1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [2]
Crosby’s books were constitutive documents in a new discipline: environmental history. The same period witnessed the rise of another discipline, Atlantic studies, which stressed the importance of interactions among the cultures bordering that ocean. (Recently a number of Atlanticists have added movements across the Pacific to their purview; the field may have to be renamed.) Taken together, researchers in all these fields have been assembling what amounts to a new picture of the origins of our world-spanning, interconnected civilization, the way of life evoked by the term “globalization.” One way to summarize their efforts might be to say that to the history of kings and queens most of us learned as students has been added 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. How that world was created is the subject of this book.
The research has been greatly aided by recently developed scientific tools. Satellites map out environmental changes wreaked by the huge, largely hidden trade in latex, the main ingredient in natural rubber. Geneticists use DNA assays to trace the ruinous path of potato blight. Ecologists employ mathematical simulations to simulate the spread of malaria in Europe. And so on—the examples are legion. Political changes, too, have helped. To cite one of special importance to this book, it is much easier to work in China nowadays than it was in the early 1980s, when Crosby was researching Ecological Imperialism. Today, bureaucratic suspicion is minimal; the chief obstacle I faced during my visits to Beijing was the abominable traffic. Librarians and researchers there happily gave me early Chinese records—digital scans of the originals, which they let me copy onto a little memory stick that I carried in my shirt pocket.
What happened after Columbus, this new research says, was nothing less than the forming of a single new world from the collision of two old worlds—three, if one counts Africa as separate from Eurasia. Born in the sixteenth century from European desires to join the thriving Asian trade sphere, the economic system for exchange ended up transforming the globe into a single ecological system by the nineteenth century—almost instantly, in biological terms. The creation of this ecological system helped Europe seize, for several vital centuries, the political initiative, which in turn shaped the contours of today’s world-spanning economic system, in its interlaced, omnipresent, barely comprehended splendor.
Ever since violent protests at a 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle brought the idea of globalization to the world’s attention, pundits of every ideological stripe have barraged the public with articles, books, white papers, blog posts, and video documentaries attempting to explain, celebrate, or attack it. From the start the debate has focused around two poles. On one side are economists and entrepreneurs who argue passionately that free trade makes societies better off—that both sides of an uncoerced exchange gain from it. The more trade the better! they say. Anything less amounts to depriving people in one place of the fruits of human ingenuity in other places. On the other side is a din of environmental activists, cultural nationalists, labor organizers, and anti-corporate agitators who charge that unregulated