In Our Time - History as Science

Episode Date: March 11, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the importance of geography and ecology in determining world history since civilisation began. The 18th century historian Thomas Carlyle said that world history was the history of what great men have accomplished, but this understanding of history is being increasingly called into question. Professor Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel, which won the 1998 Rhone Poulenc Prize for Science and the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, is a re-evaluation of the last 13,000 years of the history of mankind - particularly in the light of geography and ecology. But what are the implications of looking at world history as being determined by geography and ecology? Is environment really the determining factor in history? And if so, what role does cultural heritage play in shaping different histories? With Professor Jared Diamond, ecologist and physiologist at the Los Angeles Medical School, University of California, and author of Guns, Germs and Steel; Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, Cambridge University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the 19th century historian Thomas Carlyle said that world history was the history of what great men have accomplished. In the 20th century, that understanding of history is being increasingly called into question.

Professor Jared Diamond is an ecologist and physiologist from the University of California, Los Angeles Medical School. He's been acclaimed as being one of the very few scientists who may radically change the way we think about history. As the century closes down, then, is science the future for the past? Professor Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel, which won last year's prestigious Rhone-Poulon Prize for Science

and the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, is a re-evaluation of the last 13,000 years of the history of mankind, particularly in the light of geography and ecology. He claims that history is not only in... influenced by great men, great deeds or by genes, but also and mostly by geography and ecology. But what are the implications of looking at world history as being determined by geography and ecology? Is history being turned into a scientific discipline in the 20th century? Joining Jared Diamond is Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University,

and a historian of international repute who specializes in modern German history. In his latest book, in defense of history, he states, History is important because it illuminates the human condition by recreating the thoughts actions and lives of other human beings separated from us by time. So there appears to be some differences here. But let's start with you, Jared Diamond. You begin by saying that the global history of the past 13,000 years, followed the different causes for different people

because of differences among people's environment. You stress environment, and you're very keen to say it's not because of biological differences among people themselves. Why do you want to say that so strongly up top? It's not that I want to say it. It's that the facts say it. But let's be clear also about what I was trying to explain in the book. Most history is concerned with relatively small spatial scales and short time periods,

periods of a few decades or century or two. I was instead concerned with patterns of very long-term history. Why did history unfold differently over the last 13,000 years on the different continents? And in particular, why did every single Aboriginal Australian tribe, without exception, remain stone tool using hunter-gatherers, while over that same period of 13,000 years, most Eurasian societies adopted metal tools and writing and formed into states or empires,

and many Native American and many sub-Saharan African societies were also doing so except at a slower rate. So the reasons you bring in are sort of vast reasons to do with the development of crops and animals, Can you give people some idea of the reasons for the developments of civilizations at different places? Yes, a large chunk of the reasons have to do with the rates of rise of agriculture and herding, that's to say food production, because most hunter-gatherer societies are nomadic, only when you settle down as farmers next to your fields, pastures, and orchards.

Can you then develop explosion of population, complex technology, only then can you start to feed kings and bureaucrats and develop writing. So a lot depends upon whether around you are wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication. Aboriginal Australians remained hunter-gatherers because there were no cow-sheep or wild wheat in Australia. You can't domesticate kangaroos. There's only one Australian plant that has been domesticated.

So, of course, Australians remain hunter-gatherers, while Eurasians in the area of the Fertile Crescent were living in the part of the world that has the highest. density of domestical wild plant and animal species. So, of course, they got a head start on food production and the things that rise out of food production. So it's the switch to agriculture and the availability of... It's only four or five useful animals out of it, and it's only about a dozen useful plants for it, isn't it?

But if these are all together, as you say, then things bound forward. That's correct. In the Fertile Crescent, the five most valuable animals of the modern world, cow, sheep, goats, pigs and horses, and a package of eight wild plants, the wheat, barley, peas, lentils, chickpea, flax, etc. And the only other area of the world

that had such a head start was China. How do you react to this, Richard Evans? Your focus has been large enough by all normal standards, but compared to this, a little narrower. I suppose my first kind of question would be, really, what level are we talking about? and is this really history, isn't it prehistory? It's very persuasive as an explanation of what historians call the Neolithic Revolution,

that's a set of transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture and animal keeping, husbandry and so on societies, and all the long-term consequences that come from that. But once you get down to a slightly more, even slightly more detail level, it's difficult to really use this method, I think, explain things. Let me just take an example. If we look at pre-Columbian Indian societies and the starting

point of the book really is the conquistadores of Spanish invaders coming in after Christopher Columbus and conquering these societies in an extremely rapid devastating way. With guns, germs and steel, indeed. But

you've got essentially two groups. You've got the Aztecs, Mexico and the Inca's in Peru. And what Jerry Diamond does is to explain that they had a much lower level of technological and military development than the Spanish. They didn't have horses in particular. But he can't, to my mind, really explain why, for example, the Inks of Peru did not invent the wheel, which would have been very useful to them.

Whereas the Maya, further north, did invent the wheel, but because they didn't have llamas or anything else to hitch carts to, it just remained useful as a toy. And similarly with writing, of course you can explain why the invention of the wheel and writing did not pass from one society to the other because there are geographical barriers in between. But to my mind, the book doesn't explain why the one society invented these things and the other didn't, even though they were very similar. And for that, to my mind, you have to go to what? you might call real historical explanations, which is to do with culture,

economy, political events, indeed as well. And there are a lot of other examples of this all the way Well, we'll come back a few of them. Let's take those too. What about the reply given now by Richard that your book deals with prehistory rather than history, that these gigantic shifts you're talking about over 13,000 years work very well until, let us say,

the last couple of thousand or so? I would express it somewhat differently, but I think, yes, you have captured the essence of the book, that it is concerned with a long time scale that includes prehistory. I would add, though, that prehistory has left its strong stamp on modern history, and over the last 500 years, as we've seen the European expansion, over the globe to the New World, Aboriginal Australia, etc., we've been seen the reverberations of prehistory.

As regards the two interesting points that you raise about the lack of development of the wheel and riding among the Incas. With a wheel, it may be a matter of time. Remember that animals were domesticated in the fertile crescent around 8,200 BC, and that the wheel did not emerge in the old world until 4,200 years later. Now, the first domesticated llamas in the new world were about 3,000 BC, so if things were going at the same rate, 4,200 years later, 1,200 AD, you might expect wheels among the world.

the Incas. Well, by 1532, they didn't have the wheel, so they were at least 300 years slower, but it may be a matter of time with the emergence of the wheel. Well, that's just a kind of a what-if. I mean, it's not actually a real historical kind of explanation. It doesn't actually explain why they didn't have the wheel if you say they might have had it at some later date. And another kind of problem I have is really what you seem to me to explain is the how, but not the why. It's very, very convincing on the level of what it was that enabled Eurasian societies, particularly European societies,

to conquer and establish domination over societies and other parts of the world, like Australia and the Americas. But it doesn't actually explain why. Why do they want to do this? Why did this technology actually, did it have an effect on making them do this, or was it something else? And again, I think here one has to look at a more detailed level, particularly because when you say Eurasia,

you're talking about most of the inhabited land surface of the globe, once you start to break it down and ask the question, why wasn't it the Chinese who conquered Australia? Why was it Europeans? And then you have to say, why was it the Spanish? I mean, the history of the world would be very different if the Swedes had conquered South America, for example,

which is not a fantastic idea because Sweden was an extremely powerful and wealthy in advanced country in early modern Europe and indeed conquered most of Germany in the 17th century for a time. So you have to look at a more specific level. And once you get down to this more specific level, again, to my mind, it is not these ecological and geographical factors that you stress, but much more what I would call historical factors, culture, the economy, social structures, ideologies, this kind of thing.

How do your theories grapple with those more particular things, things, and even more particular, great figures in the sense of figures of great import, such as Hitler, Stalin, and so on. How do your grand sweeps through? How do they cope with this? What do they have to say to this that's useful? This question is, I think, one of the two most interesting questions that emerged from guns, germs, and steel. The question of down to what scale, can one still get useful explanations from these broad-term factors? Clearly, at one extreme, if you are talking about a very short time span and small spatial scale, the extreme example that we were talking about beforehand and that I mentioned at

the end of Guns, German Steel, the bomb that went off in Hitler's headquarters July 201944, if that bomb had been 50 centimeters closer to Hitler, it would have killed him, and that might have produced consequences, big consequences for many people at the time. At the more extreme scale, 13,000 years, it makes no difference whether any individual died or lived over the course of 13,000 years. So the real question is, down to what scale can you pursue the large-scale reasoning? In the case of Spain or Sweden, there are clear reasons why was Spain and not Sweden that colonized the new world. And they've been much discussed that Spain was fronting on the Atlantic, that Spain is a Mediterranean country that Spain inherited,

the Mediterranean and then the eastern shipbuilding tradition. So I think down to the level of Spain versus Sweden, or China versus Europe, you can still understand a lot with geographic and environmental factors. Why do you use this phrase that Europe became accidental conquerors? I take you to a point that we broached at the top of the program, and you didn't, it seemed to me, quite prepared to take it on. but you say in your book that until we have some convincing, detailed,

agree-upon explanation of broad pattern history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. I don't think they will. I think that the racist biological explanation of history went out of the argument a long time ago, didn't it? Oh, my. Since I talk about these things a lot,

I'm used to the fact that the vast majority of people are either explicit racists, In Japan, for example, it is polite and acceptable to be explicit races. I'm back from a visit to Japan in October where I had a discussion with a cabinet minister about these questions of history, and the first thing he did was to point to his head and say, it's a matter of intelligence, okay. So many people are explicit racist, and of those who are not explicit races, the majority still assume subconsciously because they're not told what the correct explanation is,

that history's unfolding has to do with differences between U.S. Europeans and other people. And again, the standard answer that I get from American academics about why Aboriginal Australians didn't conquer America is, well, you know, I really hate to say this, but they're so primitive and they didn't have the work ethic and the Judeo-Christian tradition. So you think it's rampant? Rampant. It's 99.9% of what people believe. Yes. Well, I don't. And I don't know many people who do, but I do bow sincerely to your George, your much greater experience of these matters.

You, I don't know how to put this. You actually, you've done a lot of fieldwork in New Guinea. You've spent a lot of time there. You've great admirer of New Guinea society. In fact, the book starts with the conversation you have with a man, a friend of yours in New Guinea. You seem to say they are more intelligent than other people. Isn't that?

Aren't you playing that same game? No, you know, one could argue about that. I discussed the intelligence of New Guineans very briefly, simply to dispose of the argument that these are primitive stupid people. You have to talk to them for about a few minutes to discover that they're not primitive stupid people. And my experience over the years is that on the average, they're somewhat more engaged, quick to learn, involved

than the average European or American. One can dispute that, but what one cannot dispute is that they do not have any lack of intelligence that would explain why they are the ones who ended up with the stone tools. I think a lot of people read history and enjoy reading history because of the story of mankind. And what does the 13,000 years spread have to say about the story of mankind in terms of moral responsibility, the direction is taken, the decisions taken, and so on? What do you think it has to say to that? I mean, do you think also that this 13,000-year geographical, ecological view is still rolling through now today,

that the big things that are happening in the 20th century and may happen to the next century will still be, determined by the same grand shifts that happened over the last 13,000 years? Yes and no, there's a lot of momentum of the last 13,000 years. That momentum explains why it's not on the agenda for Aboriginal Australians to recapture Australia and to become rural leaders. It also explains why I think Paraguay and Congo are not about to become rural leaders and why the countries of Southeast Asia are in the process of becoming rural leaders. But it is animals and grain that are going to make Southeast

Asia, a predominating country in the next few hundred years. I think I can just come in here. I think that this is one of the problems of the model that it can explain very well differences between societies which are wholly in the grip of the natural environment, but it can't explain

differences once you get away from that and you industrialise. And I was very interested to see that when you look up the word steel in the index and after all the book is called guns, germs and steel, there are only entry on four pages for it.

And there's a very little mention of guns either. There's an awful lot about germs, precisely because that's the level of technology to do with the manufacture of steel and so on, which it's difficult with this model to explain, except at several historical removes. On the whole, I'm with Jared on the idea of trying to advance a non-racist explanation.

I think, Melvin, you're being a bit optimistic here about the way most people would respond in most societies, when confronted with the kind of question that he's asking. Can we just clear up for listeners the idea of germs? I mean, people would understand guns and steel germs is because European peoples became immune to germs through living close to certain germs,

carried immunity because they lived close to animals and developed immunity systems. So they went abroad, they carried the germs to peoples who didn't have these immunity systems, and these were a big conquering factor. In essence, yes. The epidemic killers of humans, humanity, measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, etc. Those are specialized human diseases that arose from

specialized diseases of the domestic animals with which we began to come into contact 10,000 years ago. And so Eurasians, through their long exposure, develop both genetic and antibody immunity to these diseases, but other peoples did not. And the numbers are that among Native Americans, something like 95% of Native Americans died in bed of Europe. German germs, leaving the last 5% to face the spanner swords on the battlefield. Can I come to this big discussion, as I said, between when a history, as it were, leaves the land, when it leaves its dependence upon things that are most important in your 13,000-year span, and when it becomes the culture, when it becomes technology, and becomes driven by,

well, in large sense, the culture. What, Richard Evans, what's your view about the driving forces in Jared Diamond's book in this culture, in what we're looking at now. Is it a powerful explanation for what's going on in the 1990s? I don't think so, not at present. I mean, we live in a world of increasing globalization where technology is wiping out geographical and ecological differences of the sort that play the role in Jared's book.

So I think you can explain these things that several removes in the distant past and clearly as he says it's a very long hand of the ecological differences that is precisely why what he calls the Eurasian economies and the now the North American economy are very powerful

and those of other parts of the globe are less powerful but increasingly I think it's technology it's economic development, it's capitalism now we have computers and the kind of virtual abolition of geographical space in many ways which are playing the role. Diseases, for example, it's now, I think, very easy, as we saw terribly, with AIDS, for diseases to spread with extreme rapidity right across the globe and effect,

almost all areas of human society roughly simultaneously. Chair, Don. I would add to that an example that Rich and I were discussing beforehand, cholera, apropos of the spread of diseases. There was an episode in my city about 10 years ago. Colora is not endemic in the United States. There were cases of cholera in Peru, and a jet plane from Argentina and Chile landed in Peru,

loaded food and water there. By the time it landed in Los Angeles, something like 68 of the passengers had been infected with cholera. They spread on to Alaska and Osaka, and as a result of this one jet plane, there was this trail of cholera cases, all the way from South America to Japan. And that's an example of what you were saying

about the rapid spread of diseases, AIDS and cholera around the world today. Just to summarize this section, now we're talking about two different sorts of history there. Now we're talking about your great 13,000-year spread and something which is closer to the reality of our everyday lives with lead. Are these two parallel views of history

with one just being a throb underneath the other? Well, we're talking about what it is you're trying to explain, I think. And what I'm saying is that what Jerry's book explains is history or in particular prehistory on an extremely broad global level. And even when he gets down to concrete examples, which he devotes a lot of attention to in the book, such as the conquest of the Incas and the Aztecs by the Spanish conquistadores, that level of explanation only takes you so far, and you need to add on to it, explanations of a much more detailed historical level,

that indeed do come down to the individual person, to the individual qualities of Cortes and Pizarro, the leaders of the conquistadores, the reactions and policies of the Spanish government, as opposed to those of other governments, which didn't back expeditions to America, and so on and so forth. and also, of course, in the Inca and Aztec societies. So that really, I think what, again, what Jared is explaining is the how, but when you get to the why and you get down, even to asking fairly big questions as to why did the Spanish conquer the Aztecs

and the Inca's, you have to go to what I would call real historical circumstances. You intimate, or you say rather more than intimate, that you think history could become a science, could you just tell us how you think that could happen? Yes, when that could easily be misquoted. That's why I was very tentative in this. But you do say it. I don't expect it will become a science like molecular biology

pursued in the laboratory with replicated experiments. Instead, it can profit from methods used in the so-called historical sciences, in geology, astronomy, evolutionary biology, paleontology. We don't do lab experiments turning on and off glaciers and stars. Instead, we use the comparative method. We use natural experiments. And one of the exciting developments in science in the last 10 years has been the increasing sophistication of the comparative method

in sorting out the effects of ancestral features, shared ancestral features, from actual adaptation. That's a respect in which I see the potential for history, drawing human history, drawing on the methods of these other historical sciences. But I don't want to be misquoted as saying that I think history will become like atomic physics and molecular biology. No, I'm not misgrating, but I'm not having your back off either because you do say that it should become more like a science. You do make these comparisons, and it's a very interesting point. Richard Evans.

I think there's, there are clear parallels between history and the sciences that you mention. But this is one of the parts of the, this is perhaps the part of the book I found least convincing, really. it rests partly on a simple linguistic confusion. I mean, you state in your book that there aren't any departments of historical science anywhere. We don't call it historical science. But this is only because of an accident of the English language. If you look in Germany and other countries, other languages, they all use the concept of science,

Gesheists Wissenschaft in Germany, historical science. So much so, indeed, that when there's an international congress of historians, as there is every few years, it's called, because of these other countries' involvement, Congress of Historical Sciences. Science, in this sense, simply means organized knowledge, and I would certainly defend that weak conception of history as a science. So I don't think it's a question of history simply being a mass of disorganized details, as you claim in one part of your book,

that historians are always trying to do the things which astronomy and, paleontology and other subjects you mentioned try to do. That's to say, find chains of causes and explanation, draw comparisons. There's a well-established historical literature that does precisely what you say natural experiments and the other disciplines do. That is to say, to compare different societies

and try and isolate what's common to them and what factors differ and therefore to try and work out what the influence of these factors is. And it's a massive comparative literature on the history of fascism, for example, a lot of different there's a huge project of being going on about the working classes

and the middle classes in the 19th century different European societies so there's a lot of what you want history to do I would say historians are doing already so how would you react to that in principle yes and practice not nearly

enough what strikes me as a professional non-historian is how much less synthesis and how much more detailed non-comparative study goes on in the discipline of history than, say, in the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology, whose questions are similar about the trajectories of people, but which don't employ written documents nearly as much. There's a much stronger comparative synthetic tradition among cultural anthropologists and archaeologists.

And you're entirely correct, this is not missing from history. They're historians who do it, very good historians. But there are far few who do it than could do it, and there's much more resistance to doing it among historians than there is among other synthetic historical sciences. Can I end on something that Richard Evans brought up very near the beginning, which was that your book dealt marvelously, and I like him and loved the sweep of it,

but on the whole it works extremely over what one could call prehistory. Don't you think that now, at the end of the 20th century, with so much for better and for worse at our command that we as never before, leave aside great men, we humankind, as never before, are in charge or in the charge of our history by cultural forces, technologies and so and so forth,

and that the game, in that sense, the way of perception of looking through this huge sweep is over. What do you think, Richard Evans? Well, I think there's, it's very unfashionable to do so, but I'll quote Carl Marx on these issues of the big picture and the individual responsibility because I don't think anybody's ever said it better, and that is he said that people make their own history,

but not under conditions of their own choosing. And I think that's entirely right. So I don't think that looking at this huge picture necessarily eliminates issues like individual responsibility or the actions of individual men and women. And I think history is an enormously diverse discipline. and I'm all for more comparative history, but there are many other kinds of history you can do. And asking big questions is very important for historians,

and I hope they don't stop doing it. I think we'll, on that compliment, Jared Diamond. Thank you very much, Gerard Diamond. Thanks for Richard Evans, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.