If you’ve ever wondered how it was that the white man came to rule the Earth or why civilisation sprang up in the Middle East and Mediterranean but not in Africa or Australia, then Guns, Germs and Steel is a book you might like to read.

Evolutionary Biologist, Anthropologist and Linguistics expert, Jared Diamond explores these and a range of related issues from the start point of a conversation he once had with a New Guinean politician named Yali. Yali asked Diamond why it is that whities seem to have all this “cargo” (material goods, tools, houses, etc) and New Guineans have only really had any “cargo” since the whities started bringing it in.

From this starting point we are taken through a brief run down of the times and directions that man left Africa from to the first instances of agriculture and food production.

As it turns out, food production and agricultural development are key points in Diamond’s theory of civilisation development – he makes the historical connections of the invention of agriculture and the growth and density of population, developing enough to demand rules, infrastructure and other hallmarks of civilisation.

The most interesting thing about this theory is the way he backs it up with what seem like, in retrospect, pretty logical developmental phenomena. For example, the lack of potential domestic animals in Africa meant that agriculture did not readily develop there without the import of “farm friendly” creatures after shipping was invented elsewhere. Or even the fact that the horizontal layout of Eurasia meant that a given crop could grow across a wider East-West climate zone than it could in South America, meaning that population-building crops like corn and potatoes could be produced in far greater numbers and distributed to a much larger population.

While the book is not as nicely written as his 2005 “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”, the barefaced logic of his conclusions and fascinating historical summations make the overall work a very interesting read. For a bloke who was originally an ornithologist, Jared Diamond presents some pretty insightful, and often very obvious facts about international civilisation that everyone living in Western Society should know. It’s little wonder that this book won the 1998 Pulitzer for general non fiction.

Rating: 4 out of 5