How the West Won: History That Feels Good Usually Isn't

Virgil claimed that it was Rome's task to show mercy to the conquered and overthrow the proud. Two thousand years later, America's professors have assigned themselves the old Virgilian project. Book after book is published in a vast effort to convince Americans to think more highly of foreign peoples and cultures -- especially those once deemed primitive -- and less highly of themselves.

This is sometimes called the "therapeutic" approach to history, but it might be more accurate to call it the anti-imperialistic approach. The imperialist writers of a century ago sought to show how once small, backward peoples -- the English, the Americans, the Prussians -- built states and then, through their own superior personal qualities, rose to dominate a continent or the globe. The new anti-imperialist writers want to tell exactly the opposite story. The rise of the West, as they tell it, reflects no honor or glory on Western civilization. If it happened at all -- and some anti-imperial writers deny it -- it only proves the West's superior ruthlessness and cruelty. Or else, as other anti-imperial writers say, the rise of the West was the result of happenstance: the good luck of having plenty of iron and coal conveniently close, a temperate climate, easy access to the sea. Much of the anti-imperial school's writing can immediately be recognized as exercises in excuse-making. But as the screenwriters of Hollywood occasionally remind us, even very bad genres can sometimes produce good works.

A good example of a bad genre is perhaps the best way to describe Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond is an evolutionary biologist by training, but over the past quarter-century he became interested in what he calls "Yali's question." Yali was a local politician Diamond got to know while doing fieldwork in New Guinea. Diamond describes him as inquisitive and charismatic but tinged with resentment. As Diamond remembers it, Yali's question was posed like this: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" The world has been grappling with this question for the past 400 years. Diamond is one of the very few authors to produce an answer that is both original and convincing.

Diamond's intentions are, as he frankly confesses, apologetic. He believes that most Westerners inwardly explain their success in racial terms, and he aims to show that white Americans, Europeans, and Australians owe their prosperity and power much more to chance than to their own merits. Despite his polemical intent, he has produced one of the most fascinating works of history in recent times.

TRAPPED IN A BUBBLE

Diamond believes that the peoples of Eurasia got a head start over the rest of the world 13,000 years ago and that they owed that lead to the accident of the distribution of wild grains. Diamond convincingly contends that the ancient Fertile Crescent -- the arc of arable land that spreads from Palestine across southern Anatolia and down through Mesopotamia -- was uniquely abundant in potential food crops. Wheat was indigenous to the Fertile Crescent. So were lentils and chickpeas. No other place on earth was equally blessed. America might have had maize and apples, but what convinced early humans to switch from hunting to farming was not the availability of any one food but a sufficient number of them to offer a balanced and secure diet, which America, Africa, and Australia each lacked. Early agriculture competed with hunting as a way of life, and only in places where the plants existed to prove agriculture clearly superior could it take off. The Fertile Crescent met that requirement better than any other place, and so it was there that agriculture began.

Ditto for the domestication of animals. Eurasia boasted more usable species of animals than any other region. By Diamond's calculation, of the world's 148 big wild land herbivores, only 14 are suitable for domestication and only five can thrive across a broad range of climates: sheep, goats, cows, pigs, and horses. Of the five major and the nine minor domesticatable animals, 13 are indigenous to Eurasia, one (the llama) is indigenous to South America, and none are indigenous to North America, Australasia, or sub-saharan Africa. Africa has animals that can be tamed, like the elephant, but none that has ever been domesticated.

Eurasia's agricultural head start led to its head start in every other way. The first societies to become agricultural were the first to develop complex social structures, specialized armies, and eventually the guns and steel of Diamond's title.

As for the third element of that title, germs, that too was an advantage traceable to Eurasia's agricultural head start. Most infectious diseases originated from human interaction with animals. Because Eurasians developed animal husbandry earlier than anyone else, and with a wider variety of animals, they developed stronger immune systems than either native North Americans or native Australians.