1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [3]
Whipsawed between these two opposing views, the global network has become the subject of a furious intellectual battle, complete with mutually contradictory charts, graphs, and statistics—and tear gas and flying bricks in the streets where political leaders meet behind walls of riot police to wrangle through international-trade agreements. Sometimes the moil of slogans and counter-slogans, facts and factoids, seems impenetrable, but as I learned more I came to suspect that both sides may be correct. From the outset globalization brought both enormous economic gains and ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains.
It is true that our times are different from the past. Our ancestors did not have the Internet, air travel, genetically modified crops, or computerized international stock exchanges. Still, reading the accounts of the creation of the world market one cannot help hearing echoes—some muted, some thunderously loud—of the disputes now on the television news. Events four centuries ago set a template for events we are living through today.
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What this book is not: a systematic exposition of the economic and ecological roots of what some historians call, ponderously but accurately, “the world-system.” Some parts of the earth I skip entirely; some important events I barely mention. My excuse is that the subject is too big for any single work; indeed, even a pretense at completeness would be unwieldy and unreadable. Nor do I fully treat how researchers came to form this new picture, though I describe some of the main landmarks along the intellectual way. Instead in 1493 I concentrate on areas that seem to me to be especially important, especially well documented, or—here showing my journalist’s bias—especially interesting. Readers wishing to learn more can turn to the sources in the Notes and Bibliography.
Following an introductory chapter, the book is divided into four sections. The first two lay out, so to speak, the constituent halves of the Columbian Exchange: the separate but linked exchanges across the Atlantic and Pacific. The Atlantic section begins with the exemplary case of Jamestown, the beginning of permanent English colonization in the Americas. Established as a purely economic venture, its fate was largely decided by ecological forces, notably the introduction of tobacco. Originally from the lower Amazon, this exotic species—exciting, habit-forming, vaguely louche—became the subject of the first truly global commodity craze. (Silk and porcelain, long a passion in Europe and Asia, spread to the Americas and became the next ones.) The chapter sets the groundwork for the next, which discusses the introduced species that shaped, more than any others, societies from Baltimore to Buenos Aires: the microscopic creatures that cause malaria and yellow fever. After examining their impact on matters ranging from slavery in Virginia to poverty in the Guyanas, I close with malaria’s role in the creation of the United States.
The second section shifts the focus to the Pacific, where the era of globalization began with vast shipments of silver from Spanish America to China. It opens with a chronicle of cities: Potosí in what is now Bolivia, Manila in the Philippines, Yuegang in southeast China. Once renowned, now little thought of, these cities were the fervid, essential links in an economic exchange that knit the world together. Along the way, the exchange brought sweet potatoes and corn to China, which had accidental, devastating consequences for Chinese ecosystems. As in a classic feedback loop, those ecological consequences shaped subsequent economic and political conditions. Ultimately, sweet potatoes and corn played a major part in the flowering and collapse of the last Chinese dynasty. They played a small, but similarly ambiguous role in the Communist