eurasian Aborigines in Australia." America, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa lagged behind not because of the massive "stupidity" of the peoples there. They simply did not have a chance, even if they were "seven inches in the forehead." Moreover, relying on their very limited resources, many of these peoples have done amazing things and made a significant contribution to the development of human civilization. For example, the Indians did not know iron and wheels, but they developed such super-productive crops as potatoes, corn and sunflowers.

The most important factor in the primacy of “Greater Eurasia” (including the adjacent North Africa) was the size of this continent and a much larger volume of initial resources, the ability to accommodate more centers of development that spurred each other on in the course of mutual competition and exchange of innovations. Continuing the author's thought, one can see an additional dimension of this bonus: the Eurasians had the opportunity, having dirtied one region of the continent, to transfer development to another. Imagine that the Fertile Crescent, which the early Middle Eastern civilizations turned into a desert, were a separate isolated continent like Australia. Development there would very quickly be replaced by regression, and the achievements of civilization would be completely forgotten by their feral descendants. But the peoples of the Middle East were able to pass on the "baton" to other peoples of the continent, who continued to develop civilization in areas not yet polluted. However, the chain of environmental disasters still significantly slowed down the development of the continent. Development had to be shifted to ever more unfavorable, cold regions, shifted onto the shoulders of more and more backward peoples, who, before the first spark of thought was born in their heads, arranged for themselves "dark ages" for many centuries. That is why, in my opinion, 5 thousand years lay between the first pyramid and the first space rocket, and not 2 thousand years.

Another important factor in the advantage of Eurasia is its latitudinal extent, which facilitated cultural diffusion and population migration. Here, agricultural know-how could be passed from people to people, spreading over thousands of kilometers throughout the climatic zone in which they originated. America, stretched from north to south, is a different matter. Crops from North America before the arrival of the Europeans could never spread to suitable for them. climatic zones South America... From an economic point of view, America was not one large continent, but several small ones, separated from each other by mountain ranges and jungles. Unlike Eurasia, the centers of civilization could not exchange knowledge and technologies here, could not stimulate the development of more backward peoples living in a similar landscape. In each of these mini-continents, people had to reinvent the economy from scratch, with their own meager mix of cultures. For a similar reason, until the arrival of the Europeans, South Africa remained uncultivated, although its climate is suitable for Mediterranean crops. Mediterranean agriculture and cattle breeding could not overcome the barrier of savannah, equatorial forests and the zone of falling sickness.

Finally, Eurasia had a bonus in the number of plant species, and especially animals, suitable for domestication. It is no coincidence that the most backward continent was Australia, where there was practically nothing to domesticate. At first glance, sub-Saharan Africa is also lucky: the African shroud breaks the record for the diversity of ungulates. Why not domesticate all these endless herds of antelope? Why not domesticated zebras, rhinos, hippos? Imagine the Zulu zebra cavalry, accompanied by a strike force of armored rhinos. However, experiments with domestication, carried out in the 20th century, showed that our distant ancestors have exhausted almost the entire stock of large species suitable for economically justified domestication. The remaining types are simply not suitable for this for various reasons. Some have too "gourmet" food needs. Others have an inability and unwillingness to live in a herd, in the close proximity of other animals of their own kind. Still others have an innate “neuroticism” of the psyche, which either makes them too dangerous or leads to a quick death from stress. Still others have complex breeding rituals that cannot be replicated in captivity. Fifths have too slow growth rates, making their cultivation unprofitable.

It turned out that the maximum number of large animal species suitable for domestication was concentrated precisely in Eurasia, due to its large size and landscape diversity. In addition, Eurasia was too vast for humans to exterminate these species at the stage of hunting. On other continents, there were either no suitable species initially, or they were exterminated and eaten by people back in primitive times (like a horse and a mastodon in America). The variety and abundance of domestic animals, especially large ones, dramatically increases the resources of a civilization. Livestock in a traditional farm is not only protein food (milk, meat), wool, skins, but also manure, which is used to fertilize fields and preserve their fertility. And this is very important because it affects agricultural productivity and population density.

In terms of civilization development, the most important bonus from large livestock is its muscular strength, which can be used to cultivate land and transport goods. In an agrarian society, where this bonus is not available, much more human effort is required to produce an equal product. Accordingly, the share of people who can engage in craft, construction, administration, military affairs, and the development of science and culture is decreasing. The military use of pets (cavalry, camels, war elephants) also gives the community a serious bonus. In particular, the military advantage of the conquistadors over the Indians was largely due to the lack of cavalry in the latter. If, all else being equal, the Aztecs and Incas had their own cavalry, the history of the New World would have developed fundamentally differently.

The word “germs” in the title of the book points to another fatal advantage of livestock-rich societies. The fact is that most of the terrible epidemics that first hit Eurasia and then devastated America (smallpox, measles, typhus, diphtheria, plague, etc.) are mutated diseases of domestic animals that gradually spread to humans. But in Eurasia, from generation to generation, the proportion of people who have immunity to these diseases increased, and they all fell upon the societies “open” by Europeans. "The pooled mortality rates at first contact with Eurasian pathogens ranged from 50% to 100%." The decline in the indigenous population of America in the 15th-17th centuries. due primarily to this "bacteriological war", and not the atrocities of the conquistadors. Even the defeat of the Aztecs and Incas was preceded by devastating smallpox epidemics that seriously thinned their elites and armies. The more animals a civilization domesticated, the greater its potential for "bacteriological warfare" with other civilizations.

In the end, the Europeans massively populated only those continents that could not resist them at the level of "battle microbes". Peoples with their own effective microbes escaped the fate of the American and Australian aborigines, despite a similar and even greater civilizational backwardness. “Malaria throughout the equatorial and subequatorial zones of the Old World, cholera in Southeast Asia and yellow fever in Africa have become (and still are) the most formidable tropical plagues. They became the main obstacle to the colonization of the tropics by Europeans and partly due to the fact that the colonial division of New Guinea and most of Africa ended almost 400 years after the beginning of the division of the New World. "

By the way, the author of the book, a professional microbiologist, hints that sexual contacts have become one of the main channels for the transmission of diseases from animals to humans. In recent times, this is how humanity caught AIDS. It is known that many pastoral peoples have been practicing sex with sheep, goats, etc. since ancient times, and it is the abundance of such close contacts that became fertile ground for the gradual evolution of animal pathogens into human ones. So the contribution of some peoples to the primacy of Western civilization is clearly underestimated. If you rewind the whole chain of events that led to the mass genocide of the aborigines of America, then the "extreme" will not be the Spanish conquistadors, but some lustful mountain sheep breeder who was the first to pick up a harmful microbe that mutated in his body into a terrible disease. It is no accident that bestiality was considered a terrible sin in civilized countries. Such behavior threatens not only the health of the zoophile himself, but can also turn into a mortal danger for all mankind. But backward peoples do not have such prejudices, apparently, vaguely guessing that this practice will somehow help them to protect their land :-) Zoophilia is a peculiar form of patriotism among them.

The author, however, did not complete the idea of \u200b\u200bhis book. Having proved the inevitability of the primacy of Eurasia in ancient times, he could not convincingly explain the differences in the rate of development of civilizations within Eurasia itself. Why did the European Christians take the lead, and not the Chinese, Indians or Muslims, despite the antiquity of these civilizations, in the area and population commensurate with the European? Why, for example, did the industrial revolution originate in Britain, which relied on the wealth of India, and not in India itself? Why was algebra invented by the Arabs and modern science by Europeans? Why China invented paper and gunpowder, but failed to do anything sensible with these inventions?

The author touches on this problem only in the epilogue of his book and gives out a controversial hypothesis rather than substantiated proof. And this is a hypothesis with a solid "beard". We are talking about the following trivial reasoning: Chinese progress was lulled by uniformity and one-man rule, which was facilitated by the merged-flat nature of the terrain, and the landscape-dismembered Europe represented several centers of power that stimulated each other in the competition. This kind of reasoning, and not only in relation to China, became commonplace long before 1997, when the book under discussion was published. However, the author got into resonance with the then mood of the American business elite, which just at that time caught fire with the idea of \u200b\u200bdecentralizing large corporations. Seeing the "historical background" of this idea in the book, they lifted it to heaven. At the same time, Bill Gates did not like the author's geographical determinism per se, but the regionalist “principle of optimal fragmentation” formulated by him, the idea that one should seek the most optimal balance for development between centralization and anarchy. It turned out that the book gained popularity not for its main content, where the author's theories are supported by a huge array of interesting information, but with the last paragraphs of the epilogue, where the author inserted several witty impromptu.

Another paradox of Diamond: the author, without noticing it, constantly refutes his own "overvalued idea", showing that the character of the people and their inherent worldview affect its fate no less than geography. And these qualities can differ even among peoples living side by side in the same landscape. I will give an interesting quote, which tells about two close peoples of New Guinea, one of which remained in the Stone Age, and the other stepped straight from the Stone Age into global capitalism.

“... Traditional societies are very different from each other with respect to the prevailing worldview. As in industrialized Europe and America, in primitive New Guinea there are both conservative societies that resist everything new, and open societies existing side by side with them, which selectively master this new. As a consequence, today more entrepreneurial societies, getting acquainted with Western technologies, begin to put them at their service and displace their conservative neighbors.

For example, in the 30s. XX century, when the Europeans first reached the highland parts of eastern New Guinea, they "discovered" dozens of previously unknown primitive tribes, of which the Chimbu tribe began to actively master Western innovations. After seeing white colonists planting coffee trees, the chimbu themselves began to grow coffee for sale. In 1964, I met a fifty-year-old man from this tribe - in a traditional grass skirt, who could not read, who still found the time when the chimbu used stone tools, he managed to get rich on coffee plantations, for 100 thousand dollars from the proceeds without any credit buy myself a sawmill and buy a fleet of trucks bringing his coffee and timber to market.

Chimbu's neighbors in the highlands, daribi, with whom I worked for eight years, on the contrary, are emphatically conservative and are not interested in novelties at all. When the first helicopter landed on Daribi's land, they only gave it a cursory glance and returned to their interrupted studies - the chimbu in their place would immediately start bargaining about its charter. It is not surprising that today the Chimbu are actively attacking the Daribi lands, occupying them for plantations and leaving the Daribi themselves no choice but to work for the new owners. "

Here, in fact, is the answer. Geography is geography, but some national elites outweigh the Daribi features, and they force their countries and civilizations to stagnate even with an abundance of resources, while others have Chimbu features, and they use every opportunity to move forward. The regionalist idea of \u200b\u200b"balanced decentralization" preached by the author is also worth taking a closer look at.

Esi, Karinge, Omwai, Paranu, Sauakari, Vivora and all my other friends and teachers from New Guinea who know how to live in difficult environmental conditions.

Foreword. Why is world history like an onion?

This book is my attempt to summarize the history of all people who have lived on the planet over the past thirteen thousand years. I decided to write it to answer the following question: "Why did history develop so differently on different continents?" Perhaps this question will make you wary and think that you are in the hands of another racist treatise. If so, rest assured - my book is not one of them; as it will be seen later, to answer my question I don't even need to talk about the differences between races. My main goal was to reach the ultimate foundations, to trace the chain of historical causality to the maximum distance into the depths of time.

Authors who undertake the presentation of world history, as a rule, narrow their subject down to the written societies that inhabited Eurasia and North Africa. The indigenous societies of the rest of the world - Sub-Saharan Africa, North and South America, the archipelagos of Southeast Asia, Australia, New Guinea, the Pacific Islands - receive little attention, more often than not, limited to events that happened to them at the later stages of history. that is, after they were discovered and conquered by Western Europeans. Even within Eurasia, the history of the western part of the continent is covered in much more detail than the history of China, India, Japan, tropical Southeast Asia and other societies of the East. History before the invention of writing - that is, approximately until the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. - is also presented relatively fluently, despite the fact that it makes up 99.9% of the entire five-million-year period of man's stay on Earth.

This narrow focus of historiography has three drawbacks. First, interest in other peoples, that is, peoples living outside of Western Eurasia, is becoming more and more widespread today, for obvious reasons. Quite understandable, because these "other" peoples dominate the world's population and represent the overwhelming majority of existing ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups. Some of the countries outside Western Eurasia have already become - and some are about to become - among the most economically and politically powerful powers in the world.

Secondly, even those who are primarily interested in the reasons for the formation of the modern world order will not go too far if they limit themselves to events that have occurred since the appearance of writing. It is a mistake to think that before 3000 BC. peoples of different continents, on average, were at the same level of development, and only the invention of writing in Western Eurasia provoked a historical breakthrough in its population, which also transformed all other areas of human activity. Already by 3000 BC. a number of Eurasian and North African peoples had not only written culture in their embryos, but also a centralized public administration, cities, metal weapons and tools were widespread; they used domesticated animals for transport, traction and mechanical energy, and relied on agriculture and animal husbandry as their main source of food. Nothing of the kind existed on most other continents at that time; some, but not all of these inventions later independently emerged in both the Americas and in sub-Saharan Africa - and then only over the next five millennia, and the indigenous population of Australia never had a chance to come to them on their own. These facts in themselves should have become an indication that the roots of Western Eurasian domination in the modern world grow far into the preliterate past. (By Western Eurasian domination I mean the dominant role in the world of both societies of Western Eurasia itself and societies formed by people from Western Eurasia on other continents.)

Third, a story that focuses on Western Eurasian societies completely ignores one important and obvious question. Why have these societies achieved such disproportionate power and advanced so far along the path of innovation? It is accepted to answer it, referring to such obvious factors as the rise of capitalism, mercantilism, empirical natural science, the development of technology, as well as the pathogenic microbes that destroyed the peoples of other continents when they came into contact with newcomers from Western Eurasia. But why did all these factors of dominance arise precisely in Western Eurasia, while in other parts of the world either did not arise at all, or were present only to a small extent?

These factors are related to the category of immediate, but not initial causes. Why didn't capitalism emerge in pre-Columbian Mexico, mercantilism in sub-Saharan Africa, research science in China, and disease germs in indigenous Australia? If the individual factors of local culture are cited in response - for example, in China research activity was suppressed by the influence of Confucianism, and in Western Eurasia it was stimulated by the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions - then one can again state a lack of understanding of the need to establish the initial reasons, that is, to explain, why the tradition of Confucianism did not originate in Western Eurasia, and Judeo-Christian ethics - not in China. Not to mention that such a response leaves completely unexplained the fact of the technological superiority of Confucian China over Western Europe in the period that lasted until about 1400 AD.

By focusing exclusively on Western Eurasian societies, it is impossible to understand even themselves. Since it is most interesting to find out what their distinguishing features are, we cannot do without understanding the societies from which they differ - only then can we place the societies of Western Eurasia in a wider context.

Perhaps some of the readers will think that I am going to the opposite extreme of traditional historiography, namely, paying too little attention to Western Eurasia at the expense of the rest of the world. Here I would argue that the rest of the world is a very useful manual for the historian, if only because, despite the limited geographical space, they sometimes coexist with a great variety of societies. Other readers, I admit, will agree with the opinion of one of the reviewers of this book. In a slightly reproachful tone, he remarked that I, apparently, look at world history as an onion, in which the modern world forms only an outer shell and the layers of which must be cleaned in order to get to the historical truth. But history is such an onion! In addition, removing its layers is an activity that is not only extremely exciting, but also of great importance for today, when we try to learn the lessons of our past for our future.

Prologue. Yali's question

We all know very well that the history of peoples inhabiting different parts of the world has been very different. In the thirteen thousand years that have passed since the end of the last glaciation, industrial societies have developed in some parts of the world, possessing writing and metal tools, in others - unwritten agrarian societies, thirdly - only hunter-gatherer societies who own the technologies of the Stone Age. This historical global inequality still casts a shadow over modernity - at least because written societies with metal tools conquered or exterminated all others. Although these differences constitute the most fundamental fact of world history, the question of their origin remains a subject of debate. Once, 25 years ago, in a simple and not at all abstract formulation, this difficult question was addressed to me myself.

In July 1972, I was engaged in another field study of the evolution of birds on the tropical island of New Guinea, and one day I was walking along the seashore. On the same day, a local politician named Yali, whose popularity I had already heard, visited a nearby polling station. It so happened that our paths crossed: we walked along the beach in one direction and he overtook me. The next hour we spent in a joint walk, during which we talked incessantly.

Yali radiated charm and energy, especially when he turned his mesmerizing gaze on you. He spoke confidently about his own affairs, but at the same time he asked many practical questions and listened to the answers with the greatest attention. Our conversation began with a subject that then occupied the minds of every New Guinean - fast political reforms... Papua New Guinea, as the country of Yali is called today, was still ruled by Australia under a UN mandate at that time, but future independence was already in the air. Yali talked to me at length about his role in preparing the local population for self-government.

Esi, Karinge, Omwai, Paranu, Sauakari, Vivora and all my other friends and teachers from New Guinea who know how to live in difficult natural conditions.

Foreword

Why is world history like an onion?

This book is my attempt to summarize the history of all people on the planet over the past thirteen thousand years. I decided to write it to answer the following question: "Why did history develop so differently on different continents?" Perhaps this question will make you wary and think that you are in the hands of another racist treatise. If so, rest assured - my book is not one of them; as will be seen later, to answer my question, I don't even need to talk about the differences between races. My main goal was to reach the ultimate foundations, to trace the chain of historical causality to the maximum distance into the depths of time.

Authors who undertake the presentation of world history, as a rule, narrow their subject to the written societies that inhabited Eurasia and North Africa. The indigenous societies of the rest of the world - Sub-Saharan Africa, North and South America, the archipelagos of Southeast Asia, Australia, New Guinea, the Pacific Islands - receive little attention, more often than not, limited to events that happened to them at the later stages of history. that is, after they were discovered and conquered by Western Europeans. Even within Eurasia, the history of the western part of the continent is covered in much more detail than the history of China, India, Japan, tropical Southeast Asia and other societies of the East. History before the invention of writing - that is, approximately until the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. e. - is also presented relatively fluently, despite the fact that it makes up 99.9% of the entire five million year period of man's stay on Earth.

Secondly, even those who are primarily interested in the reasons for the formation of the modern world order will not advance too far if they limit themselves to events that have occurred since the appearance of writing. It is a mistake to think that before 3000 BC. e. peoples of different continents, on average, were at the same level of development, and only the invention of writing in Western Eurasia provoked a historical breakthrough in its population, which also transformed all other areas of human activity. Already by 3000 BC. e. a certain number of the Eurasian and North African peoples had not only a written culture in their embryos, but also a centralized state administration, cities, metal weapons and tools of labor were widespread; they used domesticated animals for transport, traction and mechanical energy, and relied on agriculture and animal husbandry as their main source of food. Nothing of the kind existed on most other continents at that time; some, but not all of these inventions later independently emerged in both the Americas and in sub-Saharan Africa - and then only over the next five millennia, and the indigenous population of Australia never had a chance to come to them on their own. These facts in themselves should have become an indication that the roots of Western Eurasian domination in the modern world grow far into the preliterate past. (By Western Eurasian domination I mean the dominant role in the world of both societies of Western Eurasia itself and societies formed by people from Western Eurasia on other continents.)

Why did European, and later Euro-Atlantic civilization achieve the greatest successes in human history? Why exactly Europe, first independently, and later - together with the United States of America, created the world in which we live now? What predetermined the global hegemony of the European worldview - industry, force of arms, or something else? And what influence does the environment have on the worldview of not only an individual person, but also entire nations and even races? All this and much more is discussed in his book by Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

In a recent book by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Diamond's work is seen as laying the foundation for geographic approach in explaining the structure of the world. Sami Acemoglu and Robinson are institutionalists. For the culturological school see.

Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs, and Steel: A History of Human Communities. - M .: AST, 2016 .-- 720 p.

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Prologue.Journalists often ask authors to summarize the content of their voluminous treatises in one sentence. For this book, I have already formulated it: “History different nations developed differently because of the difference in their geographic conditions, and not because of the biological difference between themselves. "

PART ONE. FROM EDEM TO KAHAMARKA

Chapter 1. Starting line

Our closest relatives on the planet are three now existing species great primates: gorilla, common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee, also known as bonobos (see details). The fact that the distribution area of \u200b\u200ball three is Africa, as well as the mass of fossil material, indicate that initial stages human evolution took place precisely on this continent.

For five to six million years, the history of man unfolded in Africa. First ancestor modern manthat spread beyond Africa became Homo erectus (Fig. 1). A particularly large number of bone fossils were left behind by people who inhabited Europe and Western Asia 130–40 thousand years ago - it was they who were named Neanderthals, and they are sometimes classified as a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis.

Figure: 1. Resettlement of a person the globe (BC - BC, AD - AD)

About 50 thousand years ago, human history finally began its countdown. These ancient people are called Cro-Magnons. The Cro-Magnons have a variety of types of tools with such a modern shape that we do not have to doubt their purpose - these are needles, awls, cutting tools, etc.

During the ice ages, ice accumulated such an amount of water in the oceans that sea levels across the planet dropped hundreds of feet below their current level. As a result, the areas of the earth's surface that are today occupied by the shallow seas separating Southeast Asia and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Java and Bali turned into land areas. (The same thing happened with other shallow waters such as the Bering Strait and the English Channel.)

For any well-studied area where humans appeared in prehistoric times, we know that human colonization has always been followed by a sharp jump in the extinction of species - these are New Zealand moas, Madagascar giant lemurs, and large flightless Hawaiian geese. This is due to the fact that the environment in which the evolution of Australian / New Guinea animals took place for millions of years did not include human hunters. It is known that Galapagos and Antarctic birds and mammals, which also evolved far from humans and first saw them only a few centuries ago, despite everything, still behave like tame.

Most of the mammals of Africa and Eurasia managed to survive to the modern era, because their evolution for hundreds of thousands and even millions of years took place side by side with human evolution. This means they have had enough time to develop a fear of the human, while the latter slowly perfected his initially obscure hunting skills.

The disappearance of all large animals in Australia / New Guinea had the most serious consequences for the further history of man in this part of the planet. These are animals that might otherwise be candidates for domestication (domestication), and in the future this has left Australians and New Guineans without native pets at all. America also lost most of its large wild animals at the turn of the 12th and 11th millennia BC.

The Neanderthals, who lived during the glacial era and were adapted to the cold, spread north no further than northern Germany and Kiev. This shouldn't surprise us, since they didn't seem to have needles, sewn clothing, heated homes, or other technology required to survive in cold climates. Tribes of people with a modern anatomical structure, who already possessed such technologies, began their expansion to Siberia about 20 thousand years ago. This expansion probably explains the extinction of the Eurasian woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos.

Chapter 2. Natural experiment in history

Thousands of islands are scattered across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean between New Guinea and Melanesia, varying greatly in area, distance from the nearest land, altitude, climate, fertility, and geological and biological resources (Fig. 2). Around 1200 BC a group of tribes from the Bismarck archipelago north of New Guinea - who by then knew how to cultivate the land, fish for food and walk on the sea - managed to land on some of these islands. Over the centuries that have passed since that moment, their descendants have populated almost every piece of land in the Pacific Ocean. The process was generally completed by 500 AD.

It seems to me that the size of a territory's population is the best indicator of the complexity of social organization. Agriculture, which contributes to population growth, also does possible the emergence of various elements of complex societies. However, the complication of social organization becomes inevitable only if there are four reasons:

the desire to neutralize potential conflicts between people who are not related by kinship;
complication of procedures for collective decision-making;
the need to supplement the system of mutual exchanges with a redistribution system;
increasing population density.

So, large societies come to centralization due to the very nature of the problems facing them of conflict resolution, decision-making, economic and spatial organization. However, by producing new people - those who hold power, are privy to information, make decisions and redistribute products - the centralization of power inevitably opens the way for them to exploit existing opportunities for the benefit of themselves and their relatives.

In the past, the transition from smaller units to larger ones through mergers has happened many times. However, contrary to Rousseau, this never happened voluntarily. In reality, the consolidation of political units occurs in one of two ways: either as a union in the face of the threat of an external force, or as an actual conquest.

PART FOUR. AROUND THE WORLD IN FIVE CHAPTERS

Chapter 15. Yali people

Australia is not only the smallest continent - it is by a large margin ahead of all others in aridity, evenness of the landscape, infertility, climatic unpredictability and scarcity of biological resources. Colonized by Europeans last, it also had the smallest and most unusual indigenous population in the world. In short, Australia is the touchstone of any theory that tries to explain differences in the way people live on different continents. Here were the most specific natural conditions, and here the most specific societies took shape (Fig. 11).

Figure: 11. Map of the region from Southeast Asia to Australia and New Guinea. The solid lines represent the current coastline, the dashed lines represent the coastline during the Pleistocene period, when sea level fell below the current level, i.e. boundaries of the Asian and Australian shelves. At that time Australia and New Guinea were united into one continent - Greater Australia, while the islands of Borneo, Java, Sumatra and Taiwan were part of Asia.

Why did not metal tools, writing and complex political organization? The main reason was that Aboriginal people remained hunter-gatherers, and innovation only emerged in densely populated and economically specialized food producing societies. In addition, Australia's aridity, infertility and climatic unpredictability kept its hunter-gatherer population within a few hundred thousand. Mesoamerica or China was home to tens of millions, meaning Australia had a very meager base of potential inventors and too few societies to experiment with innovation.

The largest loss in the entire Australian region was incurred by technology on the island of Tasmania. After separation from the mainland, the existence of the four thousandth hunting and gatherer population of Tasmania took place in the absence of contact with any other people on Earth. When Europeans finally met the Tasmanian natives in 1642, they found the most primitive material culture of the modern era. They lacked many of the technologies and artifacts widespread in big earth: arrowheads with barbs, any bone tools, boomerangs, polished stone tools, tools with a handle, hooks, sharpened spears, nets, as well as skills such as fishing, sewing, and lighting a fire. At least three other small islands (Flinders, Kangaroo and King), cut off from Australia and Tasmania by sea level rise about 10 thousand years ago, also had human populations, from 200 to 400 people, but they all became extinct over time.

The witnessed examples of technological regression on the Australian mainland indicate that the paucity of culture among Indigenous Australians compared to peoples on other continents can be explained in part by the relationship between isolation and population size.

Chapter 16. How China Became Chinese

China was once a heterogeneous region like all other populous states today. China differs from them only in that it was united much earlier. Two long rivers flowing from west to east of China (the Yellow River in the north and the Yangtze in the south) facilitated the technological and agrarian communication of the interior regions and the coast, and the relatively flat landscape facilitated similar exchanges between the north and south. All these geographic factors became one of the conditions for China's early cultural and political consolidation - a consolidation to which Europe, roughly equal in area, but having a more uneven landscape and devoid of equally large connecting rivers, did not come in its entire history.

The state of the Northern Chinese Zhou dynasty and others, organized according to its model, spread across the territory of southern China during the 1st millennium BC. This process culminated in the political unification of China under the Qin dynasty in 221 BC. The Chinese push to the south was so powerful that the present human populations of tropical Southeast Asia have hardly preserved any traces of the former settlement of the region. Only by three relict groups of hunter-gatherers - the Semang Negritos of the Malay Peninsula, the Andamans and the Veddoid Negritos of Sri Lanka - we can judge that the former inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia most likely had dark skin and curly hair, like modern New Guineans , and not fair skin and straight hair, like its today's inhabitants and their South Chinese relatives.

Chapter 17 Motorboat to Polynesia

In this book, which chronicles the migrations of human populations since the end of the last ice age, Austronesian expansion is central to one of the most important events in history. Why did the Austronesians, being mainland Chinese in origin, colonize Java and the rest of Indonesia? Why, having occupied all of Indonesia, in New Guinea, the Austronesians were able to occupy only a narrow strip of the coast and did not press the inhabitants of the highlands in any way? How did the descendants of the Chinese emigrants become Polynesians?

Analysis of archaeological artifacts and languages \u200b\u200bspoken by modern peoples indicates that the colonization of Southeast Asia began with about Taiwan (Fig. 12).

Figure: 12. Ways of Austronesian expansion: 4a - Borneo, 4b - Sulawesi, 4c - Timor (about 2500 BC), 5a - Halmahera, 5b - Java, 5c - Sumatra, 6a - Bismarck archipelago, 6b - Malay Peninsula, 6c - Vietnam (about 1000 BC), 7 - Solomon Islands (about 1600 BC), 8 - Santa Cruz, 9c - Tonga, 9d - New Caledonia (about 1200 BC) BC), 10b - Society Islands, 10c - Cook Islands, 11a - Tuamotu Archipelago (about 1 AD).

The results of Austronesian expansion in the New Guinea region, on the one hand, and in Indonesia and the Philippines, on the other, were opposite. If in the latter case, the aliens drove out the indigenous people for good (one way or another: driving them from the land, killing, infecting with diseases, assimilating), then in the first case the aborigines for the most part managed to defend their territories. Where did the opposite results come from?

Before the arrival of the Austronesians, almost all of Indonesia was a sparsely populated area, the inhabitants of which were engaged in hunting and gathering. By contrast, in the highlands - and perhaps some of the lowlands - parts of New Guinea, as well as in the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands, food production has been practiced for thousands of years. If we take the peoples of the Stone Age, the mountains of New Guinea, both then and later, were one of the most densely populated areas in the world. The Austronesians had almost no advantage over these fully developed New Guinea peoples. The uneven success of Austronesian expansion is eloquent testimony to the important role food production plays in population migration.

Chapter 18. Collision of hemispheres

Three groups of factors can be distinguished that determined the success of the European conquest of America: the longer existence of human populations in Eurasia, the greater efficiency of Eurasian food production resulting from the greater diversity of Eurasian plant and especially animal domesticates, and, finally, the absence of as serious as in America. , geographic and environmental barriers to intracontinental cultural and population diffusion.

Several centuries ago, after at least thirteen thousand years of parallel existence, the advanced societies of America and Eurasia finally collided. The first recorded attempt by the Eurasians to colonize America was made by the Scandinavians in the arctic and subarctic latitudes (see more details). This colonization was unsuccessful. The second attempt at the Eurasian colonization of America (which began in 1492 by Columbus) was successful because its parameters - source, purpose, geographical latitude, historical time - allowed the Europeans this time to fully realize their advantages. Spain, unlike Norway, was rich and populous enough to initiate pioneering expeditions and ensure the existence of colonies. Crossing the ocean, the Spaniards landed and settled in extremely favorable subtropical latitudes for agriculture.

Chapter 19. How Africa Gone Black

The five main groups that made up the African population as early as 1000 AD can be roughly designated as follows: black, white, African pygmies, Khoisans, and Asians (Fig. 13).

The Koisan family is famous for the fact that, besides it, practically no other languages \u200b\u200bin the world contain clicking consonants. From the peculiarities of the spread of the Khoisan languages \u200b\u200band the lack of their own language family among the pygmies, we can conclude that the pygmies and Khoisans in the past occupied a larger territory, which at some point was occupied by blacks.

In sub-Saharan Africa, food production has been constrained (relative to Eurasia) by a lack of native animals and plant species suitable for domestication, a smaller area suitable for local farming, and its predominant north-south orientation, which has hampered the expansion of production. food and other cultural innovations.

Epilogue. The future of history as a natural science

The essence of modern human existence and the entire history of mankind after the end of the Pleistocene, in my opinion, is determined by four groups of factors:

differences in the composition of wild plants and animals available as starting material for domestication;
differences associated with factors affecting the rate of cultural diffusion and population migration; the fastest diffusion and migration took place in Eurasia - due to the prevailing east-west orientation of the continent and the absence of serious ecological and geographical barriers in most of its territory;
convenience of intercontinental diffusion;
differences between continents in terms of area and total population.

Why among the societies of Eurasia it was European, and not the Middle East, Chinese or Indian, who came forward in technological development and achieved economic and political dominance in the modern world?

When the early start advantage due to the abundance of domesticated species in the local flora and fauna was lost, the Fertile Crescent ceased to stand out from the rest of the regions. We can trace in detail how his advantage was gradually reduced to nothing by the shift to the west of the dominant powers. After the emergence of the first states in the IV millennium BC. the center of power at first remained for a long time in the Fertile Crescent, moving between the empires: Babylonian, Hittite, Assyrian and Persian. At the end of the IV century. BC, when the Greeks under the leadership of Alexander the Great conquered all developed societies from the Balkan Peninsula to India, the center of influence for the first time irreversibly shifted to the west. His next shift in this direction occurred as a result of the Roman conquest of Greece in the II century. BC, and after the fall of the Roman Empire, it shifted again, to Western and Northern Europe.

In ancient times, most of the Fertile Crescent and the eastern Mediterranean, including Greece, were covered with forests, which were either cleared for arable land, or cut down for construction timber, or used as fuel for heating houses or producing lime mortars. Today, vast areas of the former Fertile Crescent are occupied by deserts, semi-deserts, steppes and eroded or highly saline soils.

Thus, the societies of the Fertile Crescent and in general of the eastern Mediterranean are simply not fortunate enough to appear in a region with a fragile ecology. Having destroyed their own resource base, they committed ecological suicide. Northern and Western Europe passed this fate, not because its inhabitants turned out to be wiser, but because they were lucky to live in a more ecologically sustainable region, where precipitation was more abundant and vegetation was renewed faster.

Why did China cede its leadership? I believe this is a consequence of European fragmentation, which is in stark contrast to Chinese unity. To understand why China has ceded political and technological supremacy to Europe, it is necessary to answer the main question about the causes of chronic Chinese unity and chronic European fragmentation. Europe has an extremely rugged coastline, with five large peninsulas that approach islands in isolation and each have developed their own languages. ethnic groups and political entities: Greece, Italy, Portugal / Spain, Denmark, Norway / Sweden. The coastline of China is much smoother, and only the Korean Peninsula has acquired a separate significance in history.

After the political consolidation of the Chinese region, which took place in 221 BC, there was no place in its history for other stable autonomous formations. Periods of fragmentation, of which there were several in this story, invariably ended with the restoration of autocracy. The political consolidation of Europe, on the contrary, was beyond the power of anyone, including such decisive conquerors as Charlemagne, Napoleon and Hitler; even the Roman Empire, during the period of its greatest power, controlled less than half of European territory.

The geographical homogeneity of the Chinese region at some point began to harm it. In conditions of autocracy, the decision of one despot could freeze an entire direction of technology - which has happened more than once. In contrast, the geographic division of Europe has spawned dozens or even hundreds of small rival states and centers of innovation. If one state did not give way to some invention, another was found, which took it into service and eventually forced its neighbors to either follow their example or lose in economic competition. Europe, in its current quest for political and economic unity, is likely to have to be especially careful not to destroy the systemic parameters that have underpinned its success over the past five centuries.

As for other historical factors, the most important should be called the role of culture and the role of individuals. The role of features that have arisen outside the context of habitat is an important problem (see details). As well as unique cultural traits, unique personality traits are the jokers in the story deck. They are capable of making history inexplicable in terms of geographic, environmental, or any other generalized reason. Be that as it may, the question of the scale and depth of the influence of outstanding personalities on the course of history remains open.

The McKinsey consulting firm found that the degree of competition and the size of the groups involved in it play a key role in the development of innovation. If your goal is to maximize innovation and competitiveness, you do not need excessive cohesion or excessive fragmentation. You want your country, industry, industrial area, or company to be broken up into groups that compete with each other while maintaining a fairly free communication among themselves.

Why are some countries rich (like the United States or Switzerland) while others are poor (like Paraguay or Mali)? It is clear that some part of the answer is related to the difference in social institutions. Meanwhile, there is growing awareness that the “institutional” approach to the problem is insufficient — not wrong, but insufficient — and that other important factors must be taken into account in trying to make poor countries rich. The institutional approach has been criticized from at least two sides. Objections of the first type emphasize the important role not only of effective institutions, but also of other immediate factors: the health of the nation, climatic and soil-related constraints on agricultural productivity, instability environment... The second group of objections concerns the genesis of effective institutions themselves.

The objections of this group are that it is not enough to view effective institutions as a factor of direct action, while ignoring the question of their origin as not having practical value... From my point of view, effective institutions have always emerged as a result of a long chain of historical accomplishments - the ascent from the initial factors of a geographic nature to the direct factors derived from them, among which there are institutional ones. We need to get ourselves as clear as possible about such chains if today we want them to appear as soon as possible in countries where there are no effective institutions.