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The third section shows the role of the Columbian Exchange in two revolutions: the Agricultural Revolution, which began in the late seventeenth century; and the Industrial Revolution, which took off in the early and mid-nineteenth century. I concentrate on two introduced species: the potato (taken from the Andes to Europe) and the rubber tree (transplanted clandestinely from Brazil to South and Southeast Asia). Both revolutions, agricultural and industrial, supported the rise of the West—its sudden emergence as a controlling power. And both would have had radically different courses without the Columbian Exchange.

In the fourth section I pick up a theme from the first section. Here I turn to what in human terms was the most consequential exchange of all: the slave trade. Until around 1700 about 90 percent of the people who crossed the Atlantic were African captives. (Native Americans made up part of the remainder, as I explain.) In consequence of this great shift in human populations, many American landscapes were for three centuries largely dominated, in demographic terms, by Africans, Indians, and Afro-Indians. Their interactions, long hidden from Europeans, are an important part of our human heritage that is just coming to light.

The meeting of red and black, so to speak, took place against a backdrop of other meetings. So many different peoples were involved in the spasms of migration set off by Columbus that the world saw the rise of the first of the now-familiar polyglot, world-encompassing metropolises: Mexico City. Its cultural jumble extended from the top of the social ladder, where the conquistadors married into the nobility of the peoples they had conquered, to the bottom, where Spanish barbers complained bitterly about low-paid immigrant barbers from China. A planetary crossroads, this great, turbulent metropolis represents the unification of the two networks described in the first part of this book. A coda set in the present suggests that these exchanges continue unabated.

In some respects this image of the past—a cosmopolitan place, driven by ecology and economics—is startling to people who, like me, were brought up on accounts of heroic navigators, brilliant inventors, and empires acquired by dint of technological and institutional superiority. It is strange, too, to realize that globalization has been enriching the world for nigh on five centuries. And it is unsettling to think of globalization’s equally long record of ecological convulsion, and the suffering and political mayhem caused by that convulsion. But there is grandeur, too, in this view of our past; it reminds us that every place has played a part in the human story, and that all are embedded in the larger, inconceivably complex progress of life on this planet.

· · ·

As I write these words, it’s a warm August day. Yesterday my family picked the first tomatoes from our garden—the somewhat improved successor of the tomato patch I planted after my visit to the college twenty years ago.

After I planted the seeds from the catalog, it didn’t take me long to discover why so many people love puttering in their gardens. Messing around with the tomatoes felt to me like building a fort as a child: I was both creating a refuge from the world and creating a place of my own in that world. Kneeling in the dirt, I was making a small landscape, one that had the comfortable, comforting timelessness evoked by words like home.

To biologists this must seem like poppycock. At various times my tomato patch has housed basil, eggplant, bell peppers, kale, chard, several types of lettuce and lettuce-like greens, and a few marigolds, said by my neighbors to repel bugs (scientists are less certain). Not one of these species originated within a thousand miles of my garden. Nor did the corn and tobacco grown in nearby farms; corn is from Mexico, tobacco from the Amazon (this species of tobacco, anyway—there was a local species that is now gone). Equally alien, for that matter, are my neighbors’ cows, horses, and barn cats. That people