Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (subtitled A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years in Britain) is a 1997 transdisciplinary nonfiction book by the American author Jared Diamond.

Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops.

The book's title is a reference to the means by which farm-based societies conquered populations and maintained dominance though sometimes being vastly outnumbered, so that imperialism was enabled by guns, germs, and steel.

[2] Although agriculture arose in several parts of the world, Eurasia gained an early advantage due to the greater availability of suitable plant and animal species for domestication.

As early Western Asian civilizations developed trading relationships, they found additional useful animals in adjacent territories, such as horses and donkeys for use in transport.

[2]: 168–174 Eurasians domesticated goats and sheep for hides, clothing, and cheese; cows for milk; bullocks for tillage of fields and transport; and benign animals such as pigs and chickens.

This was important because similar climate and cycle of seasons let them keep the same "food production system" – they could keep growing the same crops and raising the same animals all the way from Scotland to Siberia.

These economic and technological advantages eventually enabled Europeans to conquer the peoples of the other continents in recent centuries by using guns and steel, particularly after the devastation of native populations by the epidemic diseases from germs.

Eurasia's dense populations, high levels of trade, and living in close proximity to livestock resulted in widespread transmission of diseases, including from animals to humans.

The "trade" in diseases was a little more balanced in Africa and southern Asia, where endemic malaria and yellow fever made these regions notorious as the "white man's grave".

Monolithic, isolated empires without serious competition could continue mistaken policies – such as China squandering its naval mastery by banning the building of ocean-going ships – for long periods without immediate consequences.

In Western Europe, by contrast, competition from immediate neighbors meant that governments could not afford to suppress economic and technological progress for long; if they did not correct their mistakes, they were out-competed and/or conquered relatively quickly.

For instance, the Chinese Emperor could ban shipbuilding and be obeyed, ending China's Age of Discovery, but the Pope could not keep Galileo's Dialogue from being republished in Protestant countries, or Kepler and Newton from continuing his progress; this ultimately enabled European merchant ships and navies to navigate around the globe.

Western Europe also benefited from a more temperate climate than Southwestern Asia where intense agriculture ultimately damaged the environment, encouraged desertification, and hurt soil fertility.

Also important to the transition from hunter-gatherer to city-dwelling agrarian societies was the presence of "large" domesticable animals, raised for meat, work, and long-distance communication.

Large domestic animals also have an important role in the transportation of goods and people over long distances, giving the societies that possess them considerable military and economic advantages.

The Asian areas in which big civilizations arose had geographical features conducive to the formation of large, stable, isolated empires which faced no external pressure to change which led to stagnation.

The combined effect of the increased population densities supported by agriculture, and of close human proximity to domesticated animals leading to animal diseases infecting humans, resulted in European societies acquiring a much richer collection of dangerous pathogens to which European people had acquired immunity through natural selection (such as the Black Death and other epidemics) during a longer time than was the case for Native American hunter-gatherers and farmers.

Many noted that the large scope of the work makes some oversimplification inevitable while still praising the book as a very erudite and generally effective synthesis of multiple different subjects.

Mokyr dismissed as unpersuasive Diamond's theory that breeding specimens failing to fix characteristics controlled by multiple genes "lay at the heart of the geographically challenged societies".

[15] International Relations scholars Iver B. Neumann (of the London School of Economics and Political Science) and Einar Wigen (of University of Oslo) use Guns, Germs, and Steel as a foil for their own inter-disciplinary work.

But Neumann and Wigen also stated, "Until somebody can come up with a better way of interpreting and adding to Diamond's material with a view to understanding the same overarching problematique, his is the best treatment available of the ecological preconditions for why one part of the world, and not another, came to dominate.

"[17] Historian Tom Tomlinson wrote that the magnitude of the task makes it inevitable that Professor Diamond would "[use] very broad brush-strokes to fill in his argument", but ultimately commended the book.

[18][19] Another historian, professor J. R. McNeill, complimented the book for "its improbable success in making students of international relations believe that prehistory is worth their attention", but likewise thought Diamond oversold geography as an explanation for history and under-emphasized cultural autonomy.

But McNeill concluded, "While I have sung its praises only in passing and dwelt on its faults, [...] overall I admire the book for its scope, for its clarity, for its erudition across several disciplines, for the stimulus it provides, for its improbable success in making students of international relations believe that prehistory is worth their attention, and, not least, for its compelling illustration that human history is embedded in the larger web of life on earth."

Tonio Andrade described McNeill's review as "perhaps the fairest and most succinct summary of professional world historians' perspectives on Guns, Germs, and Steel".

"[23] In his last book, published in 2000, the anthropologist and geographer James Morris Blaut criticized Guns, Germs, and Steel, among other reasons, for reviving the theory of environmental determinism, and described Diamond as an example of a modern Eurocentric historian.

[24] Blaut criticizes Diamond's loose use of the terms "Eurasia" and "innovative", which he believes misleads the reader into presuming that Western Europe is responsible for technological inventions that arose in the Middle East and Asia.

"[11] Economists Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson have written extensively about the effect of political institutions on the economic well-being of former European colonies.

Their writing finds evidence that, when controlling for the effect of institutions, the income disparity between nations located at various distances from the equator disappears through the use of a two-stage least squares regression quasi-experiment using settler mortality as an instrumental variable.