1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Read online

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  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by Charles C. Mann

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Lannan Foundation.

  Portions of this book have appeared in different form in The Atlantic, National Geographic, Orion, and Science.

  Maps created by Nick Springer and Tracy Pollock, Springer Cartographics LLC; copyright © by 2011 Charles C. Mann

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mann, Charles C.

  1493 : uncovering the new world Columbus created / Charles C. Mann. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59672-7

  1. History, Modern. 2. Economic history. 3. Commerce—History. 4. Agriculture—History. 5. Ecology—History. 6. Industrial revolution. 7. Slave trade—History. 8. America—Discovery and exploration—Economic aspects. 9. America—Discovery and exploration—Environmental aspects. 10. Columbus, Christopher—Influence. I. Title.

  D228.M36 2011

  909’.4—dc22 2011003408

  Front-of-jacket image: De Español y Negra, Mulato, attributed to José de Alcibar, c. 1760. Denver Art Museum, Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer.

  Photo © James O. Milmoe.

  Jacket design by Abby Weintraub

  v3.1

  To the woman who built my house,

  and is my home

  —CCM

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Map

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Maps

  Prologue

  INTRODUCTION / In the Homogenocene

  1. Two Monuments

  PART ONE / Atlantic Journeys

  2. The Tobacco Coast

  3. Evil Air

  PART TWO / Pacific Journeys

  4. Shiploads of Money (Silk for Silver, Part One)

  5. Lovesick Grass, Foreign Tubers, and Jade Rice (Silk for Silver, Part Two)

  PART THREE / Europe in the World

  6. The Agro-Industrial Complex

  7. Black Gold

  PART FOUR / Africa in the World

  8. Crazy Soup

  9. Forest of Fugitives

  CODA / Currents of Life

  10. In Bulalacao

  Appendixes

  A. Fighting Words

  B. Globalization in Beta

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Index

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Additional Images

  MAPS

  Map 1 The World, 1493

  Map 2 Colonial Hispaniola

  Map 3 China Sea, 1571

  Map 4 Deforestation and Reforestation in Eastern North America, 1500–1650

  Map 5 Tsenacomoco, 1607–1670

  Map 6 Malaria in Southeast England

  Map 7 American Anopheles

  Map 8 Recreating Pangaea, 1600

  Map 9 Fujian in the Ming Era

  Map 10 Viceroyalty of Peru

  Map 11 China in the Qing Era

  Map 12 China Floods, 1823

  Map 13 Spread of Potato Blight, 1845

  Map 14 Rubber World, c. 1890

  Map 15 Spread of Sugar Through the Mediterranean and Beyond

  Map 16 Estate of Hernán Cortés, 1547

  Map 17 Portuguese Expansion into Brazil

  Map 18 Maroon Landscapes

  PROLOGUE

  Like other books, this one began in a garden. Almost twenty years ago I came across a newspaper notice about some local college students who had grown a hundred different varieties of tomato. Visitors were welcome to take a look at their work. Because I like tomatoes, I decided to drop by with my eight-year-old son. When we arrived at the school greenhouse I was amazed—I’d never seen tomatoes in so many different sizes, shapes, and colors.

  A student offered us samples on a plastic plate. Among them was an alarmingly lumpy specimen, the color of an old brick, with a broad, green-black tonsure about the stem. Occasionally I have dreams in which I experience a sensation so intensely that I wake up. This tomato was like that—it jolted my mouth awake. Its name, the student said, was Black from Tula. It was an “heirloom” tomato, developed in nineteenth-century Ukraine.

  “I thought tomatoes came from Mexico,” I said, surprised. “What are they doing breeding them in Ukraine?”

  The student gave me a catalog of heirloom seeds for tomatoes, chili peppers, and beans (common beans, not green beans). After I went home, I flipped through the pages. All three crops originated in the Americas. But time and again the varieties in the catalog came from overseas: Japanese tomatoes, Italian peppers, Congolese beans. Wanting to have more of those strange but tasty tomatoes, I went on to order seeds, sprout them in plastic containers, and stick the seedlings in a garden, something I’d never done before.

  Not long after my trip to the greenhouse I visited the library. I discovered that my question to the student had been off the mark. To begin, tomatoes probably originated not in Mexico, but in the Andes Mountains. Half a dozen wild tomato species exist in Peru and Ecuador, all but one inedible, producing fruit the size of a thumbtack. And to botanists the real mystery is less how tomatoes ended up in Ukraine or Japan than how the progenitors of today’s tomato journeyed from South America to Mexico, where native plant breeders radically transformed the fruits, making them bigger, redder, and, most important, more edible. Why transport useless wild tomatoes for thousands of miles? Why had the species not been domesticated in its home range? How had people in Mexico gone about changing the plant to their needs?

  These questions touched on a long-standing interest of mine: the original inhabitants of the Americas. As a reporter in the news division of the journal Science, I had from time to time spoken with archaeologists, anthropologists, and geographers about their increasing recognition of the size and sophistication of long-ago native societies. The botanists’ puzzled respect for Indian plant breeders fit nicely into that picture. Eventually I learned enough from these conversations that I wrote a book about researchers’ current views of the history of the Americas before Columbus. The tomatoes in my garden carried a little of that history in their DNA.

  They also carried some of the history after Columbus. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Europeans carried tomatoes around the world. After convincing themselves that the strange fruits were not poisonous, farmers planted them from Africa to Asia. In a small way, the plant had a cultural impact everywhere it moved. Sometimes not so small—one can scarcely imagine southern Italy without tomato sauce.

  Still, I didn’t grasp that such biological transplants might have played a role beyond the dinner plate until in a used-book store I came across a paperback: Ecological Imperialism, by Alfred W. Crosby, a geographer and historian then at the University of Texas. Wondering what the title could refer to, I picked up the book. The first sentence seemed to jump off the page: “European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place, which requires explanation.”

  I understood exactly what Crosby was getting at. Most Africans live in Africa, most Asians in Asia, and most Native Americans in the Americas. People of Eur
opean descent, by contrast, are thick on the ground in Australia, the Americas, and southern Africa. Successful transplants, they form the majority in many of those places—an obvious fact, but one I had never really thought about before. Now I wondered: Why is that the case? Ecologically speaking, it is just as much a puzzle as tomatoes in Ukraine.

  Before Crosby (and some of his colleagues) 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, as he had titled his previous book, the Columbian Exchange. The exchange took corn (maize) to Africa and sweet potatoes to East Asia, horses and apples, to the Americas, and rhubarb and eucalyptus to Europe—and also swapped about a host of less-familiar organisms like insects, grasses, bacteria, and viruses. The Columbian Exchange was neither fully controlled nor understood by its participants, but it allowed Europeans to transform much of the Americas, Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Africa into ecological versions of Europe, landscapes the foreigners could use more comfortably than could their original inhabitants. This ecological imperialism, Crosby argued, provided the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish with the consistent edge needed to win their empires.

  Crosby’s books were constitutive documents in a new discipline: environmental history. The same period witnessed the rise of another discipline, Atlantic studies, which stressed the importance of interactions among the cultures bordering that ocean. (Recently a number of Atlanticists have added movements across the Pacific to their purview; the field may have to be renamed.) Taken together, researchers in all these fields have been assembling what amounts to a new picture of the origins of our world-spanning, interconnected civilization, the way of life evoked by the term “globalization.” One way to summarize their efforts might be to say that to the history of kings and queens most of us learned as students has been added a recognition of the remarkable role of exchange, both ecological and economic. Another way might be to say that there is a growing recognition that Columbus’s voyage did not mark the discovery of a New World, but its creation. How that world was created is the subject of this book.

  The research has been greatly aided by recently developed scientific tools. Satellites map out environmental changes wreaked by the huge, largely hidden trade in latex, the main ingredient in natural rubber. Geneticists use DNA assays to trace the ruinous path of potato blight. Ecologists employ mathematical simulations to simulate the spread of malaria in Europe. And so on—the examples are legion. Political changes, too, have helped. To cite one of special importance to this book, it is much easier to work in China nowadays than it was in the early 1980s, when Crosby was researching Ecological Imperialism. Today, bureaucratic suspicion is minimal; the chief obstacle I faced during my visits to Beijing was the abominable traffic. Librarians and researchers there happily gave me early Chinese records—digital scans of the originals, which they let me copy onto a little memory stick that I carried in my shirt pocket.

  What happened after Columbus, this new research says, was nothing less than the forming of a single new world from the collision of two old worlds—three, if one counts Africa as separate from Eurasia. Born in the sixteenth century from European desires to join the thriving Asian trade sphere, the economic system for exchange ended up transforming the globe into a single ecological system by the nineteenth century—almost instantly, in biological terms. The creation of this ecological system helped Europe seize, for several vital centuries, the political initiative, which in turn shaped the contours of today’s world-spanning economic system, in its interlaced, omnipresent, barely comprehended splendor.

  Ever since violent protests at a 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle brought the idea of globalization to the world’s attention, pundits of every ideological stripe have barraged the public with articles, books, white papers, blog posts, and video documentaries attempting to explain, celebrate, or attack it. From the start the debate has focused around two poles. On one side are economists and entrepreneurs who argue passionately that free trade makes societies better off—that both sides of an uncoerced exchange gain from it. The more trade the better! they say. Anything less amounts to depriving people in one place of the fruits of human ingenuity in other places. On the other side is a din of environmental activists, cultural nationalists, labor organizers, and anti-corporate agitators who charge that unregulated trade upends political, social, and environmental arrangements in ways that are rarely anticipated and usually destructive. The less trade, they say, the better. Protect local communities from the forces unleashed by multinational greed!

  Whipsawed between these two opposing views, the global network has become the subject of a furious intellectual battle, complete with mutually contradictory charts, graphs, and statistics—and tear gas and flying bricks in the streets where political leaders meet behind walls of riot police to wrangle through international-trade agreements. Sometimes the moil of slogans and counter-slogans, facts and factoids, seems impenetrable, but as I learned more I came to suspect that both sides may be correct. From the outset globalization brought both enormous economic gains and ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains.

  It is true that our times are different from the past. Our ancestors did not have the Internet, air travel, genetically modified crops, or computerized international stock exchanges. Still, reading the accounts of the creation of the world market one cannot help hearing echoes—some muted, some thunderously loud—of the disputes now on the television news. Events four centuries ago set a template for events we are living through today.

  · · ·

  What this book is not: a systematic exposition of the economic and ecological roots of what some historians call, ponderously but accurately, “the world-system.” Some parts of the earth I skip entirely; some important events I barely mention. My excuse is that the subject is too big for any single work; indeed, even a pretense at completeness would be unwieldy and unreadable. Nor do I fully treat how researchers came to form this new picture, though I describe some of the main landmarks along the intellectual way. Instead in 1493 I concentrate on areas that seem to me to be especially important, especially well documented, or—here showing my journalist’s bias—especially interesting. Readers wishing to learn more can turn to the sources in the Notes and Bibliography.

  Following an introductory chapter, the book is divided into four sections. The first two lay out, so to speak, the constituent halves of the Columbian Exchange: the separate but linked exchanges across the Atlantic and Pacific. The Atlantic section begins with the exemplary case of Jamestown, the beginning of permanent English colonization in the Americas. Established as a purely economic venture, its fate was largely decided by ecological forces, notably the introduction of tobacco. Originally from the lower Amazon, this exotic species—exciting, habit-forming, vaguely louche—became the subject of the first truly global commodity craze. (Silk and porcelain, long a passion in Europe and Asia, spread to the Americas and became the next ones.) The chapter sets the groundwork for the next, which discusses the introduced species that shaped, more than any others, societies from Baltimore to Buenos Aires: the microscopic creatures that cause malaria and yellow fever. After examining their impact on matters ranging from slavery in Virginia to poverty in the Guyanas, I close with malaria’s role in the creation of the United States.

  The second section shifts the focus to the Pacific, where the era of globalization began with vast shipments of silver from Spanish America to China. It opens wi
th a chronicle of cities: Potosí in what is now Bolivia, Manila in the Philippines, Yuegang in southeast China. Once renowned, now little thought of, these cities were the fervid, essential links in an economic exchange that knit the world together. Along the way, the exchange brought sweet potatoes and corn to China, which had accidental, devastating consequences for Chinese ecosystems. As in a classic feedback loop, those ecological consequences shaped subsequent economic and political conditions. Ultimately, sweet potatoes and corn played a major part in the flowering and collapse of the last Chinese dynasty. They played a small, but similarly ambiguous role in the Communist dynasty that eventually succeeded it.

  The third section shows the role of the Columbian Exchange in two revolutions: the Agricultural Revolution, which began in the late seventeenth century; and the Industrial Revolution, which took off in the early and mid-nineteenth century. I concentrate on two introduced species: the potato (taken from the Andes to Europe) and the rubber tree (transplanted clandestinely from Brazil to South and Southeast Asia). Both revolutions, agricultural and industrial, supported the rise of the West—its sudden emergence as a controlling power. And both would have had radically different courses without the Columbian Exchange.

  In the fourth section I pick up a theme from the first section. Here I turn to what in human terms was the most consequential exchange of all: the slave trade. Until around 1700 about 90 percent of the people who crossed the Atlantic were African captives. (Native Americans made up part of the remainder, as I explain.) In consequence of this great shift in human populations, many American landscapes were for three centuries largely dominated, in demographic terms, by Africans, Indians, and Afro-Indians. Their interactions, long hidden from Europeans, are an important part of our human heritage that is just coming to light.

  The meeting of red and black, so to speak, took place against a backdrop of other meetings. So many different peoples were involved in the spasms of migration set off by Columbus that the world saw the rise of the first of the now-familiar polyglot, world-encompassing metropolises: Mexico City. Its cultural jumble extended from the top of the social ladder, where the conquistadors married into the nobility of the peoples they had conquered, to the bottom, where Spanish barbers complained bitterly about low-paid immigrant barbers from China. A planetary crossroads, this great, turbulent metropolis represents the unification of the two networks described in the first part of this book. A coda set in the present suggests that these exchanges continue unabated.