"1493"

In Europe + stories behind commodities:

• the eyes, from which new potatoes sprout, are descended from the leaves that grew on the stem.
• Compared to grains, tubers are inherently more productive. If the head of a wheat or rice plant grows too big, the plant will fall over, with fatal results.
• Hunger’s end helped create the political stability that allowed European nations to take advantage of American silver. The potato fueled the rise of the West.
• the agro-industrial complex rests on three pillars: improved crops, high-intensity fertilizers, and factory-made pesticides. All three are entwined with the Columbian Exchange, and with the potato.
• Andean peoples apparently neutralized them by eating dirt: clay, to be precise. In the altiplano, guanacos and vicuñas (wild relatives of the llama) lick clay before eating poisonous plants.
• To manage water and control erosion, Andean peoples built more than a million acres of agricultural terraces... (Fifteenth-century Indians used more appropriate methods than those ordered by Mao in the twentieth century, and had much better results.)
• During the night the trench water retained heat. Meanwhile, the complex up-and-down topography and temperature variation of the surface created slight air turbulence that mixed the warmer air in the furrows and the colder air around the platforms, raising the temperature around the crops by as much as 4°F, a tremendous boon in a place where summer nights approach freezing.
• The International Potato Center in Peru has sampled and preserved more than 4,900.
• The description of the wild potato as a trackless genetic swamp was, the Dutch admitted, a view that their colleagues might find difficult to accept.
• Florence, hardly a poor city, “experienced 111 years when people were hungry, and only sixteen ‘very good’ harvests between 1371 and 1791”
• (The German historian Joachim Radkau was blunter: the key environmental innovations of the eighteenth century, he wrote, were “the potato and coitus interruptus.
• Smith was correct. At the same time that the sweet potato and maize were midwifing a population boom in China, the potato was helping to lift populations in Europe—the more potatoes, the more people.
• First domesticated by the Moors in Spain, clover helped prevent Europeans from destroying their pastureland soil by overgrazing. The advances were not confined to agriculture.
• Unlike mammalian urine, bird urine is a semisolid substance. Because of this difference, birds can build up reefs of urine in a way that mammals cannot.
• To make them, the birds must be relatively large, form big flocks, and defecate where they live (gulls,
• The Inka parceled out guano claims to individual villages, levying penalties for disturbing the birds during nesting or taking guano allocated to other villages.
• The first European to observe guano carefully was the German polymath Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled through the Americas between 1799 and 1804.
• (The actual destination, the guano archipelago, was not mentioned.) The ruse was plausible: agents for U.S. firms were in Fujian at the same time, telling a similar lie as they sought indentured servants to build railroads.
• Much as oil buyers today begrudge the member nations of OPEC, Peru’s British customers ranted about the guano cartel.
• Congress passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856, authorizing its citizens to seize any guano islands they saw.
• Along the way guano was almost entirely replaced by nitrates mined from vast deposits in the Chilean desert. The nitrates in turn were replaced by artificial fertilizers,
• Typically biologists view a species’s “center of diversity”—the place where it has the widest array of forms—as its ancestral home. Mexico has hundreds of varieties of maize seen nowhere else, suggesting that the species originated there. Africans are more genetically diverse than Caucasians or Asians; Africa is the cradle of humankind.
• Because the ridges were not plowed, they had intact root systems that resisted erosion; the roots also ensured that grass returned quickly after harvest, restoring nutrients.
• The blight was simply the latest and worst pathogen to take advantage of the new scientific agriculture: one kind of potato, on a terrain shaped for technology, rather than biology.
• Strong winds blew the beetles into the sea, from which they washed ashore in a glittering, yellow-orange carpet that fouled beaches from New Jersey to New Hampshire... The late nineteenth century was, in consequence, a time of insect plagues.
• By the mid-1980s, each new pesticide in the eastern United States was good for about a season. In what critics call the “toxic treadmill,” potato farmers now treat their crops a dozen or more times a season with an ever-changing cavalcade of deadly substances.
• the first official account of Spain’s foray into the Americas, he tried to describe bouncing, a term not then in the Spanish language: “These balls jump much more than our hollow balls—by far—because even if they are only let slip from the hand to the ground, they rise much further than they started, and they make a jump, and then another and another, and many more, decreasing in height by itself, like hollow balls but more so.”
• Daniel Webster, the senator and secretary of state, liked to tell the story of how he received a rubber cloak and hat as a gift. He wore them on a cold evening. By the time he reached his destination the cloak had become so
• Eventually he, too, learned that immersing rubber in melted sulfur would transform it into something that would stay stretchy in cold weather and solid in hot weather. Later he called the process “vulcanization,” after the Roman god of fire.
• Goodyear’s exhibit was a triumph. “Napoleon III invested him with the Legion of Honor,” wrote the diplomat and historian Austin Coates, “and a Paris court sent him to prison for debt.” He received the medal in his cell.
• Meanwhile, Coates noted, “Hancock received English treatment: due respect while living, fading notice when dead, and on some suitable centenary thereafter, a postage stamp.
• The molecules of ordinary solid substances—the copper in a wire, say—are usually distributed in orderly arrays. Rubber molecules, by contrast, are higgledy-piggledy, the chains scrambled around each other in no discernible pattern. “The classic analogy is a bowl of spaghetti,.. Stretching a rubber band pulls the tangled molecules into alignment, lining them up in parallel like strands of spaghetti in a box. ... (The energy required to pull the chains straight is why rubber heats up when stretched.)
• So ubiquitous are the bonds that a rubber band—a loop of vulcanized rubber—is actually a single, enormous, cross-linked molecule.
• the Times claimed on March 20, 1910. “One ounce of rubber, washed and prepared for manufacture, is worth nearly its weight in pure silver.
• “Guests once knelt to lap champagne from the bathtub of the naked beauty Sarah Lubousk from Trieste,” Hemming wrote in his prodigious history of the region, Tree of Rivers.
• Isolated in the forest and utterly dependent on Arana, the Barbadans executed every command they were given. No one other than Arana’s agents was allowed to enter the Putumayo from outside.
• They were joined and to some extent replaced in the 1960s by guerrillas from Communist uprisings in Myanmar. Because Beijing was subsidizing these guerrillas, its simultaneous efforts to shut down the Golden Triangle drug trade were, not surprisingly, less than successful.
• Markham’s project saved thousands of lives, not least because Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia were running out of cinchona trees—they had killed them by stripping the bark.
• The huge benefits of moving species outweigh the huge harms, though the balance can be closer than free-exchange advocates tend to admit. As Dean put it, “The transfer of seeds, even across national borders, even for the sake of crass profit, even in behalf of imperialism, may be counted as a foremost means of the aggrandizement of the human species.
• Rubber executives realized to their shock that laborers scattered across a forest the size of a continent could not produce latex nearly as efficiently as workers who moved down rows of closely packed trees.
• If and when M. ulei arrives from Brazil, this will provide transportation. “In ten or twenty years, Xishuangbanna’s trees could be wiped out,” Tang said. “So would everyone else’s trees, probably.
• If this is accurate, much or most of the wheat that by the nineteenth century had transformed the Midwest into an agricultural powerhouse came from an African roadside chapel in Mexico City.