Seeds, Germs, Silver, and Slaves: The New World Columbus Created
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The Columbian Exchange has shaped everything about the modern world.
Charles C. Mann. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Knopf.
[美] 查尔斯·曼恩著，朱菲等译，历史的碰撞：1493，中信出版社， 2021.
Ian Morris. 2011. Seeds, Germs and Slaves, New York Times.
Source:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/books/review/1493-uncovering-the-new-world-columbus-created-by-charles-c-mann-book-review.html
It has been three years since the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the world, and multiple mutant strains of Coronavirus have emerged during the global spread of the virus. The recent rapid spread of the Omicron mutant strain has worsened in Shanghai, putting the metropolis with a population of over 25 million people into a lockdown mode. Globalization is not only an economic, cultural, and social phenomenon, but also a biological one. Globalization has brought both enormous economic gains and the ecological and social upheavals that threaten those gains. Over the past few years, the costs of globalization have become increasingly evident, with global pandemics being one of them. The global spread of pathogens is not new, and one of the major historical points was 1493.
In 1492, Columbus crossed the Atlantic and discovered the new world. But it was Columbus' activities in the years that followed, that really created the New World. By founding La Isabela, Columbus initiated permanent European occupation in the Americas. And in so doing he began the era of globalization—the single, turbulent exchange of goods and services that today engulfs the entire habitable world.
"1493" picks up where Charles C.Mann's best seller, "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus," left off. In 1491, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were almost impassable barriers. America might as well have been on another planet from Europe and Asia. But Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean the following year changed everything. His journey prompted the exchange of not only information but also food, animals, insects, plants and viruses between the continents. Plants, animals, microbes and cultures began washing around the world, taking tomatoes to Massachusetts, corn to the Philippines and slaves, markets and malaria almost everywhere. It was one world, ready or not.
The Columbian Exchange
Mann generously acknowledges how much of this story line comes from Alfred W. Crosby's classic "Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900," first published a quarter of a century ago. This book has had a huge influence in academia (it was one of the main inspirations for Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Guns, Germs, and Steel").
Alfred W. Crosby, a geographer and historian then at the University of Texas, wrote in Ecological Imperialism: "European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place, which requires explanation."
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 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.
Newspapers usually describe globalization in purely economic terms, but it is also a biological phenomenon; indeed, from a long-term perspective it may be primarily a biological phenomenon. Two hundred and fifty million years ago the world contained a single landmass known to scientists as Pangaea. Geological forces broke up this vast expanse, splitting Eurasia and the Americas. Over time the two divided halves of Pangaea developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Before Colón a few venturesome land creatures had crossed the oceans and established themselves on the other side. Most were insects and birds, as one would expect, but the list also includes, surprisingly, a few farm species—bottle gourds, coconuts, sweet potatoes—the subject today of scholarly head-scratching. Otherwise, the world was sliced into separate ecological domains. Colón’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea. After 1492 the world's ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as Crosby called it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs. And this underlies a huge amount of history learned in schools: the Industrial Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the rise of the West.
Mann argues that only by understanding what Crosby called "the Columbian Exchange" — the transfer of plants, animals, germs and people across continents over the last 500 years — can we make sense of contemporary globalization. The lesson of history, Mann argues, is that "from the outset globalization brought both enormous economic gains and ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains."
Columbus and his men brought wheat, cattle and domesticated animals like horse and sheep to the Americas. As more Europeans followed, they brought a plethora of insects and animal-borne diseases that had not previously existed outside Europe.
All of the great diseases from smallpox to measles to influenza did not exist in the Americas because they didn't have any domesticated animals. When the Europeans came over, it was as if all the deaths over the millennium caused by these diseases were compressed into 150 years in the Americas. The result was to wipe out between two-thirds and 90 percent of the people in the Americas. It was the worst demographic disaster in history.
Mann shows how the costs and benefits of globalization have always been inseparable. We cannot have one without the other. Bringing the potato to Europe made it possible for the Irish famine to kill millions when the potatoes were stricken by blight, but it also kept other millions of half-starved peasants alive. Bringing malaria to the Americas depopulated some parts of the New World, but it also kept European armies out of other parts. Mann can even see the point of view of the chainsaw-wielding loggers who deforested the Philippines so that Americans could have cheap furniture: "These agents of destruction were just putting food on the table."
Homogenocene
Mann's book opens in a garden as well as closes in one. The first is Mann's own in Massachusetts; the second, a Filipino family plot in Bulalacao. Despite being half a world apart, the two gardens grow many of the same plants, hardly any of which are native to either place.
"There's absolutely nothing in my garden that originated within 1,000 miles of my house," he says. "Tomatoes originated in Mexico. Basil came from Italy. Onions came from Europe. I live in Massachusetts. There's absolutely nothing in there from New England."
This, Mann tells us, is the hallmark of the ecological era we live in: the "Homogenocene," the Age of Homogeneity. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike. In this sense the world has become one.
Organization and the central arguments
The book takes a roughly chronological approach, beginning in 1493 and continuing to 2011, and ranges across almost every continent. It is thoroughly researched and up-to-date, combining scholarship from fields as varied as world history, immunology and economics.
The book is divided into six sections, an introduction, fours parts, and a coda – "Currents of Life". The four parts are divided first along geographical lines, "Atlantic Journeys", "Pacific Journeys", and then aligning with historical events, "Europe in the World" and "Africa in the World". In each of these sections, Mann tackles a couple of stories that illuminate the interconnections that arose as a consequence of the meeting of the worlds of peoples and places and how these interactions created new spaces and places with new and unique characteristics.
The first two lay out 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. 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 with 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.) 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.
Since Columbus the world has been in the grip of convulsive transculturation. Every place on the earth's surface, save possibly scraps of Antarctica, has been changed by places that until 1492 were too remote to exert any impact on it.
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.
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.
Globalization brought both enormous economic gains and ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains. Events four centuries ago set a template for events we are living through today.
In setting off the Columbian Exchange, humans rarely knew what they were doing. Once begun, the process ran completely out of human control. And now that it has hit its stride, every animal, plant and bug in the world is caught up in it. Back in the 1870s, for instance, the British government, worried about its rubber supplies, offered to buy every rubber seed that could be smuggled out of Brazil. People didn't ask what this would mean for Laos — why would they? But 140 years on, the chain of events they set off has brought social upheaval and the threat of ecological collapse to this remote corner of the world. There is nowhere to hide from globalization.
The Columbian Exchange has shaped everything about the modern world. It brought us the plants we tend in our gardens and the pests that eat them. And as it accelerates in the 21st century, it may take both away again.
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