1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Colón and his crew did not voyage alone. They were accompanied by a menagerie of insects, plants, mammals, and microorganisms.”

One of the major themes of this work reveals the interconnectedness of trade with several other historical outcomes. The voyagers changed the landscapes of the places they visited forever because of what they brought with them and the practices they established. In particular, the diseases they carried with them eradicated a great number of Indigenous peoples.

“The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colón’s voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene.”

Mann calls this “a thesis of this book” (p. 23). He claims that the arrival of Columbus in the Americas and the subsequent trade and travel changed the evolution of the entire planet, ushering in a new evolutionary era.

“John Rolfe was responsible for the worms, Earthworms, to be precise—the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in the Americas before 1492.”

One of the major themes of this work centers on the Homogenocene. Chapter 2 is full of examples of the ways in which colonists changed the landscape and natural world of the Americas to resemble European ecology more closely. Worms provide one example of species that colonists introduced to the Americas.

“Why didn’t the company’s backers pull the plug? Why did they keep sending ship after doomed ship? Equally puzzling, why did Powhatan allow the colony to survive? Jamestown escaped his first assault but remained at the edge of a precipice for years. Why didn’t Powhatan push it over, once and for all? Part of the answer to both questions is the Columbian Exchange.”

Mann suggests that the Columbian Exchange is responsible for ushering in the Homogenocene and altering the landscape of the Americas forever. Because the Columbian Exchange established a desire in Europe for Virginia tobacco that was so profitable, Mann asserts that there was no way that Europe was going to simply forget about the venture. In turn, Indigenous peoples began to grow dependent upon the goods and supplies they received in trade from the colonists. Their natural landscape was changed forever because of the farming practices of the colonists. The Columbian Exchange had made it impossible for a return to pre-Jamestown life.

“Neither indigenous nor newcomers understood the environmental impact of planting it on a massive scale. Tobacco is a sponge for nitrogen and potassium. Because the entire plant is removed from the soil, harvesting and exporting tobacco was like taking those nutrients from the earth and putting them on ships.”

Tobacco changed the culture of Europe and provided a profitable craze that the Virginia Company and other joint-stock companies could invest in. Colonists and Indigenous peoples did not understand the ecological ramifications of this crop and how it would alter the landscape of the Americas, leading to the Homogenocene.

“Even today, the places where European colonists couldn’t survive are much poorer than places that Europeans found more healthful. The reason, the researchers said, is that the conquering newcomers established different institutions in disease zones than they did in healthier areas.”

Mann’s thesis centers on the idea that the Columbian Exchange had widespread ramifications for the globe, both in the past and in the present. Here, he asserts that the impact of malaria brought by European colonists continues to affect the social economic status of particular areas.

“Tobacco brought malaria to Virginia, indirectly but ineluctably, and from there it went north, south, and west, until much of North America was in its grip. Sugarcane, another overseas import, similarly brought the disease into the Caribbean and Latin America, along with its companion, yellow fever. Because both diseases killed European workers in American tobacco and sugar plantations, colonists imported labor in the form of captive Africans—the human wing of the Columbian exchange.”

The introduction of malaria in the Americas was a byproduct of European colonization in the pursuit of financial gain. Mann establishes a line of causes and effects: because colonists pursued tobacco and sugarcane, they brought their diseases with them. Those diseases found favorable conditions in the Americas and spread rapidly. The immunity of captive Africans made slavery more enticing to the English.

“It would be an exaggeration to say that malaria and yellow fever were responsible for the slave trade, just as it would be an exaggeration to say that they explain why much of Latin America is still poor, or why the antebellum cotton plantations in Gone with the Wind sat atop great, sweeping lawns, or why Scotland joined England to form the United Kingdom, or why the weak, divided thirteen colonies won independence from mighty Great Britain in the Revolutionary War. But it would not be completely wrong, either.”

The Homogenocene, as Mann describes, reveals the interconnectedness of the world because of the Columbian Exchange. This quotation further shows how each action affects countless other events, even those major events that altered the course of history forever. A microscopic parasite such as Plasmodium which causes vivax malaria can have global ramifications, political and otherwise.

“Malaria did not cause slavery. Rather, it strengthened the economic case for it, counterbalancing the impediments identified by Adam Smith.”

In Chapter 3, Mann outlines an argument that malaria was a strong contributing factor for American slavery. It also emphasizes the theme “Money Changes Everything.” The pursuit of financial profits through the production of tobacco and sugarcane led toward a path of slavery as colonists found that African enslaved peoples did not succumb to the same diseases European indentured servants were vulnerable to.

“American silver was not the sole cause of the upheaval; still, threads of silver link the revolts against Spain in the Netherlands and Portugal, the ruinous Fronde civil war in France, and even the Thirty Years’ War.”

Mann’s work attempts to show the connected threads between global trade and its many political and ecological outcomes. Chapter 4 explores the silver trade between Spain and China, and Mann asserts that effects of the silver trade webbed out to these other historical events.

“Rebellions flowered in the Parian, followed by expulsions and massacres. The cycle repeated itself in 1639, 1662, 1686, 1709, 1755, 1763, and 1820, each time with an awful death toll. To modern eyes, the scenario is hard to credit: why would the Chinese keep returning?”

The question posed here in Chapter 4 closely resembles a similar question about the Columbian Exchange in Chapter 2. Mann suggests that the answer lies in the political gain for both sides of the Parián trading port. The theme “Money Changes Everything” explores how the pursuit of wealth alters the moral compass, allowing for crime and violence. Despite the violence occurring in this Philippian hub, Spain and China continued to pursue what they believed to be a mutually advantageous venture.

“The Englishman’s theory made a simple prediction: more food would lead to more mouths would lead to more misery.”

Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, five years after Hong Liangji made a similar claim, claimed that the more food supply increases, the more population would increase and, therefore, lead to inhumane living conditions. Malthus is still remembered for this theory, while Hong has gone largely unnoticed.

“In an environmentalists’ nightmare, the shortsighted pursuit of small-scale profit steered a course for long-range, large-scale disaster. Constant floods led to constant famine and constant unrest; repairing the damage sapped the resources of the state. American silver may have pushed the Ming over the edge; American crops certainly helped kick out the underpinnings of the tottering Qing dynasty.”

Hong suggested that an increase in food supply would always result in an increase in population, subsequently causing environmental and humanitarian disaster. The use of American crops to meet growing population played out exactly Hong’s theory, establishing a grim prediction for the global future.

“Celebrated by agronomists for its bounteous harvests and denounced by environmentalists for its toxicity, the agro-industrial complex rests on three pillars: improved crops, high-intensity fertilizers, and factor-made pesticides. All three are entwined with the Columbian Exchange, and with the potato.”

European farming practices became the global norm because of the Columbian Exchange, further solidifying the Homogenocene. The potato contributed to this ecological era by ushering with it fertilizers and pesticides, products modern agriculture continues to rely upon.

“From today’s perspective, the outrage—threats of legal action, whispers of war, editorials about the Guano Question—is hard to understand. But agriculture was then ‘the central economic activity of every nation,’ as the environmental historian Shawn William Miller has pointed out. ‘A nation’s fertility, which was set by the soil’s natural bounds, inevitably shaped national economic success.’”

Mann suggests that to understand the political and cultural connections to the Columbian Exchange, one must look to agriculture. Countries’ successes were dependent upon their ability to develop a system of agriculture that could support its population and maintain its continued growth.

“The Great Hunger was the first truly contemporary agricultural disaster. Without the improvements wrought by modern science and technology, the blight would have had far less impact.”

Mann explores the famine in Ireland brought on by its dependence upon potatoes and its downfall by the blight and beetles that were carried with it across the sea. Because of modern agriculture practices that swept the globe because of the Homogenocene and Columbian Exchange, crops were more vulnerable to insects and disease.

“Someday, though, there will be a problem. The cycle of the Columbian Exchange will be complete, taking away what it once gave. Trees will die fast. The epidemic will cover an area large enough to be visible from space: black-leaved splotches scattered from the tip of China to the end of Indonesia. There will be a major international mobilization of resources to fight the outbreak. And planters will suddenly be aware that they are living in the Homogenocene, an era in which Asia and the Americas are increasingly alike.”

Mann argues that modern agriculture and the Homogenocene era exposes plants upon which humans are most reliable to disease and ecological devastation. Rubber trees, he claims, will someday succumb to the ecological ramifications of the Columbian Exchange.

“But to biologists Homo sapiens is a species that like any other has its own distribution and range. Not only did human beings cause the Columbian Exchange, they were buffeted by its currents—a convulsion within our own species that is the subject of this section of the book.”

At the beginning of this chapter, Mann breaks from his usual style and outlines his thesis up until this point in the book and directs the reader toward the focus of this final section. In this final section, Mann attempts to show how humans were moved around the world because of the Columbian Exchange, influenced by it rather than the conductors of it.

“Textbooks commonly present American history in terms of Europeans moving into a lightly settled hemisphere. In fact, the hemisphere was full of Indians—tens of millions of them. And most of the movement into the Americas was by Africans, who soon became the majority population in almost every place that wasn’t controlled by Indians.”

Mann challenges the idea that European colonists discovered and settled the Americas. Rather, the Americas were already populated by sophisticated societies of Indigenous peoples. Additionally, Mann suggests that the trajectory, culture, and future of the Americas were highly influenced by Africans.

“In 1493, Pope Alexander VI resolved this dilemma of conscience. He awarded the sovereigns ‘full, free and complete power, authority, and jurisdiction’ over the Taino of Hispaniola if they sent ‘prudent and God-fearing men, learned, skilled, and proven, to instruct [them] in the Catholic faith.’ Conquest was acceptable if done for the purpose of bringing the conquered to salvation.”

Chapter 8 reveals the dichotomy between Spain’s need for labor and its desire to appear morally upright. Religion became a tool for accomplishing financial gains through the justification of forced labor framed within the context of missionary service.

“American history is often described in terms of Europeans entering a nearly empty wilderness. For centuries, though, most of the newcomers were African and the land was not empty, but filled with millions of indigenous people. Much of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world thus was less a meeting of Europe and America than a meeting of Africans and Indians—a relationship forged both in the cage of slavery and in the uprisings against it.”

Chapter 9 centers on maroon communities which consisted of Africans, Indigenous peoples, and other European outcasts. This quote explains how preconceived ideas about the settling of Americas is often presented through a Eurocentric lens, ignoring the reality of the development of American cultures.

“One of the most persistent myths about the slave trade is also one of the most pernicious: that Africans’ role was wholly that of hapless pawns. Except for the trade’s last few decades—and arguably not even then—Africans themselves controlled the supply of African slaves, selling them to Europeans in the numbers they chose at prices they negotiated as equals.”

Mann warns against looking at the history described in the book through a lens of presentism. Rather, he suggests that slavery was a normal and accepted part of life, and that Africans played a large role in the perpetuation of the Atlantic slave trade.

“But to the scientists in the room almost all the exotics were problematic, because they were helping, in ways large and small, to turn the Philippines from what it had been before Spain into something else—a homogenized, internationalized, airport-shopping-mall version of itself, a vest-pocket version of the Homogenocene.”

In the final chapter, Mann comes to terms with his own contribution to the Columbian Exchange and the Homogenocene. While discussing the various garden varieties planted in Philippine gardens, Mann recognizes that his own garden plants come from all over the world; none can be indigenously found within hundreds of miles. This quotation gets at the heart of the ethical problem of the Homogenocene—that it strips the ecologically diverse places in the world of their identity and diversity.