Book Review: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Food and dining as symbolic of power in primitive societies and in the modern world

** 2/3 **

<a href="http://<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393354326/ref=sr_1_1?crid=KPDKHFMHI336&keywords=guns+germs+and+steel&qid=1703601086&sprefix=guns+germs+and+steel%252Caps%252C195&sr=8-1&_encoding=UTF8&tag=beyondnonbina-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=97afebb9b94b0717e5f4eb9f0eaad99c&camp=1789&creative=9325">Guns Germs and SteelGuns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

When I write about a book I have read, I normally make a value judgement. But I also kind of summarise what the book is about. I read this book differently. I was looking for something, so the notes I took along the way are also in reference to that topic.

My topic? Surprise, it was about food. The sub-heading above. More specifically, I was interested in looking at how societies organise around the production and distribution of food, the rituals of eating, etc. It is a fascinating topic and <a href="http://<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/s?k=jared+diamond&crid=L4FZYNLUM7HD&sprefix=jared+diamond%252Caps%252C184&ref=nb_sb_noss_1&_encoding=UTF8&tag=beyondnonbina-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=f48b4fe0727a4b511307e5862afa312c&camp=1789&creative=9325">Books by Jared DiamondJared Diamond is fairly thorough in his research methods, if not a bit reductive in his reasoning.

These are my notes. They follow the structure of the book, but as you will see, there are big sections of the book I did not read as they were not interesting to me. As someone who studied (and has a degree in) Semiotics, the work of linguists and anthropologists on meaning, and specifically the use of writing in primitive societies as a tool of power. I particularly remember a passage on this topic where Saussure notes that a village chieftain who cannot read or write, does understand the symbolism of pen and paper, and taking them from the linguist, makes scribbles on paper and then uses what he “wrote” to tell those around him that “here it says you are to do such and such.” In other words, the chief understood the symbolism of power.

Food, the control of food, its production, its fetishisation, is very much a similar tool. Essential to life but also reified in society. These notes represent my ramblings into the topic, my rating a reflection of how thoroughly I recommend his book to you.

Prologue: “Yali’s Question”

• p. 14.  “Why do some peoples develop cargo and other’s do not?”  This becomes the central theme of the book…How is that some cultures become dominant and overtake others?
• P.30.  Geography’s effect on the ease with which ideas and inventions spread can be seen in writing, but also technology. Inventor-geniuses, or idiosyncratic cultural patterns are not the cause.  By enabling farmers to generate food surpluses, food production permitted farming societies to support full-time craft specialists who did not grow their own food and who developed technologies.  Besides sustaining scribes and inventors, food production also enabled farmers to support politicians.  Mobile bands of hunter-gatherers are relatively egalitarian, and their political sphere is confined to the band’s own territory and to shifting alliances with neighbours.  With the rise of dense, sedentary, food-producing populations came the rise of chiefs, kings, and bureaucrats.
• P31.  The rise of food production in China spawned several great prehistoric movements of human populations and cultural traits.  One of those created the China we know today, another resulted in a replacement throughout most of tropical Southeast Asia of the indigenous hunter-gatherers by farmers of South Chinese origin.  The Austronesian expansion did the same throughout the Philippines and Indonesia.

Part One looks at examples of these “expansions” From Eden to Cajamarca

Skipped

Part Two looks at The Rise and Spread of Food Production

Chapter 4: “Farmer Power”

• P. 85-86.  Recounts story of Blackfoot Indian Levi who was polite, gentle, responsible, sober and admired by the author, until one day he get’s drunk and damns the white man.  “Levi’s tribe of hunters and famous warriors had been robbed of its lands by the immigrant white farmers.  How did the farmers win out over the famous warriors?”
• P. 86.  For most of the time since the ancestors of modern humans diverged from the ancestors of the living great apes, about 7 million years ago, all humans on earth fed themselves exclusively by hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants, as the Blackfeet still did in the 19^th C.  It was only in the last 11,000 years that some peoples turned to what is known as food production: domesticating wild animals and plants and eating the resulting livestock and crops.  Today, most people on earth either produce food that they grow themselves or that someone grew for them—and within the next decade the last remaining hunter-gatherers will die out, thereby ending our million years of commitment to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
• P. 86.  Different peoples acquired food production at different times in prehistory.  Some, such as Aborigines, never did at all.  Of those who did, some developed it independently (the Chinese) while others (including the Egyptians) acquired it from neighbours.  Food production was the indirect prerequisite for the development of “Guns, germs, and steel”. Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates.  
• P.86-89.  The connections that enabled this are as follows.  1. Availability of more consumable calories means more people.  Of all plant and animal species only a small number are edible or worth hunting or gathering.  Most are useless as food: indigestible, low in nutritional value, poisonous, tedious to prepare (eg. small nuts), difficult to gather (eg. insect larvae) or dangerous to hunt (eg. rhinoceros).  Most biomass on earth is wood and leaves, which we cannot digest.  By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90% rather than 0.1% of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more calories per acre.  As a result, one acre may feed many more herders and farmers, typically 10-100 times more—than hunter-gatherers.  That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that good-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.  Livestock furnished meat, milk, fertilizer, clothing and pulling ploughs…and became the primary source of protein, replacing wild game.  Milked mammals were even more value over their lifetimes.  Big domestic mammals also interact with big domestic plants to increase crop production: manure as fertilizer increases crop yields, and the tilling of land made it possible to farmland that might have been previously uneconomical for farming.  The first prehistoric farmers of Europe Linearbandkeramik culture that arose around 5,000 B.C. were confined at the beginning to soils that could be tilled with hand tools.  It was only 1,00 years later that they could access land as they introduced the ox-pulled plough.  Native American farmers of the Great Plains farmed the river valleys but had to wait for the arrival of 19^th C Europeans to bring the animal-drawn plough.  Yielding more food enabled denser societies.  But also, the sedentary lifestyle enforced by food production permitted a shorter birth-cycle.  Hunter-gatherer women would get pregnant on average in 4-year cycles so that the child could walk and move around with the band as they moved in search of food.  This decrease to 2-year cycles with the advent of the sedentary life.  And indeed, sedentary people can have as many children as they can feed.  A separate consequence of a settled existence is that it permits one to store food surpluses.  Stored food is essential for feeding non-producing food specialists.  Hence nomadic hunter-gatherer societies had few or no such specialists.
• P89-90.  Two types of the specialists that arose are “kings” and “bureaucrats”.  Hunter-gatherer societies tended to be egalitarian, to lack full-time bureaucrats or hereditary chiefs, and were organised on a small scale at band or tribe level.  That’s because all able-bodied are expected to spend their time gathering food.  In sedentary societies, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage in full-time political activities.  A stored surplus built up by taxation can support further specialisation.  Most importantly to the question of control and conquest, it can support police and professional soldiers…one which permits organisation and the quashing of internal dissent and the other allowing for the domination and subjugation of other societies.
• P 90.  Crops and livestock have a direct food benefit, but also indirect benefits in providing fibre for clothing and rope, blankets, nets.  Fibre crops and food crops together were the hallmarks of the most economically successful societies to transition.  Big domestic animals also became the primary means of land transport until the arrival of the railroad.
• P 92.  Of equal importance to all of these factors from the perspective of conquest were the arrival of the germs that evolved in human societies in contact with livestock.  Infectious diseases such as smallpox, measles, and flue arose from mutations of similar ancestral germs that had infected animals.  The humans who raised these animals gradually built-up immunity, but when they came in contact with peoples who had never been exposed, the effect was devastating.  Epidemics in cases killed up to as many as 99% of the people exposed.  This was the primary killer of Native Americans, Native Australians, South Africans and Pacific Islanders…
• P 92.  Plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence greater population.  The resulting food surpluses, plus animal transport enabled settled, politically centralised, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies.  The availability of domestic plants and animals therefore explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed first in Eurasia and later or not at all on other Continents.  The military uses of horses and animals and the killing power of animal-derived germs complete the list of major links between food production and conquest.

Chapter 5: History’s Have and Have Nots

• P. 93-94.  Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and have nots: between peoples with farmer power and those without it, or between those who acquired it at different times.  Food production never arose in certain parts of the globe, for ecological reasons that still make it difficult.  What surprises is that it didn’t arise in parts of the world where it would have been suitable, and which are some of the richest zones today.  Foremost among these areas where indigenous hunter-gatherers were still operating at the time of the arrival of the colonists were California and the Pacific northwest of the US, the Argentine Pampas, southwestern and south-eastern Australia, and much of the Cape Region of South Africa.  As recently as 4,000 BC many areas that were propitious breadbaskets were still without (the rest of the US, France, England, Indonesia, subequatorial Africa).  Yet when we look at where food production first arose, we are struck by there being many areas that are somewhat arid or ecologically degraded: Iraq, Iran, Mexico, the Andes, parts of China, Africa’s Sahel region.  Why did food production develop in these marginal places first?

Chapter 6: To Farm or Not to Farm

• P 105-6.  Food production was not discovered, nor was it an invention.  There was often not a conscious choice between food production and hunter-gathering.  The people in various parts of the world who first developed food production were not making a conscious choice towards farming as a goal as they had never seen it before.  Food production evolved as a by-product of decisions made without awareness of the consequences.  The question should therefore be reframed as why food production evolved in some places and not others, and at different times and paces?
• P. 106.  There is not a sharp delineation between hunter-gatherer and sedentary food producers.  Some highly productive areas such as the Pacific NW and south-eastern Australia had sedentary hunter-gatherers.  Other hunter-gatherers in Peru, Palestine, and Japan became sedentary first and then acquired food production later.  15,000 years ago, when the entire world was the domain of hunter-gatherers, a majority were sedentary, whereas today, the only pockets of hunter-gatherers which remain are on marginal land where nomadism is the only option.   Conversely, there are also mobile groups of food producers.  In New Guinea’s Lake Plains, modern nomads clear a pocket of jungle, plant bananas and papayas, go off for a few months to live as hunter-gatherers, come back to tend their garden, head off to hunt, and then come back to harvest, before moving on to the next patch and letting the old one return to forest.  The Apache of the SW US would farm in the summer at high elevations then head south and down to the valleys in the colder months when they would forage and hunt.  In Africa and Asia, herding people will follow the natural migration patterns and mix hunting with husbandry.  Another distinction is between food producers who actively manage their land and hunter-gatherer’s as mere collectors of the lands wild produce.  In reality some hunter-gatherers intensively manage their land.  In New Guinea there are peoples who have not domesticated the sago palm or pandanus, but they clear around them, fertilise them, ensure they are well irrigated, and thereby increase production.  The Aborigines used controlled burns to increase the productivity of otherwise poor soils and encourage the growth of edible seed plants which sprout first after a fire.
• P 107.  From these precursors of farming from hunter-gathering, things evolved in steps.  The techniques were developed over long periods of time, different species were added gradually (both plant and animal), and what happened in different places happened in a different sequence.  Why?  Because food production systems evolved as a result of the accumulation of many separate decisions about allocating time and effort.  All other things being equal, people sought to maximise their return of calories, protein, or food types by foraging in a way that yields the most return with the greatest certainty in the least time for the least effort.  They also seek to minimize their risk of starving: moderate but reliable returns were preferable to feast or famine, which could result in death.  It is thought that the first gardens from 11,000 years ago were a hedge in case wild food supplies failed.
• P 108-9.  Adoption of food production was rapid and wholesale (livestock, pulses, cereals/grains) in south-eastern and central Europe because the hunter-gatherer lifestyle there was less productive and less competitive.  In contrast, food production was adopted piecemeal in southwester Europe (Southern France, Italy, Spain, Portugal) where sheep arrived first and cereals later.  The adoption of intensive food production from the Asian mainland was also slow and piecemeal in Japan because the hunter-gatherer lifestyle based on abundant seafood and local plans was so productive.
• P109.  Similarly, one system of food production can be traded for another.  2,500 BC saw the Eastern US Indians domesticating and growing local crops, but trading with the Mexicans who had developed a successful trinity of corn, beans and squash, which grow well together.  The Eastern Indians subsequently adopted the Mexican system and neglected the indigenous crops.
• P110.  Other factors might also include the decline of availability of wild foods.  The lifestyle of hunter-gatherers has become progressively less rewarding over the past 13,000 years as resources on which they depended have become less abundant or been hunted to extinction.  As wild animals became less abundant, increased availability of domesticable wild plants made plant domestication more rewarding.  Another factor tipping the balance away from hunter-gathering was the accumulation of knowledge on the technologies on which food production would eventually depend—for collecting, processing, and storing wild foods.  A fourth factor was the two-way link between the rise in human population density and the rise in food production.  In all parts of the world archaeologists find evidence of rising densities associated with the appearance of food production…which in turn fed the need for societies to turn to food production.
• P111.  The adoption of food production is an autocatalytic process, one which feeds itself.  Produce more food, feed more people, have more people, need more food.  This link also explains the paradox why rising food production, and the production of edible calories per acre, and rising population density, left the food producers less well-nourished than the hunter-gatherers whom they succeeded.
• P 112.  The final factor in the transition became decisive at geographic boundaries between food producers and hunter-gatherers.  The much denser populations of the farmers allowed them to displace or kill the hunter-gatherers by their sheer numbers, not to mention the other advantages (technology, germs, and professional soldiers).  As a result, in most areas of the globe suitable for food production, hunter-gatherers met one of two fates: either they were displaced or they only survived by adopting food production themselves.

Part Three: From Food to Guns, Germs and Steel

Chapter 14: From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy

• P 266-7.  Many other previously uncontacted groups of New Guineans and Amazonian Indians have similarly owed to missionaries their incorporation into modern society.  After the missionaries came teachers and doctors, bureaucrats, and soldiers.  The spreads of government and religion have thus been linked to each other throughout recorded history, whether the spread has been peaceful or by force.  While nomads and tribespeople at times defeat organised governments and religions, the trend over the past 13,000 years has been for the nomads and tribespeople to lose.  As recently as AD 1500, less than 20% of the world’s land area was marked off by boundaries into states run by bureaucrats and governed by laws.  Descendants of the societies that achieved central government and organised religion earliest ended up dominating the modern world.  The combination of government and religion has thus functioned, together with germs, writing and technology, as one of the four main sets of proximate agents leading to history’s broadest pattern.
• P267-268.  Bands and modern states occupy opposite extremes along the spectrum of human societies.  Bands are the tiniest, consisting typically of 5 to 80 people.  Most are closely related by birth—in short, an extended family, or several related extended families.  All of the bands which have survived to modern times were herders or nomadic hunter-gatherers, not settled food producers. 40,000 years ago, all humans lived in bands, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago.
• P. 268.  Bands lack many institutions that we take for granted in our own society.  They have no single base of residence.  The band’s land is typically used jointly by the whole group, instead of being partitioned amongst sub-groups or individuals.  There is no economic specialisation except by age and sex: all able-bodied people forage.  There are no formal institutions, such as laws, police, and treaties, to resolve conflicts within and between bands.  Bands are “egalitarian”.  
• P 269.  Our closest animal relatives, the gorillas, chimps and bonobos of Africa also live in bands.  The band is the political, economic, and social organisation that we inherited from our millions of years of evolutionary history.
• P 271-2.  Beyond bands we have tribes.  Tribes might have numbered a “few hundred”.  The upper limit seems to be driven by the idea of everyone being able to know everybody.  One reason the organisation of government changes from a tribe to a chiefdom when societies have more than a few hundred members is that the difficult issue of conflict resolution between strangers becomes increasingly acute in larger groups.  Further diffusing potential problems of conflict resolution in tribes is that everyone is related to everyone else, by blood, marriage, or both.  Those ties of relationships bind all members and reduce the need for codified laws, the police, and courts to enforce them.  Kin-based peer pressure is usually enough to settle any conflict that arises in tribal society.  Tribes share with bands an egalitarian social system, without class.  Status cannot be inherited, but no member will become disproportionally wealthy or powerful.  It is almost impossible for an outsider to guess who is the tribal “big-man”.  The house and clothes are the same, and there is no extra deference or privilege accorded.  Tribes also lack bureaucracy, police, and taxes.  Their economy is based on reciprocal exchanges between individuals or families rather than on the redistribution via a central authority.  Economic specialisation is slight…and every able-bodied individual participates in growing, gathering, or hunting food.  Since tribes lack economic specialists, they also lack slaves, because there are no specialised jobs for a slave to perform.
• P 273-4.  Chiefdoms are thought to have arisen around 5,500 BC in the Fertile Crescent and by 1,000 BC in Mesoamerica and the Andes.  Chiefdoms were considerably larger than tribes and ranged in size from several thousand to several tens of thousands of people.  That size created serious potential for internal conflict.  People had to learn for the first time in history how to encounter strangers without attempting to kill them.  Part of the solution to that problem was that one person, the Chief, be the final arbiter.  Another part was the chief having a monopoly on the use of force.  A chief held a recognised office (v. the tribal “big-man”), usually filled by hereditary right.  The chief was a permanent central authority, made all significant decisions, and had a monopoly on critical information.  They also had the trappings of power—big houses, special clothes, and terms of respect.
• P 274.  A chiefdom’s large population in a small area required plenty of food, obtained primarily by food production (examples of hunter-gatherer chiefdoms existed in the Pacific Northwest).  Since chiefs required menial servants as well as specialised craftspeople, chiefdoms also differed from tribes by having many jobs that could be filled by slaves, typically by capture in raids.
• P 275.  The biggest demarcation in the move from tribe to chiefdom was a move from a reciprocal economy: I give you x and you give me y, to a redistributive economy—we all give everything to the chief and the chief rations it out over time according to need (usually retaining the surplus for his family).
• P 276.  Chiefdoms introduced the dilemma fundamental to all centrally governed, non-egalitarian societies.  At best they do good by contracting and providing services which are too expensive or difficult to organise on an individual basis, but at worst they function as kleptocracies, transferring net wealth from workers to the upper classes.  The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesman, between a robber baron and a public benefactor is merely one of degree: a matter of how much of the tribute extracted from those who produce it is retained by the elite, and by how much the workers like the public uses that the redistributed wealth is put to.
• P 276-7.  For any ranked society, whether chiefdom or state, one has to ask why do the commoners tolerate the transfer of the fruits of their hard work to kleptocrats?  This question has been raised by Plato to modern times.  Egregious kleptocrats are overthrown by other kleptocrats promising a better redistribution.  How do they keep getting away with it?  1. Disarm the populace and arm the elite.  This is much easier now that we have high-tech weaponry and not just spears and clubs.  2. Make the masses happy by redistributing the wealth in popular ways.  3. Use the monopoly of force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing violence.  4. Construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy (eg. the divine right of kings, the imprimatur of religious blessing)
• P 278.  Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalised religion brings two other important benefits to centralised societies.  First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of getting unrelated people to live together in relative harmony.  Second, it gives a motive for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others…At the cost of a few society members who in battle as soldiers, the whole society becomes much more effective at conquering other societies or resisting attacks
• P 279 Central control is more far reaching, and economic redistribution in the form of tribute (now called taxes) more extensive in states than in chiefdoms.  Economic specialisation is more extreme, to the point where today not even farmers remain self-sufficient.  The effect on state society is catastrophic when state government collapses (as happened in Roman Britain between AD 407 and 411 when the Roman troops left).  Early Mesopotamian society divided food production into four specialisms (cereal farmers, herders, fishermen, and orchard and garden growers), from each of which the state took the produce and to each of which it gave out the necessary supplies, tools, and foods.  Many, perhaps most, adopted slavery on a much larger scale than did chiefdoms.  That was not because of kindness towards defeated enemies but rather the greater economic specialisation of states, with more mass production and more public works, which provided more use for slave labour.  Additionally, the larger scale of state warfare made more captives available.
• P 280.  Internal conflict resolution within states has become increasingly formalized by laws, a judiciary, a police force.  The laws are often written because states have typically had literate elites (the Incas were a notable exception)…whereas no early chiefdoms had writing.  All these features of states carry to an extreme the developments which led from tribes to chiefdoms.  But there are also some important divergences.  States are organised on political and territorial lines rather than kinship lines which defined bands, tribes, and chiefdoms.  Bands and tribes always, and chiefdoms almost always, consist of single ethnic and linguistic groups.  States and empires often brought together through conquest many such groups.
• P 281.  States triumph over simpler entities was driven in large part by technological advantages, particularly that of weaponry, and a large numerical advantage in population.  Centralised decision making, however, has the further advantage of consolidating resources and troops.  Official religious and patriotic fervour of many states makes their troops willing to fight suicidally.  This last point is so indoctrinated in us through school and society that we forget how alien it is to most of human history
• P 282-3-4.  Why do states arise?  Aristotle considered states to be the natural condition of human society.  That error is understandable as that was his known world.  But even in 1492, much of the world was still organised into chiefdoms, tribes, or bands.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau speculated that states are formed by a social contract, a rational decision reached when people calculated their self-interest, and concluded that they would be better off in states than in simpler societies, and voluntarily made the change.  But this has not been borne out by fact.  A third theory stems from the arising of large-scale irrigation systems in China and Mesopotamia, which necessitated rules and state-like function.  The timing works.  But the clearest connection is simply the size of the regional population.  Some hunter-gatherer societies reached the organizational level of chiefdoms, but none reached the level of states.  This suggests that intensive food production is the ultimate cause of state formation (by triggering population growth).
• P285.  Population growth leads to societal complexity, while societal complexity in turn leads to intensified food production and thereby further population growth.  But it also starts with food production.  Food production contributes in three ways to specific features of complex societies: First, it involves seasonally pulsed inputs of labour.  Once the harvest is done, the farmer is able to work on other things.  Second, food production may be organised so as to generate stored food surpluses, which permit economic specialisation and social stratification.  Finally, food production permits or requires people to adopt sedentary living, which allows for the accumulation of property and objects, the construction of public works
• P 286.  Food production, in addition to making population growth possible, also possesses features which make complex societies possible, but not inevitable.  The potential for conflict among unrelated strangers grows exponentially in larger societies.  That factor alone would explain why societies of thousands can exist only if they develop central authority to monopolize force and resolve conflicts.  The second reason is the impossibility of communal decision-making in larger societies.  Third is economic: any society requires means to transfer goods between its members.  While in small groups direct trade is possible, in large groups, markets and a medium of exchange become necessary.  Money and redistribution of goods.  Finally, population density is both enabled by and enables more complex society, which in turn drives specialisation and trade.
• P 288 Considerations of conflict resolution, decision making, economics, and space thus converge in requiring large societies to be centralised.  But centralised power leads to corruption, when the elite become “more equal” than others.  Societies with effective conflict resolution, sound decision-making, and harmonious economic redistribution can develop better technology, concentrate their military power, seize larger and more productive territories, and crush autonomous small societies one by one.
• P 290.  I include this reference largely because it makes reference to German political history and the unification of its principalities, which you may have covered in your undergrad degree years.  Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, restored German Confederation of 1850, and the North German Confederation of 1866…as well as to the challenges in the future US colonies—in both cases it was the threat of war from the outside that provoked the unification—from England in the case of the future US and from France for Germany.
• P 291.  When population densities are low, as is usual in regions occupied by hunter-gatherers, survivors need only move further away from their enemies.  Tribal societies without food surpluses had no means for tribute.  Hence the victors had no use for the survivors, unless to take the women in marriage.  The defeated men were killed.  But when there are chiefdoms, the defeated do not have anywhere to flee, and the victors have two avenues for exploitation.  Most typically, this meant slavery, or simply to leave them in place, but deprive them of political autonomy, a kind of slavery of a different sort.  [Not so different than the modern world].