booknotice: Ch. C. Mann's 1493

I bought this book after I read an appreciation of it by John Tierney in the Food section of the NYT of August 30, 2011. He uses the book, and an interview with the author, primarily to support his own eco-scepticism stressing the fact that because of the globalization that Mann argues was initiated by Columbus, all our foods come from somewhere else and thus creates a dilemma for locavores. And where Charles Mann recognizes the often "unpredictable and destructive consequences" of the free movement of food plants, Tierney stresses Mann's conclusion in the interview that the gains have been greater than the costs. But in his book Mann writes that "the transport of useful species out of their home environment has been a boon to mankind" in spite of huge social and environmental problems and adds: "The balance between benefits and harm may be closer than free trade advocates tend to admit."(p.266) The book had also received a generally enthusiastic review in the NYT Bookreview of August 21, which I did not read until today.

Book in hand, I began to realize that I was familiar with its author, having read his 1491, which opened up the pre-Colombian world with which, as a result of teaching the Survey of World History for several years I was not unfamiliar but of which I had, it turned out, only a pretty fragmentary knowledge. That book is a real tour de force and the author's efforts at assimilating the wealth of information he unearthed, too often resorted to speculations that did not seem warranted by his facts which as a matter of course were based on random survivals of artifacts and archeology rather than on written documentary materials.

The present volume is no less of a tour de force, but even though most of his information comes from written sources, he still draws conclusions that are, admittedly, based on speculation. These conclusions are presented in the "Prologue" and repeated in the introductions of new subjects, the treatment of which is in support of the conclusion but which ends with a modifying paragraph or two.

The full title is 1493. Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. It emerges that this world is somewhat larger than "the New World" (i.e. the Americas); it includes China and the Philippines, but not the nations of the Indian Ocean or Africa (except for the slave trade and some food, and bacteria, that traveled with the slaves), omissions the author decided on for the sake of brevity "for even a pretense at completeness would be unwieldy and unreadable."(p.xvii) What is left is actually quite readable, even seductive enough to make his conclusions believable at first glance.

What are some of these conclusions? The basic one is implied in the book's title. While it can be taken as an attention grabbing literary fancy, the book's 459 pages (including the copious footnotes) make it clear that it not only announces the author's program but it is also his thesis which he appears to present as proven when he takes the reader on an imaginary plane trip across the world of 1642 (pp.25-38). More specifically, he believes that such introductions as sweet potatoes and corn led to the ultimate collapse of the last Chinese dynasty (elaborated in Ch.5) or that malaria brought over by European colonists (ch.3) played a role in the creation of the United States (p.xvii). Such claims are modified in the text where they turn out to be only contributing factors (p.105 for malaria and pp.176-7 for China). As such they add dimensions to the historical developments that are not only interesting in their novelty but useful as well. And the obvious merit of the book, regardless of its extravagant claims is the bringing together of a wealth of material, mostly from other studies that never became bestsellers, much less eBooks.

To argue that the collapse of the last Chinese dynasty was caused in part by socio-economic factors resulting from the introduction of new foods raises the question of the demise of every other dynasty, for example that established by the Mongols in the 13th Century, or the Ming during in the 17th. And while malaria caused the death of many colonists, the United States was founded by survivors - and there were many even before the use of quinine - and by those who were less exposed to the illness, i.e. the tea drinkers of New England.

Perhaps Mann's problem is that as a journalist he's too eager to tell a good story rather than take the time to reflect on such complicated issues as the causes for the English Civil War (1642-1649), which he calls the "English Religious Civil War, part of the worldwide unrest associated with the Little Ice Age."(p.93). Relying on mostly one source, he suggests that "this global thermal anomaly"(p.30) may also have been a result of Columbus' discovery as native Americans died and with them tree burning stopped and forests became choked with brush, all of which took carbon from the air which brought lower temperatures (p.31). But by associating the Civil War with the Ice Age he evokes Christopher Hill's thesis that the main cause for that war was less religious than social. In support of the brush choked forests he cites a 1634 statement by a New England colonist (p. 31) but he has another 1634 statement from Maryland to the contrary(p.49,[and that one is supported a century later by the Swedish traveller Peter Kalm for Pennsylvania]). Thus we are to believe that the cooling of the Northern Hemisphere was mostly caused by changes in New England, for in Europe too forests were not choked with brush, rather they were cut down in such an alarming rate that the English feared they would run out of timber to build their ships. And are we to believe that the sparsely populated parts of eastern North America upset the effect of the wood covered remainder of the continent?

Another sweeping statement based on the work of Wm Macneil(p.198) maintains that the spread of the potato coincided with the end of famine in Europe "and permitted European nations to assert dominance over most of the world between 1750 and 1950."
But by 1750, before the acceptance of the potato as a staple, the seaborne empires of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English were well established, though European interference in China didn't occur until around 1900, by which time the United States also played a role. All this seems possible because of Mann's deliberate omission of developments not directly related to the Colombian Exchange of foods, etc. Thus in a footnote on p.164 he says that he barely mentions the Portuguese and the Dutch because the Spanish empire is more germane and the Dutch were not independent until 1648. The not yet independent Dutch nevertheless established the Dutch East India Company in 1602, a shareholding corporation that established an empire that included at one time or another not only modern Indonesia but Shri Lanka and Taiwan as well. In 1618 they created the West Indies Company that controlled New York, and areas in the Caribbean and, for a while, even Brazil.

Sometimes Mann's reliance on others leads to confusion as in the case of possible Dutch pirates off China in 1547(p.130) which he found in a collection of documents assembled by a Chinese official in 1762. Dutch sailors in China occur in Dutch history not until the 17th century. They were sent by the Dutch East India Company and often allied with Chinese pirates in an attempt to force the Chinese government to permit regular trade. There was one Dutch sailor, in the 1590s, who worked for the Portuguese in order to discover their route to their possessions in the Indian Ocean. The Chinese confusion may result from a mixing up of dates or even from the fact that, as pointed out by Mann, their word for the Portuguese is Farangi which comes from the Arab word for Europeans [i.e. the crusading Franks]. It appears that Mann is not familiar with the relevant scholarly literature, e.g. Tonio Andrade (2000and 2004) and many of the sources cited by Andrade.

But I wonder whether a more important omission, i.e. the Arab oecumene of the Indian Ocean which established Islam on the S.E. Indian continent as well as in modern Indonesia long before 1492, doesn't skewer Mann's perspective. After all, vide Marco Polo, Europe already knew about China and, to single out one of Mann's most desired commodities, Europeans had even created a silk industry based on silk worms brought via the ancient overland "silk road" from China to the Near East. It was to a large extent the Venetian monopoly of the Arab-oriental exchange with Europe that made others look for ways to get around [circumnavigate?] the Venetians. I would even raise the question whether modern globalization would not have resulted from European access to the East and the eventual discovery of the Americas from the Pacific as Europeans searched for the allegedly shorter way back to Europe, a sort of Columbian voyage in reverse possibly following the reports of the Chinese sailors sent out by emperor Zhu Di in the early 1400s (see Gavin Menzies' 1421).