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July 20 - October 24, 2018
Guano miners swung their picks up to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, to fulfill their assigned daily quotas
Much as oil buyers today begrudge the member nations of OPEC, Peru’s British customers ranted about the guano cartel.
Under the aegis of the Guano Islands Act, merchants claimed title to ninety-four islands, cays, coral heads, and atolls between 1856 and 1903. The Department of State officially recognized sixty-six as U.S. possessions. Most proved to have little guano and were quickly abandoned. Nine remain under U.S. control today.
No matter what their composition, though, fertilizers remain just as critical to agriculture, and through agriculture to contemporary life. In a fascinating 2001 study of the impact of factory-made nitrogen, Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba geographer, estimated that two out of every five people on earth would not be alive without it.
August 23, 2018 mjp
Proof will never be found, but it is widely believed that the guano ships carried a microscopic hitchhiker: Phytophthora infestans. P. infestans causes late blight, a plant disease that exploded through Europe’s potato fields in the 1840s, killing as many as two million people, half of them in Ireland, in what came to be known as the Great Hunger.
Typically biologists view a species’s “center of diversity”—the place where it has the widest array of forms—as its ancestral home.
Blight was first reported in Ireland on September 13, 1845.
Failure to accomplish the unprecedented, however dire the consequences, is not a moral lapse—or so the argument goes.
Today Ireland has the melancholy distinction of being the only nation in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people within the same boundaries than it did more than 150 years ago.
cross-country “professional tour” between Dublin on the east coast and Galway on the west,
The blight was simply the latest and worst pathogen to take advantage of the new scientific agriculture: one kind of potato, on a terrain shaped for technology, rather than biology.
The Great Hunger was the first truly contemporary agricultural disaster.
Afterward, Americans lionized Goodyear as a visionary. Books extolled him to children as an exemplar of the can-do spirit; a major tire company named itself after him.
Hermann Staudinger, then at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. A well-known researcher, he had already derived the chemical formulae for the basic flavors in coffee and pepper. (It is not unfair to charge Staudinger with inflicting instant coffee on the world.)
“Three fundamental materials were required for the Industrial Revolution,” Hecht, the UCLA geographer, told me. “Steel, fossil fuels, and rubber.”
London sent an investigatory team that included Roger Casement, an Irish-born British diplomat who was a pioneering human-rights activist—he had exposed atrocities committed in the Congo by agents of Belgian king Leopold II.
Today Wickham is reviled in Brazil. Tourist guides refer to him as the “prince of thieves,” a pioneer of what has come to be called “bio-piracy”; the leading economic history of Amazonia denounces his actions as “hardly defensible in the light of international law.”
More important, the transport of useful species out of their home environments has been a boon to humankind.
(The coffee plague is sometimes claimed to be why the British hot beverage of choice is tea, rather than coffee.)
Laos; with about six million people in an area the size of the United Kingdom, it is the emptiest country in Asia.
To my eye the contract looked like the kind of document that emerges when one party has a lawyer looking after its interests and the other party doesn’t know what a lawyer is.
estimates that between 1500 and 1840, the heyday of the slave trade, 11.7 million captive Africans left for the Americas—a massive transfer of human flesh unlike anything before it. In that period, perhaps 3.4 million Europeans emigrated. Roughly speaking, for every European who came to the Americas, three Africans made the trip.
Noey in hospital. 9/11/18 mjp
“America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the nineteenth century.”
Sugarcane was initially domesticated in New Guinea about ten thousand years ago. As much as half of the plant by weight consists of sucrose, a white, powdery substance known to ordinary people as “table sugar” and to scientists as C12H22O11.
Conquest was acceptable if done for the purpose of bringing the conquered to salvation.
Noey RIP 9/16/2018
mjp
Leading the expedition was Marcos de Niza, a Franciscan missionary who has never been charged with insufficient zeal.
He forgot that under bridges is only air.
Noey's funeral is in three days. 9/19/18 mjp
Tenochtitlan fell on August 13, 1521, in a welter of massacre and chaos.
Scuffling in the streets, struggling to pull strings in the government, uneasily cooperating in the military, Mexico City’s multitude of poorly defined ethnic groups from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas made it the world’s first truly global city—the Homogenocene for Homo sapiens.
In English they are usually called “maroon” communities—the term apparently comes, poignantly, from símaran, the Taino word for the flight of an arrow.
Dinner at Livia in Geneva, IL. Mjp 9/2/18
American history is often described in terms of Europeans entering a nearly empty wilderness. For centuries, though, most of the newcomers were African and the land was not empty, but filled with millions of indigenous people.
Slavery was part of the furniture of everyday life; in both Europe and Africa, depriving others of their liberty wasn’t morally problematic, though it was bad to enslave the wrong person.
Napoleon sent his army to seize Egypt. An African Napoleon would have sent his army to seize Egyptians.
Still, one suspects the Africans wrested from their homes in military raids would not have celebrated the humanity of the system.
In the past, most African slaveholders had known something about their slaves’ previous lives. Sometimes they were related to their bondsmen, distant cousins or in-laws; other times they understood exactly what familial, lineage, or tribal obligation had resulted in their enslavement. Even prisoners of war had been obtained in a known location, in a known conflict. Chattel slavery on colonial plantations, by contrast, made slaves anonymous—they were, so to speak, something bought in a store, selected purely on physical characteristics, like so many cans of soup. (In account books, slavers
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From the beginning, American slave owners were dogged by the problem that their army of slaves could be an enslaved army.
The classic response for foot soldiers facing horses is to bunch together tightly, spears facing out from a defensive wall—the tactic used by Greek infantry to win the battles of Marathon and Plataea. Despite their lack of weapons, the slaves did exactly that, their line holding together until the third charge.
With no way to ensure that the isthmus’s short-termers wouldn’t pocket funds designated for the anti-maroon campaign, the king was reluctant to, so to speak, sign the check. The conflict was a version of what economists call the “principal agent” problem: when one party pays another to act on its behalf but can’t readily measure its performance.
Peoria plAnt managers' meeting 10/2-3/2018. MJP
The assaults on Nombre de Dios and Venta de Cruces were a triumph—for the maroons.
Brewers win game 1 of the NLDS, 3-2 over the Rockies. 10/4/2018 mjp
How could this dog’s breakfast of recent international arrivals become a symbol of home and tradition, sung about by school kids before nostalgic parents?
Looking around Ifugao, I was struck by the number of abandoned, crumbling terraces. People were walking away from their farms.
