{"id":682,"date":"2011-10-05T15:06:16","date_gmt":"2011-10-05T20:06:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnstrawn.com\/?p=682"},"modified":"2011-10-05T15:06:16","modified_gmt":"2011-10-05T20:06:16","slug":"charles-manns-1493-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/reviews\/682\/charles-manns-1493-a-review","title":{"rendered":"Charles Mann’s “1493”: A Review ."},"content":{"rendered":"

Charles C. Mann, 1493.\u00a0 Uncovering the New World Columbus\u00a0 Created<\/em>.\u00a0 Alfred A. Knopf, 9 August 2011.\u00a0 $30.50, 544 pages.<\/p>\n

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Charles Mann's "1493" Illuminates the Origins of the Global Economy<\/p><\/div>\n

Apart from its misleading subtitle, Charles Mann\u2019s\u00a0\u00a01493.\u00a0 Uncovering the New World Columbus Created<\/em>, is a book to celebrate.\u00a0 (Columbus\u2019 personal contribution to the creation of the new world Mann describes was roughly the same as Johannes Gutenberg\u2019s to the invention of word processing.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But Mann is using \u201cColumbus\u201d as a kind of synecdoche for the class of European explorers-conquerors-traders who did in fact inaugurate the process of globalization which created the world we now inhabit.<\/p>\n

1493<\/em> is a bracingly persuasive counter-narrative to the prevailing mythology about the historical significance of the \u201cdiscovery\u201d of America.\u00a0 Pious European pioneers subduing the wilderness to plant a city on a hill and all that. \u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s a companion to Mann\u2019s 2005 study of the pre-Columbian world,1491<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Summarizing a generation\u2019s worth of scholarship on the complex effects of the mingling of the \u201cold\u201d and \u201cnew\u201d worlds,\u00a01493<\/em> carries on this line of enquiry by illuminating the political, cultural and biological ramifications of what Mann refers to as the \u201chomogenocene\u201d\u2014the resurrection of Pangaea, the supercontinent, connected this time not by the slow grinding power of geology but by the sinews of commerce.<\/p>\n

1493<\/em> is inspired by the work of Alfred Crosby, whose studies of the deeper biological effects of what he called the \u201cColumbian exchange\u201d 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 enquiry\u2014the meta-history of the environment.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a01493<\/em>, combining original reporting and research by Mann with a survey of the scholarship Crosby\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Many Oregonians have vacationed in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, sunbathing and swimming along the Playa la Ropa.\u00a0\u00a0 What they may not know is that this \u201cbeach of the clothes\u201d is named for the silk garments which washed ashore when a galleon bringing goods from Asia was wrecked by a storm.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Food crops from the new world were especially influential in the creation of the global economy, a story never told better than in\u00a01493<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Everyone knows how important the Andean potato was to European agriculture\u2014and the indispensible tomato to Italian cuisine.\u00a0\u00a0 The mid-19th<\/sup> 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.\u00a0\u00a0 And given its grim effects\u2014modern Ireland\u2019s population is still smaller than its 19th<\/sup> century peak\u2014one might assume that the Columbian exchange was deleterious.\u00a0\u00a0 Mann persuasively argues the opposite.<\/p>\n

\u201cTransplanting the potato to Europe and the sweet potato to China created catastrophic social and environmental problems,\u201d Mann acknowledges.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cBut it also kept millions of Europeans and Chinese from malnutrition and famine.\u00a0 The huge benefits of moving species outweigh the huge harms.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even in the shadow of the most glamorous shops in Beijing, vendors grilling sweet potatoes add spice to street life, especially on cold winter days.<\/p>\n

Astonishing facts accumulate throughout 1493<\/em>. \u00a0Japanese samurai guarded silver shipments between Acapulco and Veracruz in the 17th<\/sup>century. \u00a0The samurai were exempted from the racial laws prohibiting non-Spaniards from carrying weapons so they could \u201cwield their\u00a0katanas<\/em> andtantos<\/em>,\u201d as Mann writes, to fend off bandits.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 By the mid-18th<\/sup> century, the militias guarding Mexico\u2019s Pacific coast against British raiders were \u201ca force of\u00a0morenos<\/em>,\u00a0pardos<\/em>\u2026\u201d\u2014that is mixed-race Afro-Indians and Afro-Europeans, categorized by the colonizers in a hapless attempt to name every possible combination of genetic admixture over multiple generations\u2014\u201c\u2026Spaniards and\u00a0chinos,<\/em> <\/em>the latter mostly Filipinos and Fujianese.\u201d<\/p>\n

1493\u2019s focus on Africans in the new world is its greatest contribution.\u00a0\u00a0 At the time Great Britain\u2019s American colonies declared their independence almost three hundred years after Columbus\u2019 landfall, more African immigrants had arrived in the new world than Europeans.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

They mingled with the native peoples, and with the Europeans\u2014culturally, sexually, linguistically.\u00a0 New world societies are so distinctive from European societies in part because of the African influence flowing through America\u2019s cultures.\u00a0 Americans have been reluctant to acknowledge this truth, in part because of the depth of American racism.\u00a0\u00a0 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 that any popular historian before him has ever managed.<\/p>\n

1493<\/em> is rich in detail, analytically expansive and impossible to summarize. \u00a0Reading Mann\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0 (HBO aired a documentary about this history called \u201cMann v Ford,\u201d although the plaintiff was not connected to Charles Mann.)\u00a0 \u00a0Reading\u00a01493<\/em> showed a link between Henry Ford\u2019s epic failed attempt to build an Amazonian rubber empire in the 1920s with the Ramapough\u2019s futile battle two generations latter for justice in America.<\/p>\n

1493 deserves a prominent place among that very rare class of books which can make a difference in how we see the world, although it is neither a polemic nor a work of advocacy.\u00a0\u00a0 Thoughtful, learned, and respectful of its subject matter, 1493 is a splendid achievement.<\/p>\n

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Charles C. Mann, 1493.\u00a0 Uncovering the New World Columbus\u00a0 Created.\u00a0 Alfred A. Knopf, 9 August 2011.\u00a0 $30.50, 544 pages. Apart… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":684,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,152,176],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","category-travel-notes","category-business-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2011\/09\/10074389-large1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":708,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions\/708"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}