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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

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Charles Mann has a knack for making the details of history into fascinating reading, and this book did, indeed, keep me up reading past my bedtime. The book combines the results of his prodigious reading, his own travels and personal experiences, and his conversations with some of the leading scholars in the field.

On the heels of his earlier success (1491), Mann now turns to the post-Columbian world, and shows how Columbus's voyages brought about what Mann calls (rather inelegantly, perhaps) the "Homogenocene Age." We're all living in one world now, like it or not, and he explores how it got that way. The book doesn't attempt to be exhaustive, but goes into detail about some of the more interesting aspects of what scholars are now calling the "Columbian Exchange": a massive swap of plants, microorganisms, and animals (including humans). The period after Columbus brought about some of the most radical (and often surprising) changes in the nature of the world.

In some ways, the book recalls James Burkes' Connections television series. We see the unintended consequences and often unexpected results of seemingly minor events. The 1707 Union of Scotland and England turns out to be, quite possibly, partly the result of Panamanian mosquitoes, for example. And I learned a lot. We all know about the Puritans landing in New England, but I had no idea they also founded a colony off the coast of Nicaragua!

Charles Mann knows how to write. He also knows how to make history interesting and come alive.

The title "1493" refers to all that time since Christopher Columbus, for whom Mann has had a fascination with, first discovered the new world. With that new discovery came changes and exchanges that have transferred the world. The great trade routes that developed from the new American continent to Europe and Asia--The Columbian Exchange-- created both beneficial and devastating results and altered what people ate around the world.

The changes most of us learned about in high school social studies classes: new diseases were introduced into the indigenous peoples of the Americas and many died. Columbus came looking for gold and silver but found also sugar, corn, tobacco, beans, tomatoes and so much more. Coffee, chocolate, rubber all followed. The Spaniards in turn brought in the horse and sheep and we all know the legend of the horse in the American West.

Little did Columbus realize, Mann states, that he and the men who followed to America began what was known as globalization. Coveted items were used as trading items for other equally coveted items. Wars were fought over these items because every monarchy wanted to have the most power over the control of earth's resources, and this thirst for power spilled into Asia as well.

There may not be too much new to learn from Mann's book. I had been aware of the "Columbian Exchange" but terms such as"Homogenocene" and the dawn of globalization is new to me. Mann then uses his writing and research skills to create detailed and interesting chapters to show how the movement of animals, plants and humans have created new species, varieties and that this movement was not always bad. If a killer disease kills off the rubber plantations in Brazil, for instance, there will still be rubber trees to support economic needs growing in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Like Mann says in the book by quoting one of his sources "The Industrial Revolution would not have happened without three things: steel, fossil fuel and rubber." I'd add human ingenuity to that triage.

Another skill that makes this book great reading is that Mann traveled to all his places to see the area for himself. This book is full of photographs of historical figures, old trade routes (plus nearly 100 pages of notes), and places he has been to. This makes the book read faintly like an imbedded travel book with history as the reason. Normally travel books that mesh with historical subjects don't always work so fluidly; this book does. And while many books often just focus on the Americas and Europe, Mann correctly includes a lot of footage about China and other Asian countries, proving that even the once reclusive Chinese and Japanese can not continue to thrive without the rest of the world. This makes the evidence of the effects of globalization more impressive.

History and science buffs would like this book. It's a hard one to put down because the reader wants to learn more about the ecological version of globalization.

Worms and parasites, slaves and masters, greed and commerce, tobacco and guano - all have radically shaped today's world, and continue to do so. The Columbian Exchange united, both for better and for worse, this earth in ways that Columbus could never have dreamed.

The author's writing is well organized, researched, illustrated, and annotated. Given that, it still could have been boring but it wasn't. Charles Mann kept me entertained and interested through every word, remarkable considering how much information he was able to impart in the roughly 400 pages of text. I knew bits and pieces of this story, but never the bigger picture as he was able to show me. He did this without becoming pedantic, condescending, or proselytizing. I highly recommend this book to anyone at all interested in the history and future of this planet.

Homo Sapiens has always, but not exclusively, tried to get at reality through analysis. Break things down and study each part until you are at the irreducible. This method has gone a long way, but not everywhere. Charles C. Mann takes time in his prologue to point out that History is not a self-contained discipline. Indeed, it may be that only purely theoretical studies are self-contained and well bounded. But there is no ivory tower of History that stands by itself. For example, ecology and biology are needed to understand some of the largest forces in history. These forces routinely exceed the grasp of traditional historical methods of analysis. They certainly exceeded the grasp of all those actors on the historical stage who thought they were in control, or else controlled by the power of others like themselves who seemed to be calling the shots. Guess again.

If this sounds like dry academic theory grinding, fear not. This is a vivid and engaging book, well written and researched. The stage is merely being set. Mr. Mann's first personal example, and therefore sort of a micro example, is when he says his biggest obstacle in doing historical research in Beijing was not the government but the traffic. The Chinese government has had a creeping sense of its loss of central control (to the extent it ever truly had any) for some years now. They look with nostalgia on the Great March, the Five Year Plans (if one can imagine such a nostalgia), Great Leaps Forward, and perhaps even the Cultural Revolution. All gone. A few years back this realization of the absence of control seen in the hopelessly corrupt provincial power brokers (we shall meet their `most dishonorable' ancestors later), and actually threatened them with democracy.

Mr. Mann wants to know how the tomato (the edible variety) got from the Andes Mountains to what is now Mexico, and what it and other crops actually had to do with the price of tea in China. This was going to be good. Mr. Mann is more a reporter than an historian. Here is his topical agenda:

Tobacco
Silk and Porcelain
Malaria and Yellow Fever
Silver from Bolivia and Japan to China
Sweet Potato and Corn
Peruvian Potatoes to Europe
Rubber
Slavery

All these in the context of waves sweeping and colliding from the Old Worlds to the New and back again. We talk about globalism mostly from an economic perspective. Mr. Mann talks about economics from biological and political perspectives as well. As the title suggests, he begins with Columbus. He convinced his royal backers that Ptolemy had made a big error in his calculation of the earth's circumference. It was really five thousand miles smaller and more pear-shaped. Therefore, it was shorter and easier to get to China by going west.

We are taken to China during an expansive period. She floated an Armada that made Phillip's look more like Tommy Lipton and Queen Victoria's regatta luffing around the Channel. Wait until you see the photograph of the exact replica of the enormous flag ship. This ain't no junk. But China's government turns inward, against the tide, so to speak. The context shifts to the prying eyes of outsiders and to the frustrated insiders who could no longer trade legally, as if that would stop anybody. They were labeled pirates and bandits.

During the 16th century, China was the world's largest economy. The Chinese had to monetize this vast super power up from paying tax with a portion of the harvest. Copper coins just could not suffice. Silver, concentrated in Japan sparked a transition, for a while. Then back come the "pirates and bandits". Finally, long overdue, the Spanish ships show up, groaning with South American silver. Eighty per cent of the worlds silver was gushing out of New Spain. Maybe half of that was starting to head for China in return for silk and porcelain (hence called `china'). The value of silver began to drop, and faster still did the tax receipts of the Spanish Crown. They paid for that vast navy and army to project power. They would not make up the gap by raising taxes because of the few wealthy merchants and nobles. Spain sank into four hundred years of depression, moderated by a few decades of recession. Uh-oh, here comes Franco...

China, on the other hand, was paying Spain twice the world for its oversupply of therefore overvalued silver.

Biology intervenes again. The Chinese took up smoking, from the Spanish in Manila, the Chinese soldiers especially. "Smoke `em if you got `em..." The `ladies', as you would see in later Hollywood films of the thirties, would smoke using long stems (not their vaunted gams). Mr. Mann talks about the mosquito repellant attributes of tobacco. There was another, more sinister and compelling reason why a ready supply of cheap tobacco has been supplied to armies; it stops starvation pangs.

I did not know the use found for the unsmokable tobacco stems. Grind them into snuff. All these were made possible by the silver trade. With distances so great, value needs an abstract form. Silver may tarnish; it may sink; but it does not rot. Good old tobacco. I suppose that outside of every silver lining, a dark cloud can be found.

Several crops followed to China, thankfully, chili and peanut among them. Potatoes, in the best sense of the word supplanted turnips as a staple of European food stuffs. Their yield per acre was crucially higher than the tasty turnip. Both get you through long winters. What I had no idea of was that an Irish laborer's average per capita consumption, and I read this sentence four times, his consumption of potatoes was twelve pounds. Twelve pounds every day, on average? Holy Crisp!

Prussia went to war with Austria in 1778. The logistical point of control was the potato supply, a kartoffel cartel that would salivate the Medellín. Mr. Mann's approach to the large forces of history is to place them as unnoticed and incomprehensible to the famous personalities who crowd our history books. The successful confuse good luck with genius. But they cannot sense or comprehend what moves them on the stage. He reminds me of Ferdinand Braudel. Both are panoramic, but both do their work from many small data points, like an impressionist painting. The result is stimulating, provocative nd challenging - all while enjoyable.

Besides being a clear and precise stylist, he is comfortably readable. Formidable organization is needed to pull-off such a book with this wide scope and this amount of information. His keen scholarship is evidenced by his nearly fifty pages of notes, in addition to a full bibliography. His first of two appendices is a worthwhile discussion of terminology. The maps and illustrations are enriching, though, by me, there can hardly ever be enough maps and snaps.

Mr. Mann is at home with history, science, technology, and with matters of political economy. Finally, the type is a pleasant evolution of Aldine, which dates almost to the date of the book's title. It is today known as Monotype Dante.

This book is full of fascinating trivia and ideas. The basic one is about the Columbian Exchange: Europeans didn't just bring their guns, germs, and steel to foreign lands, they brought their earthworms, bees, cows, and crops. They didn't just kill off native peoples in the lands they 'colonized', they terraformed other continents into Europe-like places that the natives found confusing and unfamiliar.

If you think about it, it makes a fair bit of sense.

There are other ideas, too. For example, the cause of the Little Ice Age in Europe has long been a mystery. The common explanations fail so completely to actually explain it that most history and earth sciences textbooks just avoid offering any such explanation. This book proposes that the cause was the cessation of forest burning by the natives in the Americas. Not only was the smoke not released into the atmosphere anymore, but hundreds upon hundreds of square miles grew tree cover for the first time in centuries. It sure makes a lot more sense than a few small volcanic eruptions.

What this book lacks is flow. Ideas are stapled together, histories and anecdotes lurch from page to page, but there's no cohesive narrative to carry a reader from one to the next. The author will spend several pages ruminating on a topic that only merited a paragraph, perhaps two, but then gloss over the next one as if it's entirely self-explanatory. This book is absolutely full of information, but does a shoddy job of conveying it. If you're willing to work for it, you can learn a lot from this book. If not, you'll probably find one day that you set it aside a few weeks before but then never quite picked it up again.

And lastly, while the author does a good job of skirting the political correctness issues guaranteed to plague any volume like this, calling Columbus neither a hero nor a monster, that middle ground will not make anyone happy. Other reviewers, as you may see, have already castigated the book for being either too politically correct, or too culturally insensitive. If you need any story that mentions Columbus to put him on a pedestal or damn him fully, this book won't give you what you want.

Knopf's marketing campaign for this book is in full gear at the moment -- reviews in major papers on the date of publication, author interviews around the country, even proofs sent to Vine reviewers like me -- and it has created some favorable buzz, so I'll try to explain carefully why I find the book flat and disappointing.

The problem is not the title, though it was clearly chosen for marketing rather than for descriptive purposes; the book has almost nothing to do with the year 1493. But a poor title doesn't ruin a good book.

The problem is not the writing, which isn't bad. Mann writes far too much -- the book would have been better minus 100 pages and the two appendices and the "coda" -- and he has the annoying habit of falling into the first person from time to time to recount his research adventures. Once upon a time these would have been considered mistakes to be corrected in the editing process; since that process effectively no longer exists they are now considered part of one's "style." But the book is certainly readable, at least in short snatches.

The problem is not that the book is relentlessly politically-correct. From agonizing about what to call Indians to adopting as if it were gospel a controversial attempt to explain away the Medieval Warm Period, the book has every progressive base covered. But that's nothing new and shouldn't interfere too much with the substance.

But that's the problem: compared to the books' pretension, there's not much substance. The book is empty -- not empty of facts, there are thousands of those -- but empty of ideas. What is it about? It's about the fact that after Columbus people traveled all around the world, carrying with them things and ideas and other people (slaves) and plants and diseases and that that had a great effect and that now all those things are found everywhere, some of them mostly where they didn't used to be. The book is 400 pages or so of factual details -- some quite interesting, some not so much -- proving that. But does that surprise you? Did you need 400 pages of facts to prove it to you? Was that something you hadn't learned by high school? It doesn't take long to realize that the long book you are wading into is meant to offer meticulous support for an argument no longer worth making, using examples no longer particularly novel, with a bit of travelogue thrown in. The result is that what should be an interesting read becomes a tedious one.

The book is based on the work of a man named Crosby, who gained a bit of a reputation by putting a new and clumsy name -- the "Columbian Exchange," which Mann uses far too often -- and the trappings of "ecology" to the book's important but old and commonplace idea. The gushing review that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on the day of publication was written by Crosby -- a marketing coup for Knopf but hardly a service to the Journal's readers.

This is not so much a bad book as a grotesquely over-written one. Despite the hype, there is no scholarship here; Mann is a writer, not a scientist, and this is secondary-source stuff except insofar as he used the book as an excuse to take tax-deductible trips to the places he writes about. But the subject, though hardly new, is valid and the book's content might well have made two or three interesting shorter books plus a few magazine articles. Combining them, though, whether in a pretense of importance or simply for purposes of marketing, was unfortunate. There are interesting morsels here but throwing them together and attempting to present them as a substantial meal will cause readers heartburn.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann is an enjoyable and detailed history book about the Americas post-Columbus. One of the most interesting aspects of the book were the numerous examples revealing how the settlers impacted their new home, both positively and negatively, by bringing disease carrying viruses and bacteria, plants, fruits, tobacco, animals, mosquitoes, rats, etc. and the resulting consequences. Mann provides ecological insight by what is referred to as the "Columbian Exchange" which impacted both sides of the Atlantic as some of the `new world' was taken back to the `old world.' Many of the these transplants resulted in unintended consequences with effects that remain even today.

Also discussed by Mann is the globalization of international commerce and the level of trading that took place during that time to include precious stones, metals, silk, porcelain, spices, etc. Unfortunately, this also included the trading of slaves. As we know international trade is a huge business today that took root many years ago.

This book will provide you with many history lessons that were not taught in school. The devil is in the details and Mann provides a host of details to enlighten the reader to a side of history that offers more depth than a superficial class review. For example, Mann states,

"...pre-Columbian Americas has few domesticated animals; no cattle, horses, sheep, or goats graced its farmlands."

It would be difficult to imagine a time when these animals did not exist in America.

Another aspect of the book that really is pronounced is just how difficult life was during those early days. Without the inventions of modern technology everything was hard work, laborious and time consuming. Mann states,

"The lack of domestic animals had momentous consequences. In a country without horses, donkeys, and cattle, the only source of transportation and labor was the human body."

To make matters worse, at times there was a significant lack of food and many people died of starvation. Life was a day to day struggle for most just to survive. Despite difficult times of starvation, disease, extremely basic medical care, lack of adequate tools and machinery America grew and prospered over time.

If you are a history buff or just want a more in-depth view of life in the early America's then this is a book that I recommend.

We all have a pretty good idea of the changes wrought by Columbus' voyages to the new world. Europe got corn, tomatoes, and Mexico, and the Americas got Europeans, slaves, and Syphilis. But the story is much, much, deeper than that.

As author Charles McCann tells it, this book had its genesis in the writings of geographer Alfred Crosby, whose confrontationally-titled "Ecological Imperialism" got McCann thinking about the deeper implications of the "Columbian Exchange," as Crosby named it, and how they echoed throughout the world, from the Southernmost tip of South America, through the New World, Africa, and to the most remote regions of China. The story begins with the writings of a geographer, but this isn't a simple Jared Diamond narrative in which geography is the driving force behind all global dynamics. Microbiology, for instance, plays a very significant role, especially in the history of slavery. Back in the 18th Century it was well known that slavery was not a terribly viable source of labor; Adam Smith had documented that in his writings. Early settlers in New England knew that while a slave cost $25, an indentured servant could be had for a five year contract for $15, and the servant was a much more highly motivated worker, and not one looking to escape. So what was the attraction of slavery?

The key is malaria. Malaria was known throughout Europe in the 17thC, and became increasingly troublesome as people drained seaside bogs (which were regularly washed out by the tide) and created areas of standing water, in which mosquitoes bred. In the Americas, though, there was a second, more virulent and more deadly form of malaria that couldn't survive in the North, but which flourished in the South. It killed Europeans by the boatload, but a large percentage of Africans carried with them natural resistance to malaria. These Africans became the backbone of the agricultural workforce in the humid, tropical Southern states, while their owners and overseers kept away from the swamps and marshes, living in homes built on hills, where winds swept the area clean of mosquitoes. Both malaria and Yellow Fever, also brought to the new world by the first African slaves, also shaped the economics of coffee planting, sugar cane, and more in the tropics.

We all know that the Spanish came to Mexico in search of gold, and brought back the silver that contributed to the wealth (and paradoxically, the downfall) of Spain. What's less well known is that the bulk of the silver mined in Peru went to China, which had a tremendous demand for coin silver. The need for this silver forced China, which had always rejected contact with the rest of the world, to trade with the Spanish and Portuguese by way of intermediaries in the Philippines- which is one reason the people of the Philippines have both Asian and European ancestry. Trade eventually migrated to the coast of China, where a people called the Hakka engaged in direct trade with foreigners. This trade also contributed to the fall of the Ming dynasty, who were conquered by Moslem invaders who became the Qing. These new rulers banned trade, and drove the coastal traders in China inland, where they settled in what became Szechuan Province. Thus did Peruvian silver lead to the creation of a new culture and cuisine in China!

There are scores of stories like this, and all are interconnected in one way or another. Potato cultivation in the Andes by ancient Peruvians leads to one variety of potato feeding the poor of Europe- and then the transfer of guano fertilizer from South America to Europe brings with it a spore that wipes out an entire continent's crop- helped, in part, when the Irish were convinced to abandon their simple method of tilling that they shared with the ancient Peruvians in favor of modern, English tillage. The discovery of the vulcanization of rubber led to the export of rubber trees throughout Asia and the enslavement of millions- and to the industrial age, rubber being a critical material needed for seals, couplings and bushings in the steam age and beyond.

I've barely touched on the material covered in 1493. This is a fascinating book, from the first page to the last, and one that will greatly broaden your understanding of not just the effects of the Columbian Exchange, but of the biological, economic, and social interconnectedness of the world.

If one voyage could actually have made THE difference in what we now call "globalization", it was indeed Columbus's 1492 journey across the Atlantic. What followed from there, as author Charles C. Mann tells us, is an explosion of everyhting that had gone on before. Mann's descriptions of what he calls the "Columbian Exchange" range from an outburst of trade, wars, sickness and prosperity to eveything inbetween.

The book begins with some pages about Columbus, himself. Most widely known as Cristobal Colon, Mann sets the stage for the rest of the book from here. He delves headlong into tobacco, a crop that became a popular import/export for one basic reason...it was addictive. He then discusses the silver mines of Bolivia and the trade for Chinese silk. What the new world had not known were the diseases that came with the Europeans. Talk about a sea change!

Crops are certainly a centerpiece for "1493" and Mann spends chapters on potatoes, rice, rubber, (latex) sugarcane and even guano....bird droppings that made the best fertilizer. Mounds of it, several stories high, are shown in accompanying photographs. It seems as if everything due to the Columbian Exchange was intertwined wonderfully...both the good and the bad parts.

Not destined to become a mere factual account of globalization, the author introduces characters along the way that helped shape defining historical moments. One such was Julio Cesar Arana, who was an overlord in the rubber empire. As is sometimes the case with wealthy robber "barons", they die penniless, as was the case with Arana.

Mann concludes the book with an extended look at slavery and this is where "1493" really catches some historic fire. I had no knowledge that the African population far exceeded that of Europeans in the Americas until the nineteenth century....or that there were autonomous black states in the Americas. One that caught my eye was Aqualtune, an area just inland from Brazil's easternmost point. When Mann proffered that Africans were not "hapless pawns" in the slave trade...that they actually controlled the supply of African slaves, themselves...well, "Roots" needs to be remade, I found myself arguing.

"1493" moves along in a somewhat chronological fashion. It does skip around a lot and some readers might not like that very much. But the essence of the book, the realization of the Columbian Exchange...is worth every page. I highly recommend it.

This is a very interesting book and a good follow up to 1491. The problem is, I purchased the Kindle version for $5.00 less than the hard copy version. This was a mistake. Pay the extra five bucks. Although I love my Kindle and have read about 40 books on it so far, because of the number of maps and illustrations central to the understanding and enjoyment of 1493, this Kindle version has been a disappointment. The maps are almost completely unreadable on the Kindle even if expanded to full screen. The photographs are unusable as well. Hopefully the new Kindle Fire will be better at displaying this type of content. As of now, don't waste your money on a Kindle version of this book.1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created