"1493"

[fiefoe]

Charles C. Mann aims to promote 'a recognition of the remarkable role of exchange, both ecological and economic. Another way might be to say that there is a growing recognition that Columbus’s voyage did not mark the discovery of a New World, but its creation.' The new world is quite alarming.

In the Americas:

• (Alien grasses could withstand grazing better than Caribbean groundcover plants because grasses grow from the base of the leaf, unlike most other species, which grow from the tip. Grazing consumes the growth zones of the latter but has little impact on those in the former.)
• The hordes of ants swarmed through houses, blackening roofs “as if they had been sprayed with charcoal dust,” covering floors in such numbers that colonists could sleep only by placing the legs of their beds in bowls of water.
• The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and bacterial meningitis—by a quirk of evolutionary history, all were unknown in the Western Hemisphere.
• Scholars had known for more than fifteen hundred years that the world was large and round. Colón disputed both facts... The earth, he argued, was not perfectly round but “in the shape of a pear, which would all be very round, except for where the stem is, where it is higher, or as if someone had a very round ball, and in one part of it a woman’s nipple would be put there.
• local officials told me that (Philippine) archaeology students have found Chinese porcelain there that dates to the eleventh century.
• Badly wanted, in fact—Spanish silver literally became China’s money supply.
• Sweet potatoes and maize could be grown in the dry uplands. Farmers moved in numbers to these areas, which had previously been lightly settled. The result was a wave of deforestation, followed by waves of erosion and floods, which caused many deaths.
• The struggle over Dutch independence lasted eight decades and spilled into realms as far away as Brazil, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines.
• Along the way, England was drawn in; raising the ante, Spain initiated a vast seaborne invasion of that nation: the Spanish Armada.
• Nonetheless the court continued to view its economic policy in the optative mood;
• marks of the Columbian Exchange: plots of American maize in Italy, carpets of American beans in Spain, fields crowded with the shining, upturned visages of American sunflowers in France. Big tobacco leaves soak up sunlight on Dutch farms;
• For almost a century Europe has experienced frighteningly snowy winters, late springs, and cold summers. Frigid Mays and Junes delay French wine harvests until November; people walk a hundred miles across the frozen sea from Denmark to Sweden; Greenland hunters moor their kayaks on the Scottish shore...Fearing that growing Alpine glaciers will overrun their homes, Swiss villagers induce their bishop to exorcise a threatening ice front
• killing huge numbers of people—and unraveling the millennia-old network of human intervention. Flames subside to embers across the Western Hemisphere as Indian torches are stilled. In the forests, fire-hating trees like oak and hickory muscle aside fire-loving species like loblolly, longleaf, and slash pine, which are so dependent on regular burning that their cones will only open and release seed when exposed to flame.
• In the form of lethal bacteria and viruses, in other words, the Columbian Exchange (to quote Dull’s team) “significantly influenced Earth’s carbon budget.” It was today’s climate change in reverse, with human action removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere rather than adding them—a stunning meteorological overture to the Homogenocene.
• All over the North American West and Southwest, native farmers are abandoning their fields and leaping onto the backs of animals from Spain. Long-sedentary societies are becoming wanderers; the “ancient tradition” of the nomadic Plains Indian is coming into existence, a rapid adaptation to the Columbian Exchange.
• When Colón founded La Isabela, the world’s most populous cities clustered in a band in the tropics, all but one within thirty degrees of the equator. At the top of the list was Beijing, cynosure of humankind’s wealthiest society. Next was Vijayanagar, capital of a Hindu empire... It is as if the globe has been turned upside down and all the wealth and power are flowing from south to north. The once-lordly metropolises of the tropics are falling into ruin... In the coming centuries, the greatest urban centers will all be in the temperate north: London and Manchester in Britain; New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia in the United States. By 1900 every city in the top bracket will be in Europe or the United States, save one: Tokyo
• Because China did not make enough beeswax for its needs, many Chinese made candles from a substitute: the lower-quality wax produced by a scale insect.
• Most big animals are tamable, in the sense that they can be trained to lose their fear of people, but only a few species are readily domesticable—that is, willing to breed easily in captivity, thereby letting humans select for useful characteristics. In all of history, humankind has been able to domesticate only twenty-five mammals, a dozen or so birds, and, possibly, a lizard.
• the Powhatan planted many crops at once, as shown in this replica Wendat (Huron) garden in the Crawford Lake Conservation Area in Ontario, Canada. These farms and gardens were so different from anything the English knew that the newcomers often couldn’t recognize native fields...  The lack of physical property demarcation signified to the English that Indians didn’t truly occupy the land.
• a seemingly endless patchwork of bogs, marshes, grassy ponds, seasonally flooded meadows, and slow-moving streams. It seemed to be wet everywhere, no matter what the season. Credit for the watery environment belongs to the American beaver (Castor canadensis), which had no real English equivalent.
• Like the fields, the forest was shaped by native fire. Every fall Indians burned the underbrush... rather than paving roads, Indians used fire to make what the ecological historian Stephen J. Pyne has called “corridors of travel.
• Hakluyt pointed out that Spain, formerly a “poore and barren nation,” was now so rich that, incredibly, its seamen had almost stopped being thieves.
• England shipped about seven thousand people to Virginia between 1607 and 1624. Eight out of ten died.
• “Tobacco has an almost unique ability to suck the life out of soil,”
• Taking down the forest exposed the soil. Colonists’ ploughs increased its vulnerability. Nutrients dissolved in spring rains and washed into the sea. The exposed soil dried out more quickly and hardened faster, losing its ability to absorb spring rains; the volume and speed of runoff increased, raising river volume. By the late seventeenth century disastrous floods were common.
• So critical to European success was the honeybee that Indians came to view it as a harbinger of invasion; the first sight of a bee in a new territory, the French-American writer Jean de Crèvecoeur noted in 1782, “spreads sadness and consternation in all minds.
• tobacco was an instant hit around the globe—the first time people in every continent simultaneously became enraptured by a novelty. N.tabacum was the leading edge of the Columbian Exchange.
• In a debt-for-equity swap hatched by the brilliant economist John Law, the court’s lenders were allowed to trade government bonds that Paris couldn’t pay off for shares in the profits from the new colony, which was envisioned as a huge tobacco farm powered by slaves:
• 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. Unable to create stable, populous colonies in malarial areas, Europeans founded what Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson called “extractive states"
• As the days get colder, the parasite needs more and more time to develop, until it takes longer than the mosquito’s lifespan.
• From the American point of view, falciparum came from Africa, and was spread by Africans, whereas vivax came from Europe, and was spread by Europeans—a difference with historic consequences.
• A. maculipennis—and the Plasmodium vivax it carries—seem to have been uncommon in England until the late sixteenth century, when Queen Elizabeth I began encouraging landlords to drain fens, marshes, and moors to create farmland. Much of this low, foggy terrain had been flooded regularly by the North Sea tides, which washed away mosquito larvae.
• Curates died in such numbers after being sent to coastal Essex, the writer John Aubrey remarked, that the area was known as “
• More baffling still is the form that bondage took in the Americas: chattel slavery, a regime much harsher than anything seen before in Europe or Africa.
• England. This was less a tribute to the nation’s moral advancement than an enraged response to the constant targeting of her ships by Barbary pirates, who from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century enslaved tens of thousands of English sailors, soldiers, and merchants. Based in northwest Africa, these Muslim corsairs
• Not for another century did other economists fully draw out the implications of Smith’s idea. If employers constantly lost workers to the lure of cheap land, then they would want to restrict their freedom of movement. Bondage was the inevitable end result.
• “Even some committed Scottish patriots such as Paterson endorsed the Union Act of 1707,” the historian J. R. McNeill wrote in Mosquito Empires, a pioneering history of Caribbean epidemiology, ecology, and war. “Thus Great Britain was born, with assistance from the fevers of Panama.
• Data on Indian shipments are scarce, because colonists, wanting to avoid taxes and regulations, shipped them on small vessels and kept few records.
• Roughly speaking, the boundary between these two types of society was Chesapeake Bay, not far from what would become the boundary between slave and non-slave states in the United States. Did the proximity of Indian societies with slaves to sell help grease the skids for what would become African slavery in the South?
• West Africans saw them converted through greed and callousness into social deficits. Their immunity became a wellspring for their enslavement.
• From this perspective, the movie’s Tara seems an ideal residence for malaria country: atop a hill, surrounded by wide, smooth, manicured lawns, its tall windows open to the wind. Every element is as if designed to avoid Anopheles quadrimaculatus, which thrives in low, irregular, partly shaded ground and still air.
• Malarial places, the Rutmans said, drift easily toward “exaggerated economic polarization.” Plasmodium not only prodded farmers toward slavery, it rewarded big plantations, which further lifted the demand for slaves.
• Plantations burn the crop before harvest to prevent the knifelike leaves from slashing workers. Swinging machetes into the hard, soot-smeared cane under the tropical sun, field hands quickly splattered themselves head to foot with a sticky mixture of dust, ash, and cane juice.
• The epidemic didn’t kill off the sugar industry—it was too lucrative. Incredibly, Barbados, an island of 166 square miles, was then on its way to making more money than all of the rest of English America.
• rainfall, no longer absorbed by vegetation, washed soil down the slopes, forming coastal marshes. In the not-too-distant future workers would be ordered to carry the soil in baskets back up the hills—“a true labor of Sisyphus,
• History suggests, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson wrote, that industrialization cannot occur without “both investments from a large number of people who were not previously part of the ruling elite and the emergence of new entrepreneurs.
• Between the summer of 1863 and the summer of 1864, the official annual infection rate for intermittent fevers was 233 percent—the average soldier was felled two times or more.
• Disease killed twice as many Union troops as Confederate bullets or shells... The longer the war ground on, the more willing grew Washington to consider radical measures. Should part of the credit for the Emancipation Proclamation be assigned to malaria? The idea is not impossible.
• the improved drainage methods of the Victorian era dramatically cut malaria, because they didn’t leave the brackish pools