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

The Fertile Crescent's agricultural and epidemiological breakthroughs spread throughout Eurasia because of another lucky break: unlike America and Africa, which extend northwards and southwards, Eurasia extends eastwards and westwards. For primitive humans, this was an important difference: crops and herds move more easily between regions of similar climate than they do from warmer to colder regions. It took thousands of years to create species of maize that could grow in the northeastern United States. The wheat of southern Turkey, by contrast, could quickly and easily spread to southern Europe, north Africa, northern India, and eventually northern China. Likewise, humans move more easily westward and eastward, where they encounter similar kinds of germs. Diamond writes, "The cool highlands of Mexico would have provided ideal conditions for raising llamas, guinea pigs and potatoes, all domesticated in the cool highlands of the Andes. Yet the northward spread of these Andean specialities was stopped completely by the hot intervening lowlands of Central America. Five thousand years after llamas had been domesticated in the Andes, the Olmecs, Maya, Aztecs, and all other native societies of Mexico remained without pack animals and without any edible domestic mammals except dogs."

What was true for agricultural technology was true for technology of other kinds. Diamond observes that all early Old World wheels were made in the same odd way -- by joining three planks together around an axle -- which suggests that the idea was diffused. The same seems to have been true for writing. But while writing quickly spread throughout Eurasia, it was unable to make the much shorter hop from Mexico, which had a writing system, to the Andes or the mouth of the Mississippi, where sophisticated agricultural societies could have made use of it. As Diamond tells it, non-European societies were trapped in ecological bubbles by their geography and in intellectual bubbles by their illiteracy. Describing the ambush and capture of the Inca emperor Atahulpa by Francisco Pizarro's Spaniards at the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca in November 1532, Diamond wonders why the Indians were so easily tricked. His answer: illiteracy made them gullible. "From books, the Spaniards knew of many contemporary civilizations remote from Europe, and about several thousand years of European history. Pizarro explicitly modeled his ambush of Atahulpa on the successful strategy of Cortes. In short, literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history. By contrast, not only did Atahulpa have no conception of the Spaniards themselves, and no personal experience of any other invaders from overseas, but he also had not even heard (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history."

SCHOLARSHIP AS SOCIAL WORK

This summary cannot do justice to the precision and scientific learning of Diamond's account. Like William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples, this book's melding of disciplines, in this case botany and zoology with history, alters the way one thinks. It is not to be missed by anyone interested in the ancient problem of why some nations are rich and others poor. It is a much better book than David Landes' overpraised The Wealth and Poverty of Nations -- a series of brilliant individual insights linked by a badly out-of-date belief in investment-driven growth and command economies. And its conclusions are even more provocative than Thomas Sowell's Conquest and Cultures, although Sowell's teaching that war, conquest, and enslavement are the historical norm -- a norm that has often made future progress possible -- is a useful antidote to Guns, Germs, and Steel.

And yet, as fascinating as this book is, it is also in important ways destructive. It is untrue to claim, as Diamond does, that the traditional account of the rise of the West was an implicitly racist one. At least in this century, the traditional account of the rise of the West has given credit to its propitious political and social institutions. That is not true only of recent times, when the institutions in question are liberal ones, but of more ancient history as well, when the West benefited from the devolution of power implicit in feudalism and the scope for free thought created by the independence of the medieval Christian church from political control. And that traditional account agreed, with varying degrees of certainty, that those traditions were more or less available to anyone else and would have more or less similar results wherever they were tried. Today Latin American and Asian countries are rocketing toward prosperity (with a bump or two along the way) by mimicking the institutions painfully evolved in England and North America. Curiously, at the very moment when the evidence seems strongest for this institutional theory, we seem most eager to believe that backward countries are the helpless victims of their pasts.

This reproach is especially pertinent in Diamond's case because his own intentions are so stridently polemical. He wants to scold Westerners for ever having looked down on others and to lift up those others who feel demoralized by the West's superior success. "We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in people's status," he writes. "We're assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation of the world's inequalities as of AD 1500 is wrong, but we're not told what the correct explanation is. Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all."