book review 1493

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By Ian Morris

• Aug. 19, 2011

“There’s a chain of events in this best of all possible worlds,” Dr. Pangloss says at the end of Voltaire’s “Candide.” “If you hadn’t been caught up in the Inquisition, or walked across America . . . you would not be here eating candied fruit and pistachio nuts.”

“True,” Candide answers. “But now we must tend our garden.”

Voltaire would have loved Charles C. Mann’s outstanding new book, “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.” In more than 500 lively pages, it not only explains the chain of events that produced those candied fruits, nuts and gardens, but also weaves their stories together into a convincing explanation of why our world is the way it is.

Going one better than Voltaire, 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. This, Mann tells us, is the hallmark of the ecological era we live in: the “Homogenocene,” the Age of Homogeneity.

“1493” picks up where 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. 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.

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” ), but Mann has long felt it needed updating. When he met Crosby, he nagged the historian to write a new edition. Finally Crosby told him: “Well, if you think it’s such a good idea, why don’t you do it?”

And so Mann did. “1493” is much more than just “Ecological Imperialism” warmed over, however. Mann takes the argument into new territory by suggesting 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.”

With admirable evenhandedness, he 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.”

Mann has managed the difficult trick of telling a complicated story in engaging and clear prose while refusing to reduce its ambiguities to slogans. He is not a professional historian, but most professionals could learn a lot from the deft way he does this. 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, but Mann wears his learning lightly. He serves up one arresting detail after another (who knew that “No Potatoes, No Popery!” was an English election slogan in 1765?), always in vivid language (as in his description of inland Brazil in the 1970s — “bad roads, poor land and lawless violence: ‘Deadwood’ with malaria”).

Most impressive of all, he manages to turn plants, germs, insects and excrement into the lead actors in his drama while still parading before us an unforgettable cast of human characters. He makes even the most unpromising-­sounding subjects fascinating. I, for one, will never look at a piece of rubber in quite the same way now that I have been introduced to the debauched nouveaux riches of 19th-­century Brazil, guzzling Champagne from bathtubs and gunning one another down in the streets of Manaus.

All historians struggle to get the balance between human will and vast impersonal forces just right. “Should part of the credit for the Emancipation Proclamation be assigned to malaria?” Mann asks, and while I’m sure he’s right to answer that “the idea is not impossible,” this claim (and one or two others) seems a stretch. But that is part of the book’s appeal. Almost everyone will find something that challenges his assumptions.

As well as making humans share the stage with other organisms, Mann also wants Europeans to surrender more of the limelight to the rest of humanity. In the 1960s, historians began to flip from casting Europeans as heroic adventurers who created the modern world to casting them as wicked exploiters. But they continued nonetheless to put Europeans in the main roles. Mann repeatedly emphasizes that the numbers do not bear this out. “Much of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world,” he observes, “was less a meeting of Europe and America than of Africans and Indians.” As late as the 19th century, Europeans were still in a distinct minority in the New World.

Mann might be faulted for sometimes seeming to forget that since 1492 it has overwhelmingly been Europeans (not Africans or Native Americans) who have put animals, plants and microbes into motion, but his larger points still stand. 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.

Mann shows that Dr. Pangloss was right: Candide’s run-ins with the Inquisition and America’s natives were not just random events. 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. If you want to understand why, read “1493.”

Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

By Charles C. Mann

Illustrated. 535 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.50.

Ian Morris is the author of “Why the West Rules — for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future.”

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UNCOVERING THE NEW WORLD COLUMBUS CREATED

by Charles C. Mann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2011

Focusing on ecology and economics, Mann provides a spellbinding account of how an unplanned collision of unfamiliar animals,...

A fascinating chronicle of the “Columbian Exchange,” which mixed old and new world elements to form today’s integrated global culture, the “homogenocene.”

People of European ancestry poured across the world after 1500, forming the majority in several continents and dominating everywhere. Historians traditionally credit Western superiority in organization and weaponry, but science journalist Mann ( 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus , 2005) argues convincingly that biology, not technology, gave them the critical advantage. Most readers will be surprised by the author’s discussion of the history of Jamestown, America’s first permanent English colony. Settled largely by incompetent adventurers eager to duplicate the jackpot of gold that Spaniards found in Mexico and Peru, they failed, dithered and starved to death by the thousands until, after 10 years, the jackpot appeared: tobacco, the first global commodity craze. Silk and porcelain crazes quickly followed. Arriving with Columbus, malaria and yellow fever debilitated white settlers throughout America, but Africans had partial resistance, a major factor in encouraging the slave trade. Historians have focused on gold, but an avalanche of South American silver poured into China as well as Europe, facilitating international trade as well as inflation, instability, war and today’s currency system. Potatoes and corn from America probably stabilized Europe by eliminating periodic famines. They did the opposite in China, encouraging a population explosion that cleared forests, leading to floods and vast environmental degradation.

Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-307-26572-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011

HISTORY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | EXPEDITIONS | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

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Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Book Review: 1493, by Charles Mann

“Columbus’s voyage did not mark the discovery of a new world, but its creation.” So claims Charles Mann in his impressive 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created . After reading the book, I can’t help but agree.

Mann builds on the work of scholars like Alfred Crosby, who posited that “[a]fter Columbus, ecosystems that had been separate for eons suddenly met and mixed in a process” he called “the Columbian Exchange.” While being “neither fully controlled nor understood by its participants,” 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.” It also moved people all around the globe.

Sound like something you’ve heard before? The core argument may not be new, but the examples Mann uses to bolster his take on it are fascinating. For instance, when revisiting the effects of European diseases on Native Americans (which he examined at length in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus ), Mann makes the case that the Columbian Exchange may have temporarily helped cause “today’s climate change in reverse.” Specifically, the Little Ice Age of 1550-1750 (or so), which brought hard winters, late springs, and bad harvests to the Northern Hemisphere, might have been a secondary consequence of the mass death of Native Americans: prior to Europeans’ arrival, Native Americans used fire to shape their surroundings, regularly burning forests on such a scale that for “weeks on end, smoke from Indian bonfires shrouded Florida, California, and the Great Plains.” But after smallpox and other plagues took their devastating toll, the fires diminished, resulting in less CO2 in the atmosphere, more trees to reduce the CO2 that remained, and a colder climate. Then there’s the role malaria (and to a lesser degree, yellow fever) likely played in the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. This other “Old World” disease was no friendlier to Native Americans, but it flourished in the warmer areas of the Americas so virulently that European colonists died there in droves. But Africans’ inherited and acquired resistance to the illness meant that “biologically speaking, they were fitter, which is another way of saying that in these places they were—loaded words!—genetically superior.” Sadly, Africans’ immunity “became a wellspring for their enslavement,” since for (unscrupulous) Europeans “the economic logic was hard to ignore. If they wanted to grow tobacco, rice, or sugar, they were better off using African slaves than European indentured servants or Indian slaves.” Not coincidentally, the “Mason-Dixon line roughly split the East Coast into two zones, one in which falciparum malaria was an endemic threat, and one in which it was not.” And that’s just for starters: 1493 goes on to delve into the Galleon Trade and chart how Spanish silver from the brutal mining town of Potosí, Bolivia knit the world together like never before, financing wars in Europe and fueling a debilitating currency crisis in China, long the world’s largest economy. Next, Mann tracks the impact of crop migrations (like the introduction of Andean potatoes into Europe), the birth of the “agro-industrial complex,” the race for Amazonian rubber, and finally the “extraordinary cultural mix that slavery inadvertently promoted.” Mann’s writing is excellent, and the book is stuffed with devastating details, such as the tidbit that, when officials at the Peruvian mine of Huancavelica dug up the graves of their conscripted Native American workers in 1605, they found that the miners’ corpses left behind puddles of inhaled mercury. But while Mann argues in his prologue that “globalization brought both enormous economic gains and ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains,” and later that “the huge benefits of moving species outweigh the huge harms,” his emphasis is decidedly on the negative aspects. In short, 1493 isn’t—and doesn’t pretend to be—a comprehensive account of the roots of the modern world. It’s just a damn good one.

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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Charles c. mann.

557 pages, Hardcover

First published August 9, 2011

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'1493' Review: Charles C. Mann changes how we see the world

• Updated: Sep. 24, 2011, 4:00 p.m.
• | Published: Sep. 24, 2011, 3:00 p.m.
• Special to The Oregonian

Charles C. Mann

$30.50, 535 pages

JOHN STRAWN

A part from its misleading subtitle, Charles C. Mann's "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created," is a book to celebrate. (Columbus' personal contribution to the creation of the New World Mann describes was roughly the same as Johannes Gutenberg's to the invention of word processing.) But Mann is using "Columbus" as a kind of synecdoche for the class of European explorers-conquerors-traders who did in fact inaugurate the process of globalization that created the world we now inhabit.

"1493" is a bracingly persuasive counternarrative to the prevailing mythology about the historical significance of the "discovery" of America. Pious European pioneers subduing the wilderness to plant a city on a hill and all that. It's a companion to Mann's 2005 study of the pre-Columbian world, "1491," which examined not merely the civilization of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans but the devastating effects of Old World diseases among the people of the New World.

Summarizing a generation's worth of scholarship on the complex effects of the mingling of the "old" and "new" worlds, "1493" carries on this line of inquiry by illuminating the political, cultural and biological ramifications of what Mann refers to as the "homogenocene" -- the resurrection of Pangaea, the supercontinent, connected this time not by the slow grinding power of geology but by the sinews of commerce.

"1493" is inspired by the work of Alfred Crosby, whose studies of the deeper biological effects of what he called the "Columbian exchange" were greeted with a yawn when he started publishing in the early 1970s, but whose brilliance and originality soon after would not only command respect among scholars but inspire a whole new field of inquiry -- the metahistory of the environment. "1493," combining original reporting and research by Mann with a survey of the scholarship Crosby's work stimulated, examines how the European encounter with the Americas, as well as its corollary, the yoking of Europe and the Americas with the continents of Asia and Africa, the latter through the cruel vector of slavery, profoundly altered the whole world.

The global economy

Many Oregonians have vacationed in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, sunbathing and swimming along the Playa la Ropa. What they may not know is that this "beach of the clothes" is named for the silk garments that washed ashore when a galleon bringing goods from Asia was wrecked by a storm. Mann visits Manila to recount the complicated history of this trade between China and the West, fueled by gold and silver from the New World (mined and transported by African slaves), transshipped through Mexico on its way to Madrid, hauled across the Pacific between Manila and Acapulco on ships manned by polyglot crews.

Food crops from the New World were especially influential in the creation of the global economy, a story never told better than in "1493." Everyone knows how important the Andean potato was to European agriculture -- and the indispensable tomato to Italian cuisine. The mid-19th century Irish famine, its effects still felt, is likewise a well-rehearsed tale whose lineaments are incomprehensible without some knowledge of the biology of the Columbian exchange. And given its grim effects -- modern Ireland's population is still smaller than its 19th-century peak -- one might assume that the Columbian exchange was deleterious. Mann persuasively argues the opposite.

"Transplanting the potato to Europe and the sweet potato to China created catastrophic social and environmental problems," Mann acknowledges. "But it also kept millions of Europeans and Chinese from malnutrition and famine. The huge benefits of moving species outweigh the huge harms."

"1493'"s focus on Africans in the New World is its greatest contribution. At the time Great Britain's American colonies declared their independence almost 300 years after Columbus' landfall, more African immigrants had arrived in the New World than Europeans. Most did not come voluntarily, of course, but once they arrived they collectively shaped (or escaped) the culture of the eclectic new societies they found themselves in.

African influence illuminated

They mingled with the native peoples, and with the Europeans -- culturally, sexually, linguistically. New World societies are so distinctive from European societies in part because of the African influence flowing through America's cultures. Americans have been reluctant to acknowledge this truth, in part because of the depth of American racism. But writers, from Mark Twain to Ralph Ellison to William Styron to James Baldwin, have understood that America became as much an African as a European place, and Mann does more to illuminate why that is so than any popular historian before him.

"1493" is rich in detail, analytically expansive and impossible to summarize. Reading Mann's accounts of Africans forging bonds with native peoples throughout the Americas, for example, I thought about the Ramapough Mountain people in New Jersey, a so-called remnant population of mixed African-Indian-European heritage whose community has been destroyed by toxic dumping from a Ford Motor Company assembly plant. Reading "1493" showed a link between Henry Ford's epic failed attempt to build an Amazonian rubber empire in the 1920s with the Ramapough's futile battle two generations latter for justice in America.

"1493" deserves a prominent place among that very rare class of books that can make a difference in how we see the world, although it is neither a polemic nor a work of advocacy. Thoughtful, learned and respectful of its subject matter, "1493" is a splendid achievement.

Reading: Mann reads from "1493" at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.

John Strawn is a Portland writer. His website is

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1493: Uncovering The New World Columbus Created

• Charles C. Mann
• Reviewed by Y.S. Fing
• August 31, 2011

In a follow-up to his earlier book, 1491, the author examines the arrival of hybrid society and the birth of globalization.

Y.S. Fing , an instructor of English at a community college in the D.C. area, is the author of such unpublished works as “Socialize Yourself: A Teacher’s and Student’s Guide to College-Level Composition” and “Event Horizons: Aphorisms on the Life of D. Selby Fing” (www.dselbyfing.com).

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Book Summary and Reviews of 1493 by Charles C. Mann

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Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

by Charles C. Mann

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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.

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"Starred Review. Focusing on ecology and economics, Mann provides a spellbinding account of how an unplanned collision of unfamiliar animals, vegetables, minerals and diseases produced unforeseen wealth, misery, social upheaval and the modern world." - Kirkus Reviews "Starred Review. Brilliantly assembling colorful details into big-picture insights, Mann's fresh, challenge to Eurocentric histories puts interdependence at the origin of modernity." - Publishers Weekly "Charles C. Mann glories in reality, immersing his reader in complexity. He launches across the Atlantic with Columbus and swings port and starboard through time and space over the whole of the world. The worn clichés crumble as readers gain introductions to the freshest of the systems of analysis gendered in the first post-Columbian millennium." - Alfred W. Crosby, author of The Columbian Exchange "In the wake of his groundbreaking book 1491 Charles Mann has once again produced a brilliant and riveting work that will forever change the way we see the world. Mann shows how the ecological collision of Europe and the Americas transformed virtually every aspect of human history. Beautifully written, and packed with startling research, 1493 is a monumental achievement." - David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z

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Charles C. Mann Author Biography

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Charles C. Mann is a correspondent for Science and The Atlantic Monthly, and has co-written several previous books including Noah's Choice: The Future of Endangered Species and The Second Creation . A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he has won awards from the American Bar Association, the Margaret Sanger Foundation, the American Institute of Physics, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, among others. In 2005 his book 1491: New Revelation of the Americas Before Columbus was released and in 2011, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created . His writing was selected for The Best American Science Writing 2003 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003. He lives with his wife and their children in Amherst, Massachusetts.

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Book Review: 1493 : Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann

Author : Charles C. Mann Title :  1493 : Uncovering the new world Columbus created Narrator : Robertson Dean Publication Info : Random House Audio (2011) Previously Read by Same Author :  1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Summary/Review :

A sequel of sorts to 1491 , this book investigates the wide-ranging impact of contact between Eurasia & Africa and the Americas and exchange of people, animals, plants, and micorganisms that followed in the wake of Christopher Columbus’ voyages.  This is called the Columbian Exchange and is the root of today’s globalism.  Mann investigates a wide variety of topics, places, and times right up to the present day that resulted from this exchange.  It’s a fascinating overview of social and economical forces at work through history. Recommended books :

The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan,  Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World by Timothy Brook , and  Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond Rating : ****

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