Government, Centralization, and the State Theme Analysis

One of the most important developments in modern human history—and one of the major reasons why certain societies were able to colonize other societies—is the development of the modern state. Diamond defines a state as a large (at least 100,000 people, usually) society organized around a single central leadership (that leadership could be a king, a parliament, or a combination of President, Congress, and Supreme Court, as in the United States). The central leadership passes orders down to lower-level leaders, who in turn carry out these orders for a specific, local part of the population they’re responsible for governing. Diamond makes a series of points about how states form, how they’re run, and why they’re so powerful, many of which are crucial to understanding Guns, Germs, and Steel.

In part, Diamond argues, states arise over time as a function of a society’s size and population density, which themselves result from agricultural developments, military conquering, and voluntary integration. Agricultural societies permit large population density: more people stay in a smaller area, nourished by crops. As agricultural societies get larger and denser over time, they may conquer or merge with other agricultural societies. At some point, the society will reach a point where it has so many people that centralized, hierarchical leadership—i.e., a state—is the most stable form of government. Of course, there’s never been a point in history when an agricultural community has literally decided to form a state. Nevertheless, communities that venerated, or even worshipped a single authority (a king, for example) gradually developed complex institutions of power centered around enacting that authority’s commands, because such institutions more effectively governed the state. In this way, modern states often emerged.

Why, then, are states so powerful and so important to modern history? In large part, states are powerful because they produce surplus resources that can be spent on ventures like exploration and technological research. A state authority—for example, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain in the 15th century—can collect taxes from its people (who will pay willingly, due to their religious or patriotic respect for the authority) and use them to fund important long-term projects—for example, Columbus’s exploration of the New World. So while a smaller, less centralized society might not have the extra funds or the organization for a war or an expedition, a state often does.

In all, states are founded on the control and organization of large groups of people, and that’s exactly why they’re so powerful. In almost every case, a state organizes and runs the domination or colonization of other, less centrally organized countries–the very phenomenon that Diamond aims to study in his book.