The popular answers to the question above include the capricious nature of historical coincidences, the role of the Great Men, the differences in geographical circumstances or between races and cultures, the effect of Judeo-Christian values and protestant work-ethic, etc. Diamond stands firmly on the side of the geographical explanation.
This is one of those books that address both scientists and the general public. Like in the case of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, the author didn't write a jargon-heavy version for experts and a simplified one for popular consumption. It's mostly for the better, although I could have continued living without knowing the detailed characteristics of several dozens of crop variants. But putting up with some heavy dose of agriculture is a fair price for a book that tries to answer the big questions. I would describe its genre as interdisciplinary world-history - but I have no idea whether it's an existing one or there are better descriptions out there.
To summarize the book in one sentence, it says: civilization could only arise among certain social conditions, which in turn couldn't have appeared without agriculture and livestock domestication, which in turn could only happen in certain places on Earth blessed with the right geographical conditions.
Scientists in general test their theories with repeatable experiments with controlled variables. This tool is not available for historical sciences, but nature sometimes offers something close enough. Diamond opens his book with one. The Polynesian islands were populated by a group of people circa 5,000 years ago. The same genetic material and culture were put to test in several, very different environments, and the millennia-long experiment produced a number of very different societies. The islands varied in climate, geological type (the predetermines the quality of soil and the material for tools), marine resources, terrain fragmentation, and isolation. In a couple of thousand years, by the time the first European explorers reached Hawaii, it was already on the brink of the political unification of several chiefdoms. But on Cathams islands, people still lived the same hunter-gatherer lifestyle as their common ancestors before the split.
After this interesting piece of history, Diamond gets to work on laying down the foundations of his theory.
Farming started to appear around 10,000 years ago. The sedentary lifestyle allowed population growth, as women could bear children with 2-year gaps (nomad women couldn't carry newborns until their previous child was big enough to walk with the tribe, which was around 4 years). Farming produced food surpluses that facilitated the division of labor. Not everyone was needed in the fields, so some had time to invent things - like metallurgy, pottery, or writing - or became craftsmen. Food surplus and the higher number of people also led to vertical fragmentation. Priests, soldiers, and chiefs appeared to organize society. The benefits came at a cost (although chiefs, priests, and soldiers appear on both sides): early farmers had a much less balanced diet than their forebears, were more at the whim of the weather, and due to population density and living next to their livestock and where they defecated, were disease-ridden. In some places, farmers in a few generations grew 15cm smaller than their ancestors and had a shorter lifespan.
Nevertheless, farming spread. Farmers were more numerous, technologically more advanced, and exhaled deadlier germs than hunter-gatherers. Plus, they occasionally had professional soldiers. Hunter-gatherers either adopted the sedentary lifestyle or were exterminated (the low genetic diversity of Homo Sapiens compared to other animals suggests the latter happened more frequently). As farmer societies grew bigger, ever more complex and stratified political structures emerged.
But why didn't farming appear everywhere? According to Diamond, very few places on Earth offered favorable conditions. Agriculture required supporting climate and domesticable crops and animals. The species of large mammals suitable to be beasts of burden or food source are not very numerous. They have to satisfy a number of conditions. They have to breed in captivity (elephants or cheetahs out), grow fast enough (gorillas out), be sufficiently docile (no brown bears), have a natural herd-like disposition (no antelopes), and can be supported on local food sources (Koalas out). There are only 14 species of large mammals that tick all the boxes, and 13 of them are from Eurasia - the fourteenth is the South-American llama.
Plant species suitable for domesticating are also rare. They have to grow fast, be nutritious enough, give high yields, be storable, and their genetic code needs to allow for breeding.
If not enough of the conditions are satisfied, changing from hunter-gatherer to farming lifestyle is, in terms of producible calories per hour of work, just not worth it. There were however a couple of places on Earth, that were suitable. The Fertile Crescent in the Middle-East, Mesoamerica, North-East America, the Sahel-zone of Africa, and South-West China. But agriculture still didn't appear in every one of them. Why?
Diamond suggests that it has something to do with continental orientation. Whereas Eurasia stretches thousands of miles from West to East, the main axis of the Americas and Africa are North-South. That means that in Eurasia domesticated plants and animals could spread thousands of miles at the same latitudes. Same latitude by and large means the same climate and day-length. Even areas not initially endowed with the right crops and animals could adopt them in the long run. In the Americas and Africa, the diffusion of plants and animals couldn't even cross a couple of thousands of miles because of the vast differences in climate. Americans couldn't plow their fields because the South-American Llama and the Mesoamerican wheel never met.
Nevertheless, the people of the Americas were approximately as numerous, if technologically less advanced, as the people of the Old World. They lived in highly centralized societies. And yet, they were almost effortlessly wiped out by the Europeans in a couple of generations. How was that possible? When the Spanish made their excursions into the native's territories, they inadvertently unleashed all the germs of Europe onto a defenseless population. Up to 95% of the native Americans were killed as a consequence of smallpox, cholera, measles, tuberculosis, influenza, whooping cough, and the like - overwhelming majority of them before they could have set their eyes on a single white man.
Why was the invisible biological war so imbalanced? Why didn't the Americans retaliate with their own arsenal of plagues (with the exception of syphilis) and devastated Europe? The answer is two-fold. First, Americans didn't live in a radically different environment from the Europeans that could produce entirely different pathogens against which the conquistadors would have had no resistance. Second, most of the European diseases are mutations of diseases in cattle. For example, pox, measles, tuberculosis originate from cows, flu from pigs. Ten thousand years of coexistence made the Old World population largely resistant to them, but the Indians were defenseless.
The first third of the book examined how geography, agriculture, and animal domestication lead to complex societies. However, not every society built on farming evolved from chiefdoms to states and developed advanced technology. Why? Here Diamond admits that geography is relegated back to be simply one of the different factors that contribute to development, although an important one.
Writing, the most important prerequisite to technological, scientific, and bureaucratical progress, for example, was first developed in agricultural societies with a large enough population - not for the citizen to read poetry, but as tools of bureaucracy and taxation.
Innovation is the driving force behind technological progress. But what exactly facilitates it is a matter of debate. Culture must play an important role, but not definitive. Islam culture was the vanguard of scientific inquiry until the medieval ages, but then it became a backwater and it remained that ever since. China led the world in technology and sea explorations up until 1500 A.D., and then it suddenly froze in time. Diamond's argument is that Europe's advancement happened because of its fragmented geographical landscape. Mountains, bays, peninsulas, and other geographical barriers never allowed for political unification. Therefore Europe was shared by small, constantly competing political entities. Innovation provided - among others - military advantages, which kept every kingdom constantly on its toes. Technological laggards were conquered by their neighbors. Innovations could diffuse from one land to another, and the process is autocatalytic - innovation begets more innovation. Plus, with the lack of political centralization, seafaring and scientific explorations could not have been banned by imperial decree - as it happened in China in the 16th century.
The last third of the book is a whirlwind tour around the world. From the perspective already laid down in the previous chapters, Diamond examines the history of Africa, Oceania, China, and Japan. He spends the most time on his beloved New Guinea where he worked for thirty years.
The final chapter is a musing over the future of history as a scientific discipline. Diamond argues that history is not just "one damned fact after another", but there are broad patterns in it, that are discoverable, and in a way, within accepted limits, testable.
In the end, the point Diamond makes, again and again, is that the reason for different trajectories for different peoples over millennia ultimately lies in geography. Of all the possible explanations for the varying degrees of civilization - geography, genetic or cultural differences, whims of history -, geographic determinism might be the only one that cannot have racist undertones. I suspect that Diamond's distaste for racialist explanations predisposes him to favor this view, but even if he is personally biased, he makes a good case for it.
This is an engagingly written but heavy book. Diamond has expertise in anthropology, early-human history, geography, linguistics, botany, and a bunch of other fields, and the reader can't avoid some serious education while working his way through it. I read it end-to-end, but writing this summary required me to re-read parts of it again. Once I managed to digest the content and recuperate, I'd like to compare it with the next one from the genre.
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