What is Jared Diamond arguing in Guns, Germs, and Steel?

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond is arguing that Europe (and, by extension, places where Europeans settled like the United States and Australia) became rich and powerful simply because of geographic luck.  He is arguing that there was nothing about European people or European culture that made them better than other people.

In this book, Diamond sets out to answer “Yali’s Question.”  This question asks why “white people” came to have so much more material wealth and power than other people.  Diamond says that many people have answered this question by saying that Europeans are in some way superior.  Some have argued that Europeans are genetically superior to other people.  Others have argued that the Europeans are not genetically superior but that they do have cultures that are superior in that their cultures make them work harder and make them more likely to accept and embrace progress.  In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond refutes this idea.

In his book, Diamond argues, instead, that the Europeans came to power because they were lucky.  Diamond says that Europeans became powerful because they lived on a landmass where agriculture arose early.  Agriculture, to Diamond, is very important.  It allows people to live together in large groups that do not move around.  Because these groups do not move around, and because they have more than enough to eat, they can have specialists who create technology.  The sooner a group gets agriculture, the longer it has to create the “guns” and “steel” that helped the Europeans become powerful.  Farming communities also create the conditions in which infectious diseases (the “germs” of the title) can arise.

What this means is that whoever got farming first was likely to become powerful.  Diamond then asks why people in Eurasia got farming first.  He concludes that this happened because that landmass was home to more plants and animals that could be easily domesticated.  This was not something that we should give the Europeans credit for.  They did not develop agriculture and civilization because they were better than other people.  Instead, they developed agriculture earlier because they were lucky.  This luck allowed them to get a head start and to, by modern times, dominate the world.  This is the gist of Jared Diamond’s argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel.