1493 Uncovering The New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann - 2011 -506 pages

 

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann - 2011- 560 pages

I was completely fascinated by this incredibly informative work about the impact the arrival of Columbus on the island of Hispanola, near the current location of Santo Domingo,in 1492, had on Asia, Europe, as well as North and South America. The transformations impacted the lives of everyone. 1493 by Charles C. Mann book takes as its starting point the 1972 ground breaking

work by the historian Alfred W. Crosby in The Columbine Exchange.

In order to try to convey what Mann is doing in 1493 I think it is worth quoting at some length from his preface.

"Before Crosby looked into the matter, historians tended to explain Europe’s spread across the globe almost entirely in terms of European superiority, social or scientific. Crosby proposed another explanation in Ecological Imperialism. Europe frequently had better-trained troops and more-advanced weaponry than its adversaries, he agreed, but in the long run its critical advantage was biological, not technological. The ships that sailed across the Atlantic carried not only human beings, but plants and animals—sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally. After Columbus, ecosystems that had been separate for eons suddenly met and mixed in a process Crosby called The Columbine Exchange."

Mann divides his book into four sections.

Part One, Atlantic journeys begins with an account of how tobacco, cultivated in what is now the southern coastal American states, becomes a world wide rage, enriching English plantation owners. Native Americans in the region largely did not see land as something that could be individually owned. So Europeans claimed ownership and drove them out. Soon native Americans had much less land for crops and hunting. European diseases, English rats, wild pigs wrought a heavy price. Malaria, imported probably from West Africa, began to kill more than half arriving colonists as well as natives. However, Africans slaves were largely impervious to it having for generations built up an impunity. This made imported slaves a much better investment than indentured servants. Mann also details the many vegetables and fruits introduced from Africa. Mann explains how demand for slaves, in South and North America, caused different groups in Africa to go to war with each other to obtain slaves to trade for European goods, especially guns. Sugar, highly in demand in Europe, grown in the Caribbean, parts of Florida, and Brazil could only be profitably produced with slave labor. Mann details profusely the economics and horrors of slavery. Brazil became very much a slave country, the mostly young Portuguese men arrived without women and soon had children with people of African and indigenous DNA. The impact of European involvement in Brazil is now threatening to destroy the Amazon,where almost no native people now live. Mann provides lots of concrete details.

Part Two, Pacific Voyages, focus a lot on trade between the Spanish Empire and China, facilitated through ports on the South West Coast of the Philippines. Silver from Bolivia, mined by slaves ended up in the Philippines to be traded for very much in demand Chinese goods, especially silk. This silver ended up making Spanish silver coins the preferred form of money in China. Silver from South America financed wars in Europe and India. The Spanish conquistadors caused millions of deaths, largely from smallpox, and destroyed very old civilizations searching for gold. The food of China was totally changed also. Sweet potatoes, imported from the Andes,became a dominant crop.  

Part Three, Europe has two sections, "The Agro-Industrial Complex" and "Black Gold". Like the previous parts, there is an abundance of fascinating history conveyed. I will just talk a bit about how the potato, imported from the Andes, totally transformed European agricultural, ecosystems, and politics.

Potatoes can be grown with little labor. An acre of potatoes produces several times the amount of food as wheat or corn. Potatoes are very nutritional. Potatoes were planted all over Europe and became pretty much the only crop grown in Ireland. However this blessing turned into a horrible curse when in 1845 a blight from South America began to destroy seven years of potato harvests in Ireland, starving to death a large portion of the population and driving a huge amount of immigration to the USA, Australia and South America. When a society converts from one in which diverse types of indigenous crops are grown to one in which there is only one dominant non- native crop grown for cash, managed and owned by profit driven foreigners, famines often result. (Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis shows how this happened in India, China, and the Philippines.)

The chapter entitled "Black Gold" deals with the impact the industrial revolution, the popularity of the motor car, World War One and Two had on the demand for rubber. Rubber originally came from South America but now over 90 percent of the world's rubber is produced in S.E. Asia. Mann tells us how this transformed the lives of residents of these 

countries who became virtual slaves to plantation owners. (I highly recommend these two books on the impact of rubber: King Leopold's Ghost-A Story of Story of Greed, Terror in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochchild, Fordlandia -The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten City by Greg Grandin (set way up river in Brazil) .

Part Four "Africa" focuses on the slave trade and the arrival of new crops from Africa. By far the biggest impact was the slave trade from Africa to North and South America. Mann also talks about slave holding among native Americans.  

There are extensive accounts of the introduction of the horse in North America,the camel in China. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created is a beautiful book.  

Charles C. Mann is the author of the New York Times best-seller, 1493 and 1491, which won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences' Keck award for the best book of the year. A correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Wired, he has covered the intersection of science, technology, and commerce for many newspapers and magazines here and abroad, including National Geographic, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the Washington Post. In addition to 1491 and 1493, he is the co-author of five other books, one of which is a young person's version of 1491 called Before Columbus. His website 6