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"Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" Jared Diamond begins his ambitious Guns, Germs, and Steel with this query from Yali, a New Guinean politician and acquaintance. He expands Yali's question into a sophisticated analysis of why human development proceeded "at such different rates on different continents" and specifically why Europeans were "the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel." David Landes asks essentially the same question in his magisterial The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: what factors account for "the gap in wealth and health that separates rich and poor?"
These are, of course, enormously complicated questions that go to the heart of how we view the past and how that past shapes our present and future. And these are questions that run head-first into very contentious issues of inequality and elitism: the debates over Eurocentrism and the "West versus the Rest" that have percolated in the 1990s with the writings of Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and Robert Kaplan.
The traditional account of the rise of the West (what historian David Gress calls the "Grand Narrative") has been under relentless assault—sometimes for very good reasons. It is a story of European exceptionalism and progress, defined in terms of liberty, reason, and economic growth. The Grand Narrative stresses several key developments that initially shaped the West and later propelled it to world dominance: Ancient Greece (especially Athens in the fifth century b.c.), the marriage of classical culture with Christianity during the Roman Empire, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, the "discovery" of America, the Enlightenment, the emergence of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, and the various political revolutions that led eventually to the emergence of modern Western liberal democracies.
This myopic approach—which, as Gress rightly notes, has tended to view religion as "peripheral, derivative, and largely irrelevant"—has been amended thoughtfully over the past two decades by a group of world historians, including Carlo Cipolla, William McNeill, and Theodore Von Laue. They have sought to understand the West's rise and more recent political-economic dominance in the context of world history. Their work as a whole takes geography, cross-cultural contacts (especially commercial, military, and epidemiological exchanges), religion, technology, and political/military power seriously.
A more radically non-Eurocentic and often unabashedly Sinocentric approach to world history challenges the very notion of Western exceptionalism. The principal figure in this school of thought is the historical sociologist Andre Gunder Frank. He begrudgingly relegates the West's political and economic dominance to a brief, two-century "spasm" that began around 1800 and is now most likely in the process of collapsing.
Now Diamond and Landes have joined this vigorous, at times rancorous, debate. Both scholars have produced works of sweeping synthesis, each of which builds on earlier work. Diamond's provocative 1992 book on the origins of the human animal, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, clearly suggests the direction taken in Guns, Germs, and Steel. And back in 1969, Landes wrote a highly regarded work on the Industrial Revolution, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Developmentin Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, the early chapters of which raised the questions that The Wealth and Poverty of Nations attempts to answer. These two scholars approach the topic of societal inequality from vastly different perspectives and training. Diamond is a UCLA physiologist who has expanded his expertise into the fields of evolutionary biology and biogeography. A wonderful writer who can draw upon his vast reading in many fields, he is a frequent contributor both to scientific journals and to science magazines for the general reader. Landes, an emeritus professor of history and economics at Harvard, writes The Wealth and Poverty of Nations from the vantage point of a distinguished career in economy history.
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