UCSD Settlement of Europeans in America Discussion INSTRACTIONS Précis submission should be at least 1/2 page, single-spaced (maximum of 1 full page). A

UCSD Settlement of Europeans in America Discussion INSTRACTIONS

Précis submission should be at least 1/2 page, single-spaced (maximum of 1 full page). A précis is a text summary that illustrates the key points of the original text of the author, its tone, and its overall effect on the reader (was it informative, useful? Did it provide a good discussion about the theme/topic?). Precis will be based on the two readings Mann, 2013 (Chapter 2 only) and Deagan, K. 1996 (I’ve attached the two readings bellow).

How you write your essay is up to you; you may structure it in any number of ways, so long as you identify key themes, synthesize ideas, and compare and contrast authors. Keep in mind that a good précis cannot be long and complicated. It must have a clear, precise structure.

The following points may help you write essays for this course.

1. Consider beginning your essay with 1 introductory paragraph that summarize the themes of the two readings (Mann, 2013 (Chapter 2 only) and Deagan, K. 1996) , identify key conflicts and disagreements, and outline the structure of your essay. It’s much easier to read than assignments that first summarize the readings and then discuss them on the last page.

2. Focus on the content and argumentation of the assigned readings rather than on your personal reactions to them. These essays are designed to help you synthesize the readings and understand the week’s topics more deeply. That said, you are welcome to add your opinions to the essay, along with the rationale that underlies your opinions.

3. Remember the rules of paragraph construction. Begin with a topical sentence that lets the reader know what the content of the paragraph will refer to. Short and snappy topical sentences catch the reader’s eye and provide a concise way of summarizing what is to come afterward.

4. When reading your sources indicate in your notes what is a direct quote from what is a paraphrase of the material. Write down the entire reference to the work you are referencing including the page number. Direct quotes must be so indicated.

5. Consider concluding your essay with a discussion of the themes in the articles, key points of tensions, ideas you have for resolution of these tensions, or new directions your own ideas are taking as a result of reading these articles.

6. Include a References Cited section. All discussions of a person’s ideas or direct quotes from their work should include an in-text reference plus the page number (e.g., Relethford 1994:254). At the end of the paper you should have a References Cited section with the full reference to the work, including the author, date, title, publisher, and publisher’s location. See bellow attached citation guide. Click here to view a larger image.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2011 by Charles C. Mann
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and
in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Lannan Foundation.
Portions of this book have appeared in different form in The Atlantic, National Geographic, Orion, and Science.
Maps created by Nick Springer and Tracy Pollock, Springer Cartographics LLC; copyright © by 2011 Charles C. Mann
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mann, Charles C.
1493 : uncovering the new world Columbus created / Charles C. Mann. —1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59672-7
1. History, Modern. 2. Economic history. 3. Commerce—History. 4. Agriculture—History. 5. Ecology—History. 6.
Industrial revolution. 7. Slave trade—History. 8. America—Discovery and exploration—Economic aspects. 9. America—
Discovery and exploration—Environmental aspects. 10. Columbus, Christopher—Influence. I. Title.
D228.M36 2011
909’.4—dc22
2011003408
Front-of-jacket image: De Español y Negra, Mulato, attributed to José de Alcibar, c. 1760. Denver Art Museum, Collection
of Frederick and Jan Mayer.
Photo © James O. Milmoe.
Jacket design by Abby Weintraub
v3.1
To the woman who built my house,
and is my home
—CCM
CONTENTS
Cover
Map
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Maps
Prologue
/ In the Homogenocene
INTRODUCTION
1. Two Monuments
PART ONE
2. The Tobacco Coast
/ Atlantic Journeys
3. Evil Air
PART TWO
/ Pacific Journeys
4. Shiploads of Money (Silk for Silver, Part One)
5. Lovesick Grass, Foreign Tubers, and Jade Rice (Silk for Silver, Part
Two)
PART THREE
/ Europe in the World
6. The Agro-Industrial Complex
7. Black Gold
PART FOUR
8. Crazy Soup
/ Africa in the World
9. Forest of Fugitives
CODA
10. In Bulalacao
/ Currents of Life
Appendixes
A. Fighting Words
B. Globalization in Beta
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Additional Images
MAPS
Map 1 The World, 1493
Map 2 Colonial Hispaniola
Map 3 China Sea, 1571
Map 4 Deforestation and Reforestation in Eastern North America, 1500–
1650
Map 5 Tsenacomoco, 1607–1670
Map 6 Malaria in Southeast England
Map 7 American Anopheles
Map 8 Recreating Pangaea, 1600
Map 9 Fujian in the Ming Era
Map 10 Viceroyalty of Peru
Map 11 China in the Qing Era
Map 12 China Floods, 1823
Map 13 Spread of Potato Blight, 1845
Map 14 Rubber World, c. 1890
Map 15 Spread of Sugar Through the Mediterranean and Beyond
Map 16 Estate of Hernán Cortés, 1547
Map 17 Portuguese Expansion into Brazil
Map 18 Maroon Landscapes
PROLOGUE
Like other books, this one began in a garden. Almost twenty years ago I
came across a newspaper notice about some local college students who
had grown a hundred different varieties of tomato. Visitors were
welcome to take a look at their work. Because I like tomatoes, I decided
to drop by with my eight-year-old son. When we arrived at the school
greenhouse I was amazed—I’d never seen tomatoes in so many different
sizes, shapes, and colors.
A student offered us samples on a plastic plate. Among them was an
alarmingly lumpy specimen, the color of an old brick, with a broad,
green-black tonsure about the stem. Occasionally I have dreams in which
I experience a sensation so intensely that I wake up. This tomato was
like that—it jolted my mouth awake. Its name, the student said, was
Black from Tula. It was an “heirloom” tomato, developed in nineteenthcentury Ukraine.
“I thought tomatoes came from Mexico,” I said, surprised. “What are
they doing breeding them in Ukraine?”
The student gave me a catalog of heirloom seeds for tomatoes, chili
peppers, and beans (common beans, not green beans). After I went
home, I flipped through the pages. All three crops originated in the
Americas. But time and again the varieties in the catalog came from
overseas: Japanese tomatoes, Italian peppers, Congolese beans. Wanting
to have more of those strange but tasty tomatoes, I went on to order
seeds, sprout them in plastic containers, and stick the seedlings in a
garden, something I’d never done before.
Not long after my trip to the greenhouse I visited the library. I
discovered that my question to the student had been off the mark. To
begin, tomatoes probably originated not in Mexico, but in the Andes
Mountains. Half a dozen wild tomato species exist in Peru and Ecuador,
all but one inedible, producing fruit the size of a thumbtack. And to
botanists the real mystery is less how tomatoes ended up in Ukraine or
Japan than how the progenitors of today’s tomato journeyed from South
America to Mexico, where native plant breeders radically transformed
the fruits, making them bigger, redder, and, most important, more
edible. Why transport useless wild tomatoes for thousands of miles? Why
had the species not been domesticated in its home range? How had
people in Mexico gone about changing the plant to their needs?
These questions touched on a long-standing interest of mine: the
original inhabitants of the Americas. As a reporter in the news division
of the journal Science, I had from time to time spoken with
archaeologists, anthropologists, and geographers about their increasing
recognition of the size and sophistication of long-ago native societies.
The botanists’ puzzled respect for Indian plant breeders fit nicely into
that picture. Eventually I learned enough from these conversations that I
wrote a book about researchers’ current views of the history of the
Americas before Columbus. The tomatoes in my garden carried a little of
that history in their DNA.
They also carried some of the history after Columbus. Beginning in the
sixteenth century, Europeans carried tomatoes around the world. After
convincing themselves that the strange fruits were not poisonous,
farmers planted them from Africa to Asia. In a small way, the plant had
a cultural impact everywhere it moved. Sometimes not so small—one
can scarcely imagine southern Italy without tomato sauce.
Still, I didn’t grasp that such biological transplants might have played a
role beyond the dinner plate until in a used-book store I came across a
paperback: Ecological Imperialism, by Alfred W. Crosby, a geographer and
historian then at the University of Texas. Wondering what the title could
refer to, I picked up the book. The first sentence seemed to jump off the
page: “European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place,
which requires explanation.”
I understood exactly what Crosby was getting at. Most Africans live in
Africa, most Asians in Asia, and most Native Americans in the Americas.
People of European descent, by contrast, are thick on the ground in
Australia, the Americas, and southern Africa. Successful transplants, they
form the majority in many of those places—an obvious fact, but one I
had never really thought about before. Now I wondered: Why is that the
case? Ecologically speaking, it is just as much a puzzle as tomatoes in
Ukraine.
Before Crosby (and some of his colleagues) looked into the matter,
historians tended to explain Europe’s spread across the globe almost
entirely in terms of European superiority, social or scientific. Crosby
proposed another explanation in Ecological Imperialism. Europe
frequently had better-trained troops and more-advanced weaponry than
its adversaries, he agreed, but in the long run its critical advantage was
biological, not technological. The ships that sailed across the Atlantic
carried not only human beings, but plants and animals—sometimes
intentionally, sometimes accidentally. After Columbus, ecosystems that
had been separate for eons suddenly met and mixed in a process Crosby
called, as he had titled his previous book, the Columbian Exchange. The
exchange took corn (maize) to Africa and sweet potatoes to East Asia,
horses and apples, to the Americas, and rhubarb and eucalyptus to
Europe—and also swapped about a host of less-familiar organisms like
insects, grasses, bacteria, and viruses. The Columbian Exchange was
neither fully controlled nor understood by its participants, but it allowed
Europeans to transform much of the Americas, Asia, and, to a lesser
extent, Africa into ecological versions of Europe, landscapes the
foreigners could use more comfortably than could their original
inhabitants. This ecological imperialism, Crosby argued, provided the
British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish with the consistent edge
needed to win their empires.
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 trade upends political, social, and environmental
arrangements in ways that are rarely anticipated and usually destructive.
The less trade, they say, the better. Protect local communities from the
forces unleashed by multinational greed!
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.
·
·
·
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, habitforming, 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 dynasty that eventually succeeded it.
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…
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