Charles Mann's '1493' maps a lively tale of globalization

Plain Dealer guest writer By Plain Dealer guest writer The Plain Dealer
Follow on Twitter
on September 26, 2011 at 10:08 AM, updated September 26, 2011 at 10:19 AM

1493.jpg1493, Knopf, 535 pp., $30.50

By Alex Nalbach

It has been said that if a butterfly beats its wings in Japan, it may trigger a hurricane across the Pacific. But when a mosquito bearing malaria was transplanted across the Atlantic, it altered the course of history.

So, at least, suggests Charles C. Mann in "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created." Like "1491," his popular survey of the pre-Columbian Americas, this work describes more than a single year. It is, in fact, an ambitious history of the early centuries of modern globalization.

Mann describes how voyages across the Atlantic and the Pacific ushered in the Homogenocene, a new epoch in which formerly isolated microbes, plants, animals and people were transplanted through trade, bio-piracy or accident. Increasingly, once-distinctive ecologies, economies and cultures began to blend.

In a process known as the Columbian Exchange, European caravels and galleons brought to the Americas unfamiliar earthworms and honeybees, livestock and mosquitoes, malarias and fevers, sugar cane and enslaved Africans.

After 1573, they also ferried to Asia "New World" silver, sweet potatoes and maize, tobacco plants and rubber trees. In the opposite direction flowed Asian silk, porcelain and labor. Off to Europe went silver, guano and potatoes (along with potato blights and beetles). "Never before," Mann notes, "had so much of the planet been bound up in a single network of exchange."

This is not only history on a planetary scale, but also a history of the planet: of soil exhaustion and erosion, invasive species and (possibly) human-induced climate change, as early as 400 years ago.



Mann brings to life brilliant, brawling boomtowns like silver-rich Potosi in Bolivia or rubber-drunk Manaus in Brazil. We tour Manila, the Philippine-Spanish-Chinese entrepot of the silver-for-silk trade. We stroll Mexico City, with its European nouveau riches, African pages, Chinese barbers and Amerindian slums. And we visit Macaco, capital of a Brazilian "kingdom" of Africans, Amerindians, heretics and Jews seeking liberty from Portuguese plantations and Inquisitions along the coast.

Mann describes what it was like to mine for mercury (deadly), to process sugar cane (difficult and deadly) and to excavate guano (disgusting, difficult and deadly). And throughout his narrative, he tells of colorful adventurers and entrepreneurs, captives and rebels, all shaping the Homogenocene.

The writer includes generous acknowledgements of the diverse scholars upon whose work he has built. And he is generally careful not to attribute all the major changes of the past half-millennium exclusively to the Columbian Exchange.

In his balanced assessment, Mann explains that the same forces that brought variety to local cuisines could undermine local biodiversity; the same factors that helped Europeans and Asians to escape the Malthusian trap of overpopulation also induced demographic collapse in the Americas.

The global capitalist system unleashed both wealth and poverty, endured both boom and bust, facilitated both opportunity and exploitation, distributed both commodities and contagions.

And, as Mann remind us, both the benefits and the costs often accrue unintentionally -- as unforeseen as a plague carried aloft on insect wings.

Alex Nalbach is an independent historian in Bay Village.