Guns germs and steel. Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel. The fate of human societies. Epilogue. The future of history as a natural science

Why did European, and later Euro-Atlantic civilization achieve the most tremendous successes in human history? Why did Europe, first independently and later together with the United States of America, create the world in which we live now? What predetermined the world hegemony of the European worldview - industry, force of arms or something else? And what influence does the environment have on the worldview of not only an individual, but also entire nations and even races? Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, discusses all this and much more in his book.

A recent book by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson sees Diamond's work as laying the foundation geographical approach to explaining the structure of the world. Acemoglu and Robinson themselves are proponents of the institutional school. About the cultural school, see.

Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs and Steel: A History of Human Communities. – M.: AST, 2016. – 720 p.

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Prologue. Journalists often ask authors to summarize the content of their lengthy treatises in one sentence. For this book I have already formulated it: “The history of different peoples has developed differently due to the difference in their geographical conditions, and not because of a biological difference between them."

PART ONE. FROM EDEN TO CAJAMARCA

Chapter 1. Starting line

Our closest relatives on the planet are the three now existing types great apes: the gorilla, the common chimpanzee and the pygmy chimpanzee, also known as the bonobo (for more details, see). The fact that the distribution area of all three is Africa, as well as the mass of fossil material, indicate that the initial stages of human evolution took place on this continent.

For five to six million years, human history unfolded in Africa. First ancestor modern man, which spread beyond Africa, became Homo erectus (Fig. 1). A particularly large number of bone fossils were left behind by people who inhabited Europe and Western Asia 130–40 thousand years ago - it was they who were given the name Neanderthals, and they are sometimes classified as a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis.

Rice. 1. Human settlement around the globe (BC – BC, AD – AD)

About 50 thousand years ago, human history finally began its countdown. These ancient people are called Cro-Magnons. The Cro-Magnons develop a variety of types of tools that have such a modern form that we have no doubt about their purpose - these are needles, awls, cutting tools, etc.

During the Ice Ages, the ice accumulated so much water from the world's oceans that sea levels across the planet dropped hundreds of feet below their present level. As a result, areas earth's surface, which today are occupied by shallow seas separating Southeast Asia and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Java and Bali, turned into areas of land. (The same thing happened in other shallow waters, such as the Bering Strait and the English Channel.)

For any well-studied territory where people appeared in prehistory, we know that human colonization was always followed by a sharp jump in the extinction of species - New Zealand moas, Madagascar giant lemurs, and large flightless Hawaiian geese. This is because the environment in which Australian/New Guinea animals evolved over millions of years did not include human hunters. It is known that Galapagos and Antarctic birds and mammals, which also evolved far from people and were first seen only a few centuries ago, despite everything, still behave like tame ones.

Most of the mammals of Africa and Eurasia managed to survive into the modern era because their evolution for hundreds of thousands and even millions of years occurred side by side with the evolution of humans. This means they had plenty of time to develop a fear of man as he slowly perfected his initially lackluster hunting skills.

The disappearance of all large animals of Australia/New Guinea had the most serious consequences for the subsequent history of man in this part of the planet. These animals would otherwise be candidates for domestication, leaving the Australians and New Guineans with no native pets at all in the future. America also lost most of its large wild animals at the turn of the 12th and 11th millennia BC.

Neanderthals, who lived during the Ice Age and were adapted to the cold, spread north no further than northern Germany and Kyiv. This should not surprise us, since they apparently did not have needles, sewn clothing, heated houses, or other technologies necessary for survival in cold climates. Tribes of people with a modern anatomical structure, who already possessed such technologies, began their expansion into Siberia approximately 20 thousand years ago. This expansion should probably explain the extinction of the Eurasian woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses.

Chapter 2. Natural experiment in history

In a vast expanse Pacific Ocean Thousands of islands are scattered between New Guinea and Melanesia, varying greatly in area, distance from the nearest land, altitude, climate, fertility, and geological and biological resources (Fig. 2). Around 1200 BC a group of tribes from the Bismarck Archipelago, north of New Guinea, who by that time knew how to cultivate the land, obtain food by fishing and navigate the sea, managed to land on some of these islands. Over the several centuries that have passed since that moment, their descendants have populated almost every piece of land in the Pacific Ocean. The process as a whole was completed by 500 AD.

It seems to me that the size of a territory's population is the best indicator of the complexity of social organization. Agriculture, which contributes to population growth, also makes possible the emergence of various elements of complex societies. However, the increasing complexity of social organization becomes inevitable only if the following four reasons exist:

the desire to neutralize potential conflicts between people who are not related;
increasing complexity of collective decision-making procedures;
the need to complement the system of mutual exchanges with a system of redistribution;
increasing population density.

So, large societies come to centralization due to the very nature of the problems they face in resolving conflicts, making decisions, and economic and spatial organization. However, by producing new people - those who hold power, are privy to information, make decisions and redistribute products - the centralization of power inevitably opens the way for them to exploit existing opportunities for the benefit of themselves and their relatives.

In the past, the transition from smaller units to larger ones through mergers has happened many times. However, contrary to Rousseau, this never happened voluntarily. In reality, the consolidation of political units occurs in one of two ways: either as unification under the threat of an external force, or as actual conquest.

PART FOUR. AROUND THE WORLD IN FIVE CHAPTERS

Chapter 15. Yali people

Australia is not only the smallest continent - it is far ahead of all others in terms of aridity, flatness of the landscape, infertility, climatic unpredictability and scarcity of biological resources. The last to be colonized by Europeans, it also had the smallest and most unusual indigenous population in the world. In short, Australia is the touchstone of any theory that attempts to explain the differences in the way of life of people on different continents. Here were the most specific natural conditions, and here the most specific societies developed (Fig. 11).

Rice. 11. Map of the region from Southeast Asia to Australia and New Guinea. Solid lines show the current coastline, broken lines show the coastline during the Pleistocene period, when sea level fell below the modern level, i.e. boundaries of the Asian and Australian shelves. At that time, Australia and New Guinea were united into one continent - Greater Australia, and the islands of Borneo, Java, Sumatra and Taiwan were part of Asia.

Why did Australia not develop metal tools, writing, or a complex political organization? The main reason was that the aborigines remained hunter-gatherers, and innovations arose only in densely populated and economically specialized food-producing societies. In addition, Australia's aridity, infertility and climatic unpredictability kept its hunter-gatherer population to within a few hundred thousand. Tens of millions lived in Mesoamerica or China, meaning Australia had a very meager base of potential inventors and too few societies capable of experimenting with innovation.

The greatest loss of technology in the entire Australian region was suffered on the island of Tasmania. After separation from the mainland, Tasmania's 4,000-strong hunter-gatherer population lived without contact with any other people on Earth. When Europeans finally met the Tasmanian Aborigines in 1642, they found the most primitive material culture of the modern era. They lacked many technologies and artifacts that were widespread in mainland: barbed arrowheads, any bone tools, boomerangs, ground stone tools, hilted tools, hooks, sharpened spears, nets, as well as skills such as fishing, sewing, and starting fire. At least three other small islands (Flinders, Kangaroo and King), cut off from Australia and Tasmania by rising sea levels about 10 thousand years ago, also had human populations, ranging from 200 to 400 people, but they all eventually died out.

Documented examples of technological regression on the Australian mainland indicate that the paucity of Indigenous Australian culture compared with peoples of other continents may be partly explained by the interaction of isolation and population size.

Chapter 16. How China became Chinese

China was once a heterogeneous region, like all other populous states today. China differs from them only in that it united much earlier. China's two long rivers (the Huang He in the north and the Yangtze in the south) facilitated technological and agricultural communication between the interior and the coast, and the relatively flat landscape facilitated similar exchanges between north and south. All these geographical factors became one of the conditions for the early cultural and political consolidation of China - a consolidation that Europe, approximately equal in area, but with a more uneven landscape and without equally large connecting rivers, did not achieve in its entire history.

The state of the northern Chinese Zhou dynasty and others organized on its model spread throughout southern China during the 1st millennium BC. This process culminated in the political unification of China under the Qin dynasty in 221 BC. The Chinese push south was so powerful that the current human populations of tropical Southeast Asia have little trace of the region's previous occupation. Only from three relict groups of hunter-gatherers - the Semang Negritos of the Malay Peninsula, the Andamanese and the Veddoid Negritos of Sri Lanka - can we judge that the former inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia most likely had dark skin and curly hair, like modern New Guineans , and not fair skin and straight hair, like its inhabitants today and their southern Chinese relatives.

Chapter 17 Motorboat to Polynesia

In this book, which chronicles the migrations of human populations since the end of the last Ice Age, the Austronesian expansion takes center stage as one of the most important events in history. Why did the Austronesians, being mainland Chinese in origin, colonize Java and the rest of Indonesia? Why, having occupied all of Indonesia, in New Guinea were the Austronesians able to occupy only a narrow strip of the coast and did not in any way push out the inhabitants of the highlands? How did the descendants of Chinese immigrants become Polynesians?

Analysis of archaeological artifacts and languages spoken by modern peoples indicates that the colonization of Southeast Asia began with Taiwan (Fig. 12).

Rice. 12. Paths of Austronesian expansion: 4a - Borneo, 4b - Sulawesi, 4c - Timor (about 2500 BC), 5a - Halmahera, 5b - Java, 5c - Sumatra, 6a - Bismarck Archipelago, 6b - Malay Peninsula, 6c - Vietnam (circa 1000 BC), 7 - Solomon Islands (circa 1600 BC), 8 - Santa Cruz, 9c - Tonga, 9d - New Caledonia (circa 1200 BC .., 10b - Society Islands, 10c - Cook Islands, 11a - Tuamotu Archipelago (about 1 AD).

The results of Austronesian expansion in the New Guinea region, on the one hand, and in Indonesia and the Philippines, on the other, were opposite. If in the latter case the aliens ousted the indigenous people completely (one way or another: by driving them off the land, killing, infecting them with diseases, assimilating), then in the first case the aborigines, for the most part, managed to defend their territories. Where did the opposite results come from?

Before the arrival of the Austronesians, almost all of Indonesia was a sparsely populated area whose inhabitants were hunter-gatherers. In contrast, in the highland - and perhaps some lowland - parts of New Guinea, as well as the Bismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands, food production has been practiced for thousands of years. If we take the peoples of the Stone Age, the mountains of New Guinea were then and later one of the most densely populated areas in the world. The Austronesians had almost no advantages over these fully developed New Guinea peoples. The uneven success of Austronesian expansion is eloquent evidence of the important role food production plays in population migrations.

Chapter 18. Collision of hemispheres

Three groups of factors can be distinguished that determined the success of the European conquest of America: the longer existence of human populations in Eurasia, the greater efficiency of Eurasian food production, resulting from the greater diversity of Eurasian plant and especially animal domesticates, and, finally, the absence of such serious as in America , geographic and environmental obstacles to intracontinental cultural and population diffusion.

Several centuries ago, after at least thirteen thousand years of parallel existence, the advanced societies of America and Eurasia finally collided with each other. The first recorded attempt of Eurasians to colonize America was made by the Scandinavians in the Arctic and subarctic latitudes (for more details, see). This colonization was not successful. The second attempt at the Eurasian colonization of America (begun in 1492 by Columbus) was successful because its parameters - source, goal, geographical latitude, historical time - allowed the Europeans to fully realize their advantages this time. Spain, unlike Norway, was a sufficiently rich and populous country to initiate pioneering expeditions and support the existence of colonies. Crossing the ocean, the Spaniards landed on the shore and settled in extremely favorable conditions for conducting Agriculture subtropical latitudes.

Chapter 19. How Africa became black

The five main groups that made up the African population even before 1000 AD can be roughly described as: blacks, whites, African pygmies, Khoisan and Asians (Fig. 13).

The Khoisan family is famous for the fact that besides it, practically no other languages in the world contain click consonants. From the peculiarities of the distribution of the Khoisan languages and the lack of their own language family among the Pygmies, one can come to the conclusion that the Pygmies and Khoisan in the past occupied a larger territory, which at a certain point was occupied by blacks.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the development of food production was constrained (compared to Eurasia) by the lack of local animal and plant species suitable for domestication, the smaller area suitable for local farming, and its predominant north-south orientation, which prevented the spread of production food and other cultural innovations.

Epilogue. The future of history as a natural science

The essence of modern human existence and the entire history of mankind after the end of the Pleistocene, in my opinion, is determined by four groups of factors:

differences in the composition of wild plants and animals available as starting material for domestication;
differences associated with factors influencing the rate of cultural diffusion and population migration; diffusion and migration occurred most rapidly in Eurasia - due to the prevailing east-west orientation of the continent and the absence of serious environmental and geographical barriers in most of its territory;
convenience of intercontinental diffusion;
differences between continents in area and total population.

Why did European societies, and not Middle Eastern, Chinese or Indian ones, take the lead in technological development and achieve economic and political dominance in the modern world?

Once the advantage of an early start due to the abundance of domesticated species in the local flora and fauna was lost, the Fertile Crescent ceased to stand out from the rest of the regions. We can trace in detail how his advantage was gradually eroded by the shift to the west of the dominant powers. After the emergence of the first states in the 4th millennium BC. the center of power initially remained in the Fertile Crescent for a long time, moving between the empires: Babylonian, Hittite, Assyrian and Persian. At the end of the 4th century. BC, when the Greeks under the leadership of Alexander the Great conquered all developed societies from the Balkan Peninsula to India, the center of influence for the first time irreversibly shifted to the west. His next shift in this direction occurred as a result of the Roman conquest of Greece in the 2nd century. BC, and after the fall of the Roman Empire it shifted again, to Western and Northern Europe.

In ancient times, much of the Fertile Crescent and the eastern Mediterranean, including Greece, was covered with forests that were either cleared for arable land, felled for construction timber, or turned into fuel for heating homes or making mortars. Today, vast areas of the former Fertile Crescent are occupied by deserts, semi-deserts, steppes and eroded or extremely saline soils.

Thus, the societies of the Fertile Crescent and the eastern Mediterranean in general were simply unlucky enough to emerge in a region with a fragile ecology. By destroying their own resource base, they committed environmental suicide. Northern and Western Europe avoided such a fate, but not because its inhabitants were wiser, but because they were lucky to live in a more environmentally stable region, where rainfall was more abundant and vegetation regenerated faster.

Why did China lose its leadership? I believe that this is a consequence of European fragmentation, which differs sharply from Chinese unity. To understand why China has ceded political and technological dominance to Europe, we need to answer the main question about the reasons for chronic Chinese unity and chronic European fragmentation. Europe has an extremely rugged coastline, with five large peninsulas that approach island-like isolation and each of which has developed its own languages, ethnic groups and political entities: Greece, Italy, Portugal/Spain, Denmark, Norway/Sweden. The coastline of China is much smoother, and only the Korean Peninsula has acquired a separate significance in history.

After the political consolidation of the Chinese region, which occurred in 221 BC, there was no place in its history for other stable autonomous entities. Periods of fragmentation, of which there were several in this history, invariably ended with the restoration of autocracy. The political consolidation of Europe, on the contrary, was beyond the power of anyone, including such decisive conquerors as Charlemagne, Napoleon and Hitler; even the Roman Empire, at its peak, controlled less than half of European territory.

The geographical homogeneity of the Chinese region at some point began to harm it. In conditions of autocracy, the decision of one despot could freeze an entire direction of technology - which happened more than once. On the contrary, the geographical division of Europe has given rise to dozens or even hundreds of small rival states and centers of innovation. If one state did not give way to some invention, another was found that took it into service and, over time, forced its neighbors to either follow their example or lose in economic competition. Europe, in its current quest for political and economic unity, may well have to be especially careful not to destroy the systemic parameters that have underpinned its successes over the past five centuries.

As for other historical factors, the most important are the role of culture and the role of individuals. The role of features that arose out of connection with living conditions is important problem(see details). Like the unique characteristics of a culture, the unique characteristics of a great personality are jokers in the deck of history. They are capable of making history inexplicable in terms of geographical, environmental or any other generalized reasons. Be that as it may, the question of the scale and depth of influence of outstanding personalities on the course of history remains open.

The consulting firm McKinsey was able to find out that the degree of competition and the size of the groups participating in it play a key influence on the development of innovation. If your goal is to be as innovative and competitive as possible, you don't need too much cohesion or too much fragmentation. You want your country, industry, industrial area or company to be divided into groups that compete with each other, while at the same time maintaining fairly free communication between themselves.

Why are some countries rich (like the United States or Switzerland) while others are poor (like Paraguay or Mali)? It is clear that some part of the answer has to do with the difference social institutions. Meanwhile, today there is a growing understanding that the "institutional" approach to the problem is insufficient - not wrong, but insufficient - and that in trying to make poor countries rich, other important factors must be taken into account. The institutional approach has been criticized on at least two levels. The first type of objection emphasizes the important role not only of effective institutions, but also of other immediate factors: the health of the nation, climatic and soil-related constraints on agricultural productivity, unsustainability environment. The second group of objections concerns the genesis of effective institutions themselves.

The objections of this group are that it is not enough to consider effective institutions as a factor of direct action, ignoring the question of their origin as having no practical significance. From my point of view, effective institutions have always arisen as a result of a long chain of historical achievements - the ascent from the initial factors of a geographical nature to the direct factors derived from them, among which there are institutional ones. We need to be as clear as possible about such chains if we want countries today that lack effective institutions to have them in place as quickly as possible.

Modern thinkers who strive to “cover with a single glance” the entire history of mankind can be divided into two large groups. Some work in the paradigm of world-systems analysis, which puts the regional and global division of labor in the foreground. The second, predominantly Anglo-American authors, produce products in the spirit of the good old 19th century, where world history is conceived as the result of the determining influence of one or two factors. For McLuhan it is communication technology; for McNeil it is the arms race and those who support it. social structures, Diamond has landscape and geographical resources.

Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel" is interesting in its attempt to revive, taking into account the latest data, geographical determinism, in honor of the idea of \u200b\u200bthe equal gifts of all races and peoples. And he really managed to prove in detail that the championship of the Old World was associated precisely with serious geographical bonuses. “If Australia and Eurasia had exchanged peoples in the late Pleistocene, Australian Aborigines would today inhabit not only Eurasia, but most of the Americas and Australia, and only scattered population fragments would remain of the Eurasian Aborigines in Australia.” America, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa have fallen behind not because of the massive “stupidity” of the people there. They simply did not have a chance, even if they were “seven spans in the forehead.” Moreover, relying on their very limited resources, many of these peoples have done amazing things and made significant contributions to the development of human civilization. For example, the Indians did not know iron and wheels, but they developed such highly productive agricultural crops as potatoes, corn and sunflowers.

The most important factor in the primacy of “Greater Eurasia” (including adjacent North Africa) was the size of this continent and the significantly larger volume of initial resources, the ability to accommodate more centers of development, which spurred each other through mutual competition and exchange of innovations. Continuing the author’s thought, one can see an additional dimension to this bonus: the Eurasians had the opportunity, having polluted one region of the continent, to transfer development to another. Let's imagine that the Fertile Crescent, which the first Middle Eastern civilizations turned into a desert, were a separate isolated continent like Australia. Development there would very quickly give way to regression, and the achievements of civilization would be completely forgotten by the feral descendants. But the Middle Eastern peoples were able to pass the “baton” to other peoples of the continent, who continued to develop civilization in territories that had not yet been polluted. However, a chain of environmental disasters nevertheless significantly slowed down the development of the continent. Development had to be moved to increasingly unfavorable, cold regions, transferred to the shoulders of increasingly backward peoples, who, before the first spark of thought was born in their heads, arranged “dark ages” for themselves for many centuries. That is why, in my opinion, 5 thousand years lay between the first pyramid and the first space rocket, and not 2 thousand years.

Another important factor in the advantage of Eurasia is its latitudinal extent, which facilitated cultural diffusion and population migration. Here, agricultural know-how could be passed on from people to people, spreading over thousands of kilometers throughout the climate zone in which they originated. America, stretched from north to south, is a different matter. Agricultural crops from North America could not have spread to the suitable climatic zones of South America before the advent of Europeans. From an economic point of view, America was not one large continent, but several small ones, separated from each other by mountain ranges and jungles. Unlike Eurasia, centers of civilization could not exchange knowledge and technology here, nor could they stimulate the development of more backward peoples living in a similar landscape. On each of these mini-continents, people had to invent economies from scratch, with their own meager set of cultures. For a similar reason, South Africa remained uncultivated until the arrival of Europeans, although its climate was suitable for Mediterranean crops. Mediterranean agriculture and cattle breeding could not overcome the barrier of savannah, equatorial forests and the area affected by sleeping sickness.

Finally, Eurasia had a bonus in the number of plant and especially animal species suitable for domestication. It is no coincidence that the most backward continent was Australia, where there was practically nothing to domesticate. At first glance, sub-Saharan Africa is also lucky: the African shroud breaks the record for the diversity of ungulates. Why not domesticate all these endless herds of antelope? Why weren't zebras, rhinoceroses, and hippos domesticated? Imagine Zulu cavalry on zebras, accompanied by a strike force of armored rhinoceroses. However, experiments with domestication conducted in the 20th century showed that our distant ancestors had exhausted almost the entire supply of large species suitable for economically viable domestication. The remaining species are simply not suitable for this for various reasons. Some have too “gourmet” food requirements. For others, it is the inability and unwillingness to live in a herd, in close proximity to other animals of their own species. Still others have an innate “neuroticism” of the psyche, which either makes them too dangerous or leads to quick death from stress. Still others have complex breeding rituals that cannot be reproduced in captivity. Fifths have too slow a growth rate, making their cultivation unprofitable.

It turned out that the maximum number of large animal species suitable for domestication was concentrated in Eurasia, due to its large size and landscape diversity. In addition, Eurasia was too vast for humans to exterminate these species even at the hunting stage. On other continents, suitable species either did not exist initially, or they were exterminated and eaten by people back in the primitive times(like the horse and mastodon in America). The diversity and abundance of domestic animals, especially large ones, dramatically increases the resources of civilization. Livestock in a traditional economy is not only protein food (milk, meat), wool, skins, but also manure, which is used to fertilize fields and preserve their fertility. And this is very important because it affects agricultural productivity and population density.

From the point of view of the development of civilization, the most important bonus from large livestock is their muscular strength, which can be used to cultivate the land and transport goods. In an agrarian society, where there is no this bonus, much more human effort has to be made to produce an equal product. Accordingly, the proportion of people who can engage in crafts, construction, management, military affairs, and the development of science and culture is decreasing. The military use of domestic animals (cavalry, camels, war elephants) also gives society a serious bonus. In particular, the military advantage of the conquistadors over the Indians was largely explained by the latter's lack of cavalry. If, other things being equal, the Aztecs and Incas had their own cavalry, the history of the New World would have developed fundamentally differently.

The word "germs" in the book's title points to another fatal advantage of pastoral societies. The fact is that most of the terrible epidemics that first struck Eurasia and then devastated America (smallpox, measles, typhus, diphtheria, plague, etc.) were mutated diseases of domestic animals that gradually spread to humans. But in Eurasia, from generation to generation, the proportion of people with immunity to these diseases increased, and they fell upon the societies “opened” by Europeans all at once. “Pooled mortality rates for first exposures to Eurasian pathogens ranged from 50% to 100%.” The decline in the indigenous population of America in the 15th-17th centuries. is explained primarily by this “bacteriological war”, and not by the atrocities of the conquistadors. Even the defeat of the Aztecs and Incas was preceded by devastating smallpox epidemics, which seriously thinned out their elites and armies. The more animals a civilization domesticated, the greater its potential for “germ warfare” with other civilizations.

Ultimately, Europeans massively populated only those continents that could not resist them at the level of “combat microbes.” Peoples who possessed their own effective microbes escaped the fate of the American and Australian aborigines, despite similar and even greater civilizational backwardness. “Malaria throughout the equatorial and subequatorial zone of the Old World, cholera in Southeast Asia and yellow fever in Africa became famous as the most dangerous tropical scourges (and still remain so). They became the main obstacle to the colonization of the tropics by Europeans and part of their merit is the fact that the colonial division of New Guinea and most of Africa ended almost 400 years after the beginning of the division of the New World.

By the way, the author of the book, a professional microbiologist, hints that one of the main channels of transmission of diseases from animals to humans has become sexual contacts. Recently, this is how humanity contracted AIDS. It is known that many pastoral peoples have been practicing sex with sheep, goats, etc. since ancient times, and it was the abundance of such close contacts that became fertile ground for the gradual evolution of animal pathogens into human ones. So the contribution of some peoples to the primacy of Western civilization is clearly underestimated. If we rewind the entire chain of events that led to the mass genocide of the natives of America, then the “extreme” ones will turn out to be not the Spanish conquistadors, but some lustful mountain sheep farmer who was the first to pick up a harmful microbe that mutated in his body into a terrible disease. It is no coincidence that in civilized countries bestiality was considered a terrible sin. Such behavior threatens not only the health of the zoophile himself, but can also turn into a mortal danger for all humanity. But backward peoples do not have such prejudices, apparently vaguely realizing that this practice will somehow help them protect their land :-) Bestiality among them is a unique form of patriotism.

The author, however, never brought the idea of his book to completion. Having proved the inevitability of the primacy of Eurasia in ancient times, he was unable to convincingly explain the differences in the speed of development of civilizations within Eurasia itself. Why were it the European Christians who took the lead, and not the Chinese, Indians or Muslims, despite the antiquity of these civilizations and their area and population size comparable to the European one? Why, for example, did the Industrial Revolution originate in Britain, which relied on the wealth of India, and not in India itself? Why were algebra invented by the Arabs and modern science created by Europeans? Why did China invent paper and gunpowder, but failed to do anything meaningful with these inventions?

The author touches on this problem only in the epilogue of his book and gives more of a controversial hypothesis than a substantiated proof. And this is a hypothesis with a solid “beard”. We are talking about the following trivial reasoning: Chinese progress was lulled by uniformity and unity of command, which was facilitated by the united-flat nature of the terrain, and landscape-dissected Europe consisted of several centers of power that stimulated each other in competition. This kind of reasoning, and not only in relation to China, became commonplace long before 1997, when the book under discussion was published. However, the author resonated with the then sentiments of the American business elite, which just at that time was fired up with the idea of decentralizing large corporations. Seeing the “historical justification” for this idea in the book, they raised it to the skies. At the same time, Bill Gates was attracted not by the author’s geographical determinism itself, but by the regionalist “principle of optimal fragmentation” that he formulated, the idea that it is necessary to look for the most optimal balance for development between centralization and anarchy. It turned out that the book gained popularity not for its main content, where the author’s theories are supported by a huge array of interesting information, but for the last paragraphs of the epilogue, where the author inserted several witty impromptu remarks.

Another Diamond paradox: the author, without noticing it, constantly refutes his own “super-valuable idea”, showing that the character of a people and their inherent worldview influence their fate no less than geography. And these qualities can differ even among peoples living side by side in the same landscape. Let me give you an interesting quote that tells about two close peoples of New Guinea, one of which remained in the Stone Age, and the other stepped straight from the Stone Age into global capitalism.

“...Traditional societies are very different from each other in terms of their prevailing worldviews. As in industrialized Europe and America, in primitive New Guinea there are conservative societies that resist everything new, and open societies that exist side by side with them, which selectively master this new. As a result, today more enterprising societies, becoming familiar with Western technologies, are beginning to use them to their advantage and displace their conservative neighbors.

For example, in the 30s. In the 20th century, when Europeans first reached the highlands of eastern New Guinea, they “discovered” dozens of previously unknown primitive tribes, of which the Chimbu tribe were especially active in adopting Western innovations. After seeing the white colonists planting coffee trees, the Chimbu themselves began to grow coffee for sale. In 1964, I met a fifty-year-old man from this tribe - in a traditional grass skirt, who could not read, who still lived in the days when the Chimbu used stone tools, he managed to get rich on coffee plantations, for $ 100 thousand from the proceeds without any credit buy himself a sawmill and acquire a fleet of trucks that delivered his coffee and wood to market.

Chimbu's neighbors in the highlands, the Daribi, with whom I worked for eight years, are, on the contrary, emphatically conservative and not interested in new products at all. When the first helicopter landed on Daribi land, they only took a quick look at it and returned to their interrupted activities - the Chimbu in their place would have immediately started haggling about its charter. It is not surprising that today the Chimbu are actively advancing on Daribi lands, occupying them for plantations and leaving the Daribi themselves no choice but to work for the new owners.”

Here, in fact, is the answer. Geography is geography, but some national elites have Daribi traits, and they make their countries and civilizations stagnate even with an abundance of resources, while others have Chimbu traits, and they use every opportunity to move forward. The regionalist idea of “balanced decentralization” preached by the author is also worth taking a closer look at.

Ese, Karinige, Omwai, Paranu, Sauakari, Vivor and all my other friends and teachers from New Guinea who know how to live in difficult natural conditions.

Jared Diamond (b. 1937) is a famous American biologist, anthropologist and writer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of the world bestsellers “The Third Chimpanzee”, “Why We Like Sex So Much” and “Collapse”.

Guns, Germs, and Steel:

The Fates of Human Societies

Translation from English M. Kolopotina

Serial artwork and cover design V. Voronina

From the editor

In 1972, in New Guinea, Jared Diamond was walking along the seashore with a local politician named Yali, and he asked him: “Why did you whites accumulate so much cargo and bring it to New Guinea, while we blacks had so much cargo of our own?” few?" – it was Yali’s question that became the impetus for writing this book.

In New Guinea, “cargo” is a generalized name for all the benefits of white civilization, in other words, the very guns and steel that Diamond put in the title, and perhaps even Coca-Cola. Many local residents believed that the cargo was sent by their ancestors, whom the whites cajoled with the help of witchcraft rituals; these beliefs are called cargo cults. Followers of cargo cults built fake runways, air traffic control towers, and put fake headphones on their heads to lure cargo to them.

This story is interesting because Yali (quite a historical figure) was, in his old age, a prophet of the local cargo cult, although it is not clear how much he himself believed in him. But in any case, it’s hard to escape the thought that if I were Diamond, I would answer the islander’s question with something unnecessary like: “headphones should be made of rattan, not bamboo.” If he were a Red Cross volunteer, he might say that transnational corporations are to blame for the unfair distribution of cargo. And Diamond thought for 25 years, read books on paleoecology, archeology, comparative studies and domestic animal biology, and then wrote “Guns, Germs and Steel.”

Jared Diamond belongs to a breed of people who were quite numerous in the nineteenth century, but now, unfortunately, there are almost none left. He studied birds in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands for more than thirty years, wrote countless ornithological articles and the monumental monograph “Birds of Melanesia,” co-authored with the great evolutionist Ernst Mayr. He studied at Harvard, completed his PhD at Cambridge, and has been a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, for many years. He designs nature reserves (and sits on the board of the World Wildlife Fund - WWF), publishes articles about blood feuds in the New Yorker magazine and speaks several languages - including New Guinea Fora and Indonesian.

In addition to this opus magnum, Diamond wrote two more books, one way or another dedicated to history. “The Third Chimpanzee,” not yet translated into Russian, describes the first few million years of human history. There Diamond, recognizing the differences between humans and chimpanzees as insignificant enough to unite these species into one genus, asks the question: why of all living creatures was it the third (after the common and dwarf) chimpanzee that began to rule the world? “Guns, Germs and Steel” is an attempt to create “ a short history of all people over the past 13 thousand years”: this time Diamond compares different human societies according to their degree of success. Why, he asks, did Europeans, armed with firearms, steel swords and epidemic diseases, conquer almost the entire world, while the Inca Empire did not even know the wheel, and the Australian Aborigines remained hunter-gatherers until the 19th century? Finally, in Collapse, Diamond examines the causes of the collapse of human societies - especially those that occurred through their own fault, without outside influence. Together, the three books cover the period from the emergence of man to his probable extinction (which, however, according to Diamond, we may well be able to avoid).

Even if we do not take other books into account, “the history of all people over the last 13 thousand years” itself can cause some caution. In history, as nowhere else, the grandeur of the author's plan often serves as an aggravating circumstance. Especially for the Russian reader, who understands well what happens when a mathematician (or even a geographer) directs all his enthusiasm to the creation of a comprehensive historical theory. Therefore, it is worth mentioning right away that Diamond does not set as his goal the fight against traditional historical science– on the contrary, he treats her in the most careful manner.

Guns, germs and steel, that is, technological superiority and resistance to epidemic diseases, were the direct factors that ensured “Eurasian dominance” throughout the world. However, this explanation is clearly not enough. After all, for some reason, guns, steel swords and ships that made it possible to cross the ocean appeared among the conquistadors, and not among the Indians or Bushmen. And it was in the conquistadors that the pathogens of smallpox, tuberculosis and cholera lived. In other words, long before the great geographical discoveries of society different parts the lights varied significantly. To explain how these differences accumulated, Diamond constructs a chain of causation that begins with the emergence of agriculture.

Successful conquests require advanced technology and centralized political power. People who create new technologies and carry out management (in Diamond's terminology - kleptocrats) need to be fed, therefore, it is necessary to be able to create and store surplus food. In addition, political centralization itself can only occur with high population density, which again is only possible with food production. Food production requires efficient crops and livestock to provide food and draft power to till the fields. Livestock also serves as a source of epidemic diseases, supplying their pathogens to settled human populations, which are capable of developing some kind of immunity to common diseases over the course of many epidemics.

Crops and livestock appear first where there are wild species suitable for domestication. Species suitable for domestication are distributed very unevenly and, as Diamond meticulously shows, are most abundant in Eurasia. In addition, it was in Eurasia, which is elongated in a latitudinal direction, that domesticated animals and plants spread especially easily due to the relatively less variability of climate. In other words, the decisive role in the success of human societies is played by the starting conditions, greatly enhanced by positive feedback loops (this, in short, describes the 13 thousand years of history of all people).

Diamond's position is often described with the offensive phrase “geographical determinism,” but this is not entirely fair. First, as Diamond shows, even when conditions are unequal, people often become the cause of their own future failures. For example, in America 13 thousand years ago, there were probably animals suitable for domestication, but they were killed off by the first people who arrived there. As a result, the Indians mastered horse riding only when the Spaniards brought horses to America - but it was too late. Secondly, geographical determinism implicitly assumes that people are passive and progress almost happens on its own - once you are in the right place, you don’t have to worry about the future. In fact, and it’s nice to agree with this when reading “Guns, Germs and Steel,” human history was made by incredibly inquisitive and hardworking people. And this applies to primitive societies even more than to developed ones: if someone was not domesticated, it means that he simply could not have been domesticated; If you haven’t learned to eat something, it means it’s simply inedible. And the hypothesis that they “just didn’t figure it out,” as Diamond convincingly shows, can almost always be rejected as untenable.

Very characteristic feature“Guns…” is that there are practically no names in the text. This is no coincidence: the main achievements of humanity, even if they are associated with the name specific person, happened in a non-literate era or in non-literate societies. It is difficult to doubt that the domestication of the horse is incomparably more significant historical event than the battle on the Kulikovo Field, but how many people know the date of the second of them with an accuracy of one year, and how many can name the millennium when the first happened?.. Here is another unexpected advantage of the book - it can be read as a catalog of human achievements, in which, Unlike the history textbook of the Fatherland, the time scale is correctly scaled. Diamond is not the first, but an unusually fascinating attempt to describe “macrohistory” and for this alone he deserves all sorts of praise: non-literate societies occupy much less space in popular culture than they deserve. Perhaps, thanks to “Guns, Germs and Steel,” history textbooks will finally have a chapter about the dizzying Austronesian expansion, the development of the most important agricultural crops and other epoch-making events of the unwritten era. And history textbooks will become a little more interesting and accurate from this.

Andrey Babitsky, Moscow, 2009

This book is my attempt to summarize the history of all the people who have lived on the planet over the past thirteen thousand years. I decided to write it to answer the following question: “Why has history developed so differently on different continents?” Perhaps this question will make you wary and think that another racist treatise has fallen into your hands. If so, rest assured, my book is not one of them; as will be seen later, to answer my question I do not even need to talk about the differences between the races. My main goal was to reach the ultimate foundations, to trace the chain of historical causality to the maximum distance into the depths of time.

Authors who undertake to present world history tend to narrow their subject to the literate societies that inhabited Eurasia and North Africa. The indigenous societies of the rest of the world - sub-Saharan Africa, North and South America, the archipelagos of Southeast Asia, Australia, New Guinea, the Pacific Islands - receive only minor attention, and mainly to the events that happened to them in later stages history, that is, after they were discovered and conquered by Europeans. Even within Eurasia, the history of the western part of the continent is covered in much more detail than the history of China, India, Japan, tropical Southeast Asia and other societies of the East. History before the invention of writing - that is, approximately until the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. e. – is also stated relatively fluently, despite the fact that it constitutes 99.9% of the entire five-million-year period of human existence on Earth.

Such a narrow focus of historiography has three disadvantages. Firstly, interest in other peoples, that is, peoples living outside Western Eurasia, is becoming increasingly widespread today for obvious reasons. Understandable, because these “other” peoples dominate the population globe and represent the vast majority of existing ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups. Some of the countries outside Western Eurasia have already become—and others are about to become—among the world's most economically and politically powerful powers.

Secondly, even those who are primarily interested in the reasons for the formation of the modern world order will not advance very far if they limit themselves to events that have occurred since the advent of writing. It is a mistake to think that before 3000 BC. e. the peoples of different continents were on average at the same level of development, and only the invention of writing in Western Eurasia provoked a historical breakthrough in its population, which also transformed all other areas of human activity. Already by 3000 BC. e. a number of Eurasian and North African peoples had not only the beginnings of a written culture, but also a centralized public administration, cities, metal weapons and tools were widespread; these peoples used domesticated animals for transport, draft power, and a source of mechanical energy, and relied on agriculture and animal husbandry as their main source of food. On most of the other continents nothing like this existed at that time; Some, but not all, of these inventions later arose independently in the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa - and then only over the next five millennia, and the indigenous people of Australia never had the opportunity to come to them on their own. These facts in themselves should serve as evidence that the roots of West Eurasian domination in the modern world extend far into the pre-literate past. (By West Eurasian dominance I mean the dominant role in the world of both the societies of Western Eurasia itself and the societies formed by immigrants from Western Eurasia on other continents.)

Third, history that focuses on West Eurasian societies completely ignores one important and obvious issue. Why did these societies achieve such disproportionate power and advance so far in innovation? It is customary to answer it by referring to such immediate factors as the rise of capitalism, mercantilism, empirical natural science, the development of technology, as well as pathogenic microbes that destroyed the peoples of other continents when they came into contact with newcomers from Western Eurasia. But why did all these factors of dominance arise specifically in Western Eurasia, and in other parts of the world either did not arise at all or were present only to a small extent?

These factors belong to the category of proximate, but not initial causes. Why didn't capitalism emerge in pre-Columbian Mexico, mercantilism in sub-Saharan Africa, exploratory science in China, advanced technology in North America, and disease-causing microbes in aboriginal Australia? If the answer is given by individual factors of local culture - for example, in China, scientific research activity was suppressed by the influence of Confucianism, and in Western Eurasia it was stimulated by the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions - then we can again state a lack of understanding of the need to establish the original causes, that is, to explain why the Confucian tradition did not originate in Western Eurasia, and Judeo-Christian ethics did not originate in China. Not to mention that such an answer leaves without explanation the fact of the technological superiority of Confucian China over Western Europe in a period lasting until about 1400 AD. e.

By focusing exclusively on West Eurasian societies, it is impossible to even understand them themselves. Because the the most interesting thing is to find out what they are distinctive features, we cannot do without understanding the societies from which they differ before we can place the societies of Western Eurasia in a broader context.

It may seem to some readers that I am going to the opposite extreme of traditional historiography, namely, paying too little attention to Western Eurasia at the expense of the rest of the world. Here I would argue that the rest of the world is a very useful tool for the historian, if only because, despite the limited geographical space, they sometimes coexist with a great variety of societies. Other readers, I assume, will agree with the opinion of one of the reviewers of this book. In a slightly reproachful tone, he remarked that I apparently looked at world history as an onion in which modern world forms only the outer shell and the layers of which must be cleared in order to get to the historical truth. But history is such an onion! Moreover, peeling away its layers is not only extremely exciting, but also of great importance for today, when we try to learn the lessons of our past for our future.

Prologue
Yali's question

We all know well that the history of the peoples inhabiting different parts of the globe has been very different. In the thirteen thousand years since the end of the last glaciation, industrial societies with writing and metal tools have developed in some parts of the world, non-literate agrarian societies in others, and only hunter-gatherer societies with Stone Age technologies in others. This historical global inequality still casts a shadow on modernity, at least because literate societies with metal tools conquered or exterminated all others. Although these differences constitute the most fundamental fact of world history, their origin remains a matter of debate. One day, twenty-five years ago, this difficult question was addressed to me in a simple and direct manner.

In July 1972, I was researching the evolution of birds on the tropical island of New Guinea and one day I was walking along the seashore. On the same day, a local politician named Yali, about whose popularity I had already heard, was visiting a neighboring electoral district. It so happened that our paths crossed: we were walking along the beach in the same direction, and he caught up with me. We spent the next hour walking together, during which we talked incessantly.

Yali radiated charm and energy, and his gaze literally hypnotized him. He spoke confidently about his own affairs, but at the same time asked many sensible questions and listened to the answers with the greatest attention. Our conversation began with the subject that occupied the minds of every New Guinean at that time—immediate political reforms. Papua New Guinea, as the country of Yali is called today, was still ruled by Australia under a UN mandate, but future independence was already in the air. Yali told me in detail about his role in preparing the local population for self-government.

At some point, Yali turned the flow of the conversation and began bombarding me with questions. He had never been anywhere other than New Guinea and had only a high school education, but his curiosity was inexhaustible. First of all, he wanted to know about my activities with New Guinea birds (including whether I was paid well for it). I told him how different groups of birds successively colonized New Guinea over millions of years. Then, in response to Yali's question, I explained how the ancestors of his own people came to New Guinea tens of thousands of years ago and how Europeans have colonized New Guinea over the past two centuries.

Although our conversation remained friendly throughout, the tension between the two societies he and I represented was well known to both him and me. Just 200 years ago, all the inhabitants of New Guinea lived in the “Stone Age”. In other words, they still used stone tools, which had been replaced by metal ones in Europe for several millennia, and their villages were still not united within a single political hierarchy. When the whites arrived on the island, they introduced centralized government and introduced the New Guineans to things they immediately appreciated, from steel axes, matches and medicine to woven clothing, soft drinks and umbrellas. In New Guinea, all these things were collectively called “cargo”.

Many of the colonialists openly despised the islanders for their “primitiveness.” The standard of living of even the least able white “masters,” as they were still called in 1972, was much higher than that of the native New Guineans—higher even than that of such a popular leader as Yali. On the other hand, Yali and I had extensive experience communicating with both whites and New Guineans, and therefore both understood perfectly well that the latter, on average, were certainly no more stupid than the former. All this was probably on Yali’s mind when, once again looking intently at me with his sparkling eyes, he asked the question: “Why did you, the whites, accumulate so much cargo and bring it to New Guinea, while we, the blacks, , was there so little of your own cargo?”

This simple question touched the very essence of life as Yali perceived it. Indeed, there is a gulf between the lifestyle of the average New Guinean and the lifestyle of the average European or American. Something similar can be said about the differences between the peoples of the West and other peoples of the world. There must be good reasons for such a colossal discrepancy—reasons that should, in theory, be obvious.

Be that as it may, Yali’s seemingly elementary question is one of the most difficult. For example, at that time I still couldn’t find what to answer. Professional historians still do not have a unanimous answer to this question, and most have even stopped asking it. Since our casual conversation, I have been studying and writing about other aspects of human evolution, history, and language. In this book, written twenty-five years later, I want to finally answer Yali's question.

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel is a record-breaking book I've been reading sporadically since October 2011, but once started, Guns ended up remaining unread for much longer than Joyce's Ulysses. For me, such a situation is rare, the point here is that I took it up exclusively as an optional elective, and also that Jaired practically from the first lines formulates the main thesis, then only developing it, and the initial position itself looks less at least banal.

The book ended up being educational. "Guns, Germs and Steel" is a nonfiction exploration of why European peoples developed so quickly compared to those of Africa or the Americas, giving them the opportunity to take over less developed peoples. Diamond, who sympathizes with the natives of Guinea, decided to answer the question of his friend Yali with this book, who asked about the reason for the difference in wealth between different peoples. Let's say, why did a small detachment of Spaniards manage to defeat a large army of Indians? Why is the development of peoples in Africa, Australia, South America and Europe or Asia so different at the same time? All had vast territories at their disposal, and often, at first glance, a sufficient amount of resources. So what's up? Are the nations to blame for this or is something else to blame?

Jared clearly and gradually develops his idea further. Human societies have developed unevenly across continents because of differences in environmental conditions, not because of differences in human biology. Having postulated this at once, he then moves on to the causes. Advanced technology, centralized political organization, and other features of complex societies could only have arisen in large, sedentary populations with the ability to store and redistribute surplus food. Meanwhile, domesticated species of animals and plants were distributed extremely unevenly across the continents. Let's say that for 32 cereals suitable for “domestication” in the Mediterranean zone, there are only 2 available in South America. Of the large mammals in Eurasia, 13 out of a conditionally suitable 72 were domesticated, while in sub-Saharan Africa - 0 (!!!) out of the available 51. Statistics raise questions, Diamond answers them. The thesis ends with the fact that the peoples in whose habitat these species were present received a great head start, leading to guns, microbes (one of the assistants in the conquest of isolated societies) and steel. In short, everyone who has played "Civilization" knows what we're talking about. But most interesting are the additional insights Diamond makes in each of the chapters.

Firstly, I was very interested in the phenomenon of cultural and agricultural migration. If the principle of limiting the spread of domesticated plants or animals is quite simple to understand - say, in the Fertile Crescent or most of Europe, the distribution of plants is simplified due to the similarity of climatic zones, and America is elongated along the meridians, therefore, for even a domesticated plant to spread further across the continent, it not only must to begin to grow in a different climatic zone, but also to move purely geographically through deserts or other obstacles, which is impossible, then stopping cultural diffusion is more difficult to comprehend. Let's say someone made a useful discovery, but he can no longer transmit it beyond the mountain range dividing the continent, because... the landscape does not allow free movement beyond natural barriers. Such obstacles can be large deserts, high and long mountain ranges, oceans, etc.

Secondly, the book describes the domestication process in a very interesting way. Everyone, probably at some stage, thinking about school curriculum, asked themselves why Africans did not domesticate zebras or raise an army of fighting rhinoceroses, with which they would conquer neighboring countries and establish world domination. But it turns out that some species are simply unsuitable for domestication, because the benefits of trying to breed the species do not justify the effort expended and the dangers involved. Zebras, peccaries, elephants, rhinoceroses - a lot of potential "friends of man." Diamond argues that failed domestication is a consequence of a flaw not in the natives, but in the species itself. Some - due to diet, because... Domestication makes sense if you get a certain amount of meat for the amount of food invested. Therefore, carnivores disappear immediately; raising them is ineffective. But even among herbivores there are animals that are too picky in their choice of food. The second is due to the growth rate. Gorillas and elephants would make great pets, but who would wait 15 years for his herd to reach adult size? This is why elephants are captured and tamed, but not domesticated. Thirdly, problems with reproduction in captivity. Some wild species use gigantic territories for courtship rituals, while others cannot be forced to live in a flock. Some are just crazy, hot-tempered creatures. Let's say the grizzly bear is omnivorous and could have been domesticated if not for its monstrously ferocious and unpredictable temperament. The same goes for rhinoceroses and other animals. In general, the chapters dealing with the distribution of plants and animals are the best in the book.

Thirdly, Diamond once again reminds us of the infections that Europeans brought to America and which wiped out many more local residents than guns could. All of us who have read anything know about this, but I had not thought about the origin of these infections before. It turns out that many infectious diseases came to people after the domestication of animals and close contact with them, i.e. are also a product of domestication. He also talks coherently about writing, which could also have appeared only in highly organized societies, in which individual members were allocated for special functions not directly related to food production, and so on. As a result, Jared emphasizes that blacks and Indians... are simply unlucky. Roughly speaking, if we were in Africa, we would be sitting on garbage dumps of computers that blacks would bring to us. If anyone wants, they can argue with this, but I was turned on by the description of the domestication of animals. I've never thought about this before.

Esi, Karinga, Omwai, Paranu, Sauakari, Vivor and all my other friends and teachers from New Guinea who know how to live in difficult natural conditions.

Preface

Why is world history like an onion?

Authors who undertake to present world history tend to narrow their subject to the literate societies that inhabited Eurasia and North Africa. The indigenous societies of the rest of the world - sub-Saharan Africa, North and South America, the archipelagos of Southeast Asia, Australia, New Guinea, the Pacific Islands - receive only little attention, most often limited to events that happened to them in later stages of history. that is, after they were discovered and conquered by Western Europeans. Even within Eurasia, the history of the western part of the continent is covered in much more detail than the history of China, India, Japan, tropical Southeast Asia and other societies of the East. History before the invention of writing - that is, approximately until the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. e. - is also stated relatively fluently, despite the fact that it constitutes 99.9% of the entire five-million-year period of human presence on Earth.

Such a narrow focus of historiography has three disadvantages. Firstly, interest in other peoples, that is, peoples living outside Western Eurasia, is becoming increasingly widespread today for obvious reasons. Quite understandable, because these “other” peoples dominate the world's population and represent the vast majority of existing ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups. Some of the countries outside Western Eurasia have already become - and some are about to become - among the most economically and politically powerful powers in the world.

Secondly, even those who are primarily interested in the reasons for the formation of the modern world order will not advance very far if they limit themselves to events that have occurred since the advent of writing. It is a mistake to think that before 3000 BC. e. the peoples of different continents were on average at the same level of development, and only the invention of writing in Western Eurasia provoked a historical breakthrough in its population, which also transformed all other areas of human activity. Already by 3000 BC. e. a number of Eurasian and North African peoples had in their infancy not only a written culture, but also centralized government administration, cities, and metal weapons and tools were widespread; they used domesticated animals for transport, draft power, and a source of mechanical energy, and relied on agriculture and animal husbandry as their main source of food. On most of the other continents nothing like this existed at that time; Some, but not all, of these inventions later arose independently in the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa - and then only over the next five millennia, and the indigenous population of Australia never had the opportunity to come to them on their own. These facts in themselves should be an indication that the roots of West Eurasian dominance in the modern world extend far into the pre-literate past. (By West Eurasian dominance I mean the dominant role in the world of both the societies of Western Eurasia itself and the societies formed by immigrants from Western Eurasia on other continents.)

Third, history that focuses on West Eurasian societies completely ignores one important and obvious issue. Why did these societies achieve such disproportionate power and advance so far in innovation? It is customary to answer it by referring to such obvious factors as the rise of capitalism, mercantilism, empirical natural science, the development of technology, as well as pathogenic microbes that destroyed the peoples of other continents when they came into contact with newcomers from Western Eurasia. But why did all these factors of dominance arise specifically in Western Eurasia, and in other parts of the world either did not arise at all or were present only to a small extent?

These factors belong to the category of proximate, but not initial causes. Why didn't capitalism appear in pre-Columbian Mexico, mercantilism in sub-Saharan Africa, research science in China, and disease-causing microbes in aboriginal Australia? If the answer is given by individual factors of local culture - for example, in China, scientific research activity was suppressed by the influence of Confucianism, and in Western Eurasia it was stimulated by the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions - then we can again state a lack of understanding of the need to establish the original causes, that is, to explain why the Confucian tradition did not originate in Western Eurasia, and Judeo-Christian ethics did not originate in China. Not to mention that such an answer leaves completely unexplained the fact of the technological superiority of Confucian China over Western Europe in the period that lasted until approximately 1400 AD. e.

By focusing exclusively on West Eurasian societies, it is impossible to even understand them themselves. Since the most interesting thing is to find out what makes them distinctive, we cannot do without understanding the societies from which they differ before we can place the societies of Western Eurasia in a broader context.

It may seem to some readers that I am going to the opposite extreme of traditional historiography, namely, paying too little attention to Western Eurasia at the expense of the rest of the world. Here I would argue that the rest of the world is a very useful tool for the historian, if only because, despite the limited geographical space, they sometimes coexist with a great variety of societies. Other readers, I assume, will agree with the opinion of one of the reviewers of this book. In a slightly reproachful tone, he remarked that I apparently looked at world history as an onion, in which the modern world forms only the outer shell and the layers of which must be peeled to get to the historical truth. But history is such an onion! Moreover, peeling away its layers is an activity that is not only extremely exciting, but also of great importance for today, when we try to learn the lessons of our past for our future.