Do Leaders Make History? Jared Diamond's Answer After Guns, Germs, and Steel

Sean Carroll opens far from physics: history sits at the other end of the simplification scale, because what happens in a single period is nearly infinite. Writing history means choosing which events explain anything, so 'why did this happen, what can we learn' keeps circling back to the old dispute: do singular individuals drive the flow, or do deep structures?

Jared Diamond enters that dispute from an unusual place: a UCLA career from gut physiology to geography, bird research and national-park work in New Guinea since 1964. On his first visit he finds stone tools, no writing, no state — and within a day rejects the intellect explanation: New Guineans are as sharp and curious as Europeans, so the answer must lie elsewhere.

The answer, 34 years later, becomes Guns, Germs, and Steel: not brains but surroundings. Where domesticable wild plants and animals grow decides where farming starts; surplus food then feeds specialists, scribes, and early kings. The richest start belongs to the Fertile Crescent: wild ancestors of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and horses plus wheat, peas, and lentils push farming ahead 11,000 years ago, with China, Mexico, the Andes, and New Guinea trailing.

Carroll's objection is familiar: the Crescent does not rule today, so why did Europe pull ahead? Diamond answers on two levels. First, the Crescent's edge dissolved as it spread: domesticates move into Europe while dry, irrigation-dependent, salinization-prone soils stay behind. Second, Europe keeps a geographic ticket: an Atlantic front, seamanship practice in the Mediterranean, peninsulas, islands, and radially flowing rivers that lock in political fragmentation — a combination India and China lack.

The sharpest contrast is China: between 1400 and 1432 it owns the largest ships on earth, then one emperor scraps the ocean fleets, judging that China already holds everything it needs. In Europe, had one prince banned a technology, the neighbor would walk through the door. Unity, Diamond argues, is sometimes a blessing and in the long run a burden: medieval China leads with gunpowder, compass, and paper, then rides the wave of good and bad emperors, while Europe's disunity forces competition and experiment.

That geography still works today is shown on the map of Africa: north and south coasts out-earn the interior, while the tropical belt lags under malaria, sleeping sickness, and thin soils. Landlocked states haul freight overland where sea freight costs roughly seven times less per kilo-mile. An academic aside belongs to the story too: after the Pulitzer, his physiology department deems the book unjudgeable and blocks promotion — the price of leaving one's discipline.

The new book is personal in motive: born in 1937, Diamond recalls a Life cover photo as his earliest datable memory, wartime family losses, and a Polish family's story on one branch ending in Auschwitz and on the other in a Siberian camp; a life in leaders' shadow turns, after 2019's Upheaval, into a book on leaders. The architecture spans four arenas: politics (curiosity rooted in Hitler's world), business (what Gates, Musk, and Jobs changed, if anything), sports (NBA, NFL, and World Cup watched with his sons after age 50), and religion (would a Mediterranean faith be the largest today had Jesus died in childhood).

The methods chapter draws a firm line between antiquity and the recent past: biographies of the Gracchi, Caesar, and Augustus exist but bias cannot be audited, while politicians from 1940 to 2000 leave photo and television archives. Where experiments are impossible or indecent, natural experiments step in: some 85 leaders dying in office of natural causes and 57 assassinated ones are set against nearly 200 countries where no such death occurs. In business, variance decomposition across CEO transfers attributes around 30 percent of profit variation to the leader in tight samples and near 15 percent in broader ones, with industry and firm effects of comparable size. A Danish registry of 78,000 firms shows a grieving CEO drags profits for a year or two; the lone joke exception, a mother-in-law's passing, carries no statistical weight.

The book opens at a crossroads in March 1930: a truck strikes the right side of the car carrying Hitler, and slightly more speed would have closed the road to 1933. Diamond grants the singularity — a mesmerizing speaker who deceived Chamberlain, generals, and businessmen alike, taking gamble after gamble under an early-death expectation (the Rhineland march pays, Stalingrad no-retreat and the Bulge offensive do not) — then builds the counter-case: Versailles terms, the 1923 hyperinflation, and a ruined middle class meant any German leader would aim to undo 1918, Stresemann peacefully and Hitler by war. The same duality pairs Botswana's Seretse Khama (one of 21 university graduates at independence, British-educated, British-married, chief of the largest tribe and hence the only one who could abolish chiefly power and vest his own tribe's diamonds in the nation) with Bezos: Khama as uniquely equipped, Bezos as distinct in style while eBay and Walmart sell the same 'everything store' differently.

Sports and religion give the method its clearest stage: hundreds of sackings a year in Argentina's football league, eighteen-month average tenures in Germany, successful post-Wooden UCLA coaches fired for not being Wooden — many of them victims of regression to the mean. Comparing clubs that sack with clubs that stand pat shrinks the effect; college coaching outweighs the pros; the Brady-Belichick split, Argentina-Spain's one-sided yellow cards, and American football's penalty-and-fumble drill suggest a coach's leverage sits in discipline more than tactical genius. Religion rewrites the equation: charisma is mandatory yet insufficient, requiring organization (Paul, Brigham Young) and often armed defense or offense (Mormon militias, Christian armies centuries later). Timing then falls into three: those who choose the moment like de Gaulle, those the moment finds and who know it like Churchill, and those who stumble into it unknowingly like Genghis Khan amid Central Asia's wettest spell in two millennia with ten horses per warrior.