Guns, Germs, and Steel: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

Diamond describes the Phaistos disk, an ancient clay disc decorated with signs that date back to ancient Minoan times. The signs on the disc appear to be words, but historians have been unable to understand the Minoan language. It’s not clear if the language was an indigenous Minoan invention or a transplant from a neighboring region. One of the most amazing things about the disk is that the words aren’t written or carved; they’re stamped with what appear to be blocks coated with ink. Printing is one of the key human inventions: it allows for quick, efficient communication. The Phaistos disk seems to represent the difficult of “proving” why certain technologies appeared in certain places at certain times. Inventions are unpredictable and idiosyncratic—so why was the printing press first invented by the Minoans, not the Egyptians or the Mayans?

There are a few different theories about the history of technology. One theory is that technological breakthroughs are unpredictable because they always come from single, “heroic” figures, like Archimedes or the Wright Brothers. But the idea that heroic figures invent important things neglects the fact many different people are involved in inventing any one object (for example, there were at least a dozen figures who partially invented the steam engine). Technology develops cumulatively.

Another theory of the history of technology is the old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention”—in other words, if a society needs something, somebody will find a way to build it. The problem with this idea is that often, inventors don’t realize how their own inventions will be used. The car engine, the phonograph, and hundreds of other important inventions were developed for purposes entirely different from the purposes with which we now associate them. So in a way, invention is the mother of necessity; technology “finds” a use after it’s invented, instead of being invented for a specific purpose.

The real driving force behind discovering a new technology, Diamond posits, is trial and error. There were certain raw materials available to ancient peoples—stone, wood, bone, clay, etc. People experimented with such materials, developing technologies like glass. Gunpowder was first discovered through experimental mixings of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter.

The next step, after discovering a new technology, is to popularize it. There are four major factors that influence the popularization and acceptance of a new technology: 1) the technology’s economic benefits, 2) its social prestige, 3) the ease with which people can grasp the technology’s advantages, and 4) the technology’s compatibility with vested interests. With regard to 4: there are many cases of superior technologies being suppressed because they clash with a society’s vested interests. For example, British cities still used gaslights in the 1920s because the British municipal government had already invested heavily in gas lighting, and would have been bankrupted by electrical lighting.

Historians of technology long before Diamond have listed some of the social factors that encourage the reception of new technologies. Societies that protect patent rights and intellectual property are supposedly more receptive to new technologies. Also, there are cultural factors like risk-taking and religious tolerance that supposedly encourage civilizations to accept new technologies. The problem with such a list of factors is that they don’t get to the heart of the matter: it might be true that societies that protect intellectual property or tolerate many different religions are better at receiving new technologies—but why? Diamond will try to get to the underlying cause of such cultural differences in the reception of technology.

In general, technology arises from “the handling of natural raw materials.” The problem with such an idea is that there are many technologies and inventions, like writing, that don’t seem to arise from interaction with any raw materials at all. And there are many inventions that arose in certain civilizations but not other civilizations with the same resources (such as the compass or the windmill).

How do societies exchange technologies? As with language, technological diffusion can involve a specific blueprint, or a general idea. Diamond argues, “Depending on their geographic location, societies differ in how readily they can receive technology by diffusion from other societies.” On one hand, medieval Islam, positioned in the middle of Eurasia, acquired many technologies from Asia and spread them to Europe. The aborigines in Australia, however, were isolated from Asia by geographic barriers like the ocean.

Also, geographically isolated societies are more likely to permanently abandon technologies after receiving them. For example, Japan abandoned foreign imports like guns after the 1600s due to the government’s strong xenophobia (fear or hatred of foreign cultures). Many civilizations abandon certain technologies for cultural reasons. The difference is that a geographically connected region like the Middle East could reacquire the technology later on, while a more geographically isolated country like Japan did not have the option to reacquire guns for many years after the 1600s.

Another important point about technology: it is self-catalyzing. That is, the discovery of one technology encourages the discovery of other technologies. For example, the discovery of pottery made possible the manipulation of copper and iron ore, leading to the development of metallurgy. One technology led to another.

Diamond returns to the Phaistos disk. Now that he’s looked at the reasons for technological diffusion, it’s possible to understand why the Minoans didn’t succeed in popularizing the printing press in Europe, while medieval Germans like Johannes Gutenberg (often credited with “discovering” the printing press) did. The Phaistos disk was made from clay and had to be punched by hand instead of with a metal press—therefore, the printing technology was slow and clumsy, and its marginal superiority to writing by hand was small. Furthermore, the Phaistos disk was developed at a time when writing was used only by a small number of temple scribes, where the Gutenberg printing press arose when there were many more people in Europe who could read.

There are two major “jumps” in the history of technology. One occurred about 100,00 years ago: the development of bone and stone tools. The second occurred about 13,000 years ago: the adoption of agriculture and crop production. The agricultural revolution required a sedentary lifestyle, at least compared to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. It also produced centralized societies with large populations.

Three major factors, “time of onset of food production, barriers to diffusion, and human population size,” have led to the differences in the development of technology. Eurasia contains more people than any other landmass, includes two important centers of food production (China and the Fertile Crescent), has relatively few geographic barriers to diffusion, and is longest from east to west, not north to south. As a result of all these important environmental advantages, technology arose earlier in Eurasia than it did in other continents, and spread fastest. Because technology is self-catalyzing, Eurasia’s early technological advantages help to explain how it maintained technological supremacy over other continents even centuries later.