Triumph of Western Civilization in the Book

¶ … Triumph of Western Civilization

In the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, the historian and New Guinea anthropologist Jared Diamond argues that the geography and the environment of the West played the major role in determining the dominance of Western civilization of the modern world. According to Diamond, although geography and the environment do not automatically lead to dominance over other civilizations, these two factors do make major contributions to the four factors that are responsible for all historical developments. The first of these factors is the widespread availability of potential crops and domestic animals as a sustainable food source. This first factor's importance is followed by the need for a nation's location near the a continental axis in a way that facilitates the sustenance of year-round agriculture and yields the seasonal and climatic advantages for a variety of foodstuffs. Third in importance to holding sway over other nations is an access to important trade routes that facilitates a transfer of knowledge between continents, and lastly there is a sustainable population size that can be supported by the local agricultural and livestock economy.

Thus, because they were aided by all of these assets, the Western cultures that were first able to domesticate plants and animals were then able to develop writing skills, as well as make advances in the creation of government, technology, weaponry, and immunity to disease. Were Diamond to survey the world in 1400 A.D. he would likely predict the eventual success of the Western nations, even though tribes such as the Yali, a native New Guinean people might be equally intelligent and perspicuous about their natural environment. The haves and the have-nots of the world, in terms of political dominance and food production are just as often based upon technological, geographical, and climate-based accidents as they are upon great discoveries of great minds in the civilization, suggests Diamond.

The geographical and climate of feudal society in 1400 A.D. enabled European nations to engage in long-term colonization of the farmable land and thus lay the seeds for eventual political stability. The development of trade routes, shipbuilding, and the access to other nations because of the West's location near oceans and open shipping routes, more than the ideals of the Enlightenment or religiously propelled crusades and pilgrimages all facilitated this dominance. Had the Black Plague or other diseases decimated the European population to a greater extend, and had the disease not been contained, history may have evolved, Diamond argues, upon an entirely different course.

But can geography alone explain the hold that the West developed upon other nations -- after all, China as a nation, despite its many territorial advantages, made a conscious political decision to close itself off to the West, thus inhibiting its spread of trade and use of Diamond's four factors of development, such as access to other nations, goods, and ideas.

Ancient Rome's fall was likewise precipitated by political causes, such as a poor political leadership that did not control the outreaches of the prosperous empire. But Diamond would argue that although politics may exert an important and secondary shaping influence on what nations dominate the geopolitical landscape of the world, agricultural sustainability and geographical favor comes first.