1493

1493 Charles C. Mann

The title can be misleading – it really is not about 1493 – it is about the events post Columbus that began in 1493 and changed the world.  In fact the “Columbian Exchange” as the author discusses is the beginning of globalization on many scales affecting nations, economies, foods, and cultures.  It is the exchange of goods that change the balance between people and their land, often leading to the degradation of land.  It includes seemingly innocuous events like the introduction of earthworms into North America by the Jamestown colony.  An impact on our ecology that we still do not fully understand.  And the introduction of honey bees, which may have impacted indigenous bees, but more destructively created the means for pollinating invasive species that would not have been visited by North American bees.

And this goes on in the Americas and every other continent.  It spawns the horror of slavery in which African slaves were brought in to replace the original American Indian Slaves because the Africans were immune to the malaria and other tropical diseases that were killing the Indians and the settlers.  These same diseases were part of an introduction of disease and pathogens to the continent with strange consequences – like being the major factor in reducing the Indigenous populations, infecting and weakening the British Army that chose to land in the Southern – Malaria states – where they thought they would find more loyalists, and the impact on Yankees in the civil war who had not developed an immunity to the diseases before shipping south.

Sweet potatoes in China and Potatoes in Europe upset the order of both Asia and Europe. Tobacco became a truly international trigger to global trade and part of the impetus for expanding slavery.  In SA rubber was the international star of commerce with issues of disease confronting the prospectors and the challenge of understanding the molecular structure of the strange product.  We learn that Goodyear was a pauper, but at least is remembered while his contemporary and perhaps more capable chemist – Hancock is seldom remembered.  Rubber was a story of both science and industry and is well told in the text.

There are many stories and many countries involved and all of them are stories that support the fear of Occupy Wall Street.  Each country represented by their own corporations enslaved, slaughtered and abused the natives and the land.  Each was rapacious and only held back by the competitive efforts of other countries.  Like the Indians of America who were not asked about their desires and needs, but rather moved, slaughtered and enslaved (yes, they were the first slaves in NA).  The weave of history that this book follows from 1493 includes a variety of obscure tales that are important in history, but not remembered over the time and major issues of the centuries. 

The US south was represented by a man named Maury who tried to lead a US annexation of Amazon that would be a slave holding refuge against the anti-slave factions of the north.  Among the spurious reasons was the decision that the waters of the Mississippi mixed with the Amazon in the ocean, therefore making the Amazon a part of NA – of course no one thought that maybe it made the Mississippi part of S.A.

Maury is famous for a more positive contribution – the mapping of the ocean currents and his work is still the basis for our understanding of ocean flow, but he was a fully committed southern slavery advocate; “One of Maury's arguments in favor of a United States presence in the Amazon drew upon his work with wind and current charts. Although the oceanographer maintained that the current off São Roque "is neither dangerous nor ... constant," he averred that ships running under canvas from the mouth of the Amazon to Europe to Rio to Africa or around either of the Capes must stand north and pass not far from the West Indies. This fact ... makes that river basin nearer to us than to Brazil (if we call Rio, Brazil[)] and puts practically the mouth of that river almost as much within the Florida pass and under our control

as is the mouth of the Mississippi (Maury 1948, 217). http://sites.maxwell.syr.edu/clag/Yearbook1987/sternberg.pdf

In many ways, the entire globalization discussion and examples become a treatise on slavery – cause, continuation, and impact.  There are many stories of “maroons” that I have never heard.  In the end your disgust with slavery will be strengthened.

This book is a perfect companion to 1491, Collapse, and  Guns Germs and Steel.  Dense with information, stories and new perspectives. 

From the author of 1491 - the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas - a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together - and marked the beginning of an extraordinary exchange of flora and fauna between Eurasia and the Americas. As Charles Mann shows, this global ecological tumult - the "Columbian Exchange" - underlies much of subsequent human history. Presenting the latest generation of research by scientists, Mann shows how the creation of this worldwide network of exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Manila and Mexico City - where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted - the center of the world. In 1493, Charles Mann gives us an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination.