Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

PROLOGUE Y ALIS Q UESTION
The regionally differing courses of history

CHAPTER 1 UP TO THE STARTING LINE
What happened on all the continents before 11,000 B.C.?

CHAPTER 2 A NATURAL EXPERIMENT OF HISTORY
How geography molded societies on Polynesian islands

CHAPTER 3 COLLISION AT CAJAMARCA
Why the Inca emperor Atahuallpa did not capture King Charles I of Spain

CHAPTER 4 FARMER POWER
The roots of guns, germs, and steel

CHAPTER 5 HISTORYS HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS
Geographic differences in the onset of food production

CHAPTER 6 TO FARM OR NOT TO FARM
Causes of the spread of food production

CHAPTER 7 HOW TO MAKE AN ALMOND
The unconscious development of ancient crops

CHAPTER 8 APPLES OR INDIANS
Why did peoples of some regions fail to domesticate plants?

CHAPTER 9 ZEBRAS, UNHAPPY MARRIAGES, AND THE ANNA KARENINA PRINCIPLE
Why were most big wild mammal species never domesticated?

CHAPTER 10 SPACIOUS SKIES AND TILTED AXES
Why did food production spread at different rates on different continents?

CHAPTER 11 LETHAL GIFT OF LIVESTOCK
The evolution of germs

CHAPTER 12 BLUEPRINTS AND BORROWED LETTERS
The evolution of writing

CHAPTER 13 NECESSITYS MOTHER
The evolution of technology

CHAPTER 14 FROM EGALITARIANISM TO KLEPTOCRACY
The evolution of government and religion

CHAPTER 15 YALIS PEOPLE
The histories of Australia and New Guinea

CHAPTER 16 HOW CHINA BECAME CHINESE
The history of East Asia

CHAPTER 17 SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA
The history of the Austronesian expansion

CHAPTER 18 HEMISPHERES COLLIDING
The histories of Eurasia and the Americas compared

CHAPTER 19 HOW AFRICA BECAME BLACK
The history of Africa

EPILOGUE T HE F UTURE OF H UMAN
H ISTORY AS A S CIENCE

W HY IS W ORLD H ISTORY L IKE AN O NION ?

T HIS BOOK ATTEMPTS TO PROVIDE A SHORT HISTORY OF everybody for the last 13,000 years. The question motivating the book is: Why did history unfold differently on different continents? In case this question immediately makes you shudder at the thought that you are about to read a racist treatise, you arent: as you will see, the answers to the question dont involve human racial differences at all. The books emphasis is on the search for ultimate explanations, and on pushing back the chain of historical causation as far as possible.

Most books that set out to recount world history concentrate on histories of literate Eurasian and North African societies. Native societies of other parts of the worldsub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, Island Southeast Asia, Australia, New Guinea, the Pacific Islandsreceive only brief treatment, mainly as concerns what happened to them very late in their history, after they were discovered and subjugated by western Europeans. Even within Eurasia, much more space gets devoted to the history of western Eurasia than of China, India, Japan, tropical Southeast Asia, and other eastern Eurasian societies. History before the emergence of writing around 3,000 B.C. also receives brief treatment, although it constitutes 99.9% of the five-million-year history of the human species.

Such narrowly focused accounts of world history suffer from three disadvantages. First, increasing numbers of people today are, quite understandably, interested in other societies besides those of western Eurasia. After all, those other societies encompass most of the worlds population and the vast majority of the worlds ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups. Some of them already are, and others are becoming, among the worlds most powerful economies and political forces.