1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

by Charles C. Mann

Transoceanic travel in those days was heart-stoppingly expensive and risky—the equivalent, perhaps, of space-shuttle flights today.

Colón’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea.

In 1514, twenty-two years after Colón’s first voyage, the Spanish government counted up the Indians on Hispaniola for the purpose of allocating them among colonists as laborers. Census agents fanned across the island but found only 26,000 Taino. Thirty-four years later, according to one scholarly Spanish resident, fewer than 500 Taino were alive. The destruction of the Taino plunged Santo Domingo into poverty. The colonists had wiped out their own labor force.

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries novel microorganisms spread across the Americas, ricocheting from victim to victim, killing three-quarters or more of the people in the hemisphere.

It was as if the suffering these diseases had caused in Eurasia over the past millennia were concentrated into a span of decades.

My teacher, alas, had it exactly backward. Scholars had known for more than fifteen hundred years that the world was large and round. Colón disputed both facts.

Economics 101 predicts what will happen in these circumstances. New money chases after the same old goods and services. Prices rise in a classic inflationary spiral. In what historians call a “price revolution,” the cost of living more than doubled across Europe in the last half of the sixteenth century, tripling in some places, and then rose some more. Because wages did not keep pace, the poor were immiserated; they could not afford their daily bread. Uprisings of the starving exploded across the continent, seemingly in every corner and all at once. (Researchers have called it the “general crisis” of the seventeenth century.)

Year after year, the company spent outsize sums to send colonists to Virginia—more than a hundred shiploads all told. Year after year, most of the would-be settlers perished within weeks or months—men and women, rich and poor, child and convict. England shipped about seven thousand people to Virginia between 1607 and 1624. Eight out of ten died.

On December 4, 1619, John Woodlief landed with thirty-five men at a new plantation, upstream from Jamestown, called Berkeley Hundred. Woodlief had been instructed by his backers to celebrate the day of arrival “as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty god”—the first Thanksgiving in English America. Berkeley Hundred’s founders had ordered the date to be observed every year. By the next December 4, thirty-one of the thirty-five tassantassas who had landed that day were sleeping in the soil.

Within weeks of each other, Jamestown had inaugurated two of the future United States’ most long-lasting institutions: representative democracy and chattel slavery.

Removing forest cover, blocking regrowth on fallow land, exhausting the soil, shutting down annual burning, unleashing big grazing and rooting animals, introducing earthworms, honeybees, and other alien invertebrates—the colonists so profoundly changed Tsenacomoco that it became harder and harder for its inhabitants to prosper there.

Before these maladies arrived, the most thickly inhabited terrain north of Mexico was what is now the southeastern United States, and the wet forests of Mesoamerica and Amazonia held millions of people. After malaria and yellow fever, these previously salubrious areas became inhospitable. Their former inhabitants fled to safer lands; Europeans who moved into the emptied real estate often did not survive a year.

Even today, the places where European colonists couldn’t survive are much poorer than places that Europeans found more healthful.

More baffling still is the form that bondage took in the Americas: chattel slavery, a regime much harsher than anything seen before in Europe or Africa.

Because willing hands are more likely to do their jobs well, Smith reasoned in The Wealth of Nations, “the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.” All else being equal, he argued, economics suggests that planters should have chosen the cheaper, easier, less threatening alternative: servants from Europe.

Smith, who hated slavery, was trying to prove that something he detested was not only immoral, but foolish economically. Slavery, in his view, was largely the irrational product of humankind’s “love to domineer.”

Publicly outraged by bondage and with no domestic slave industry to protect, the English were Europe’s least likely candidates for slavemasters.

Then, between 1680 and 1700, the number of slaves suddenly exploded. Virginia’s slave population rose in those years from three thousand to sixteen thousand—and kept soaring thereafter. In the same period the tally of indentured servants shrank dramatically. It was a pivot in world history, the time when English America became a slave society and England became the dominant player in the slave trade.

Not for another century did other economists fully draw out the implications of Smith’s idea. If employers constantly lost workers to the lure of cheap land, then they would want to restrict their freedom of movement. Bondage was the inevitable end result. Paradoxically enough, America’s wide-open frontier was, from this perspective, an incitement to slavery.

New Edinburgh showed that Scots—and other Europeans—died too fast in malarial areas to be useful as forced labor.

In time Carolina grew famous as a slave importer, a place where the slave ships arrived from Africa and the captives, dazed and sick, were hustled to auction. But for its first four decades the colony was mainly a slave exporter—the place from where captive Indians were sent to the Caribbean, Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts.

In any case, the Indian slave trade was immensely profitable—and very short-lived. By 1715 it had almost vanished, a victim in part of its own success. As Carolina’s elite requested more and more slave raids, the Southeast became engulfed in warfare, destabilizing all sides. Victimized Indian groups acquired guns and attacked Carolina in a series of wars that the colony barely survived. Working in groups, Indian slaves proved to be unreliable, even dangerous employees who used their knowledge of the terrain against their owners.

Naturally, the colonists looked for a different solution to their labor needs—one less vulnerable to disease than European servants or Indian slaves.

About 97 percent of the people in West and Central Africa are Duffy negative, and hence immune to vivax malaria.

In vivax-ridden Virginia and Carolina, they were more likely to survive and produce children than English colonists. Biologically speaking, they were fitter, which is another way of saying that in these places they were—loaded words!—genetically superior.

Regardless of whether they knew it, though, planters with slaves tended to have an economic edge over planters with indentured servants. If two Carolina rice growers brought in ten workers apiece and one ended up after a year with nine workers and the other ended up with five, the first would be more likely to flourish. Successful planters imported more slaves. Newcomers imitated the practices of their most prosperous neighbors. The slave trade took off, its sails filled by the winds of Plasmodium

particular worry was education; echoing many in British Guiana, Booker president Josiah Booker denounced the notion of teaching his company’s employees to read because it would encourage them to aspire “far above their station in life.” Wrong ideas in the wrong people’s hands could put the elites’ political power at risk.

So determined were natives to avoid the mercury pits that parents maimed their children to prevent them from having to serve.

“The Spaniards who had seen the Chinese as such a grave threat that their survival depended on their complete disappearance didn’t hesitate to do everything possible to ensure the massive repopulation of the Parián,”

Rebellions flowered in the Parián, followed by expulsions and massacres. The cycle repeated itself in 1639, 1662, 1686, 1709, 1755, 1763, and 1820, each time with an awful death toll.

N. tabacum was part of an unplanned ecological invasion that shaped, for better and worse, modern China.

The families that Qing policies encouraged to move west needed to eat, and what they ate, day in and day out, was maize, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. Part of the reason China is the world’s most populous nation is the Columbian Exchange.

Even four centuries after its introduction tobacco remains so profitable in China that villagers still turn rice paddies into tobacco plots. These Fujianese farmers are drying tobacco in 2009.

In part, the failure was due to an inherent problem with mass illegal immigration. It is not easy to deport huge numbers of people—tearing them from homes and families built up over years—without mass suffering.

In an environmentalists’ nightmare, the shortsighted pursuit of small-scale profit steered a course for long-range, large-scale disaster. Constant floods led to constant famine and constant unrest; repairing the damage sapped the resources of the state.

Potatoes are about three-quarters water and one-quarter starch but have vitamins enough to prevent scurvy if consumed in quantity.

but the tubers had become so essential to all of northern Europe that Prussia and Austria fought a “potato war” in 1778–79 in which the two armies spent most of their time scrambling to get food for themselves and deny it to the enemy. Only when every potato in Bohemia had been consumed did hostilities end.

tuber bigger than his head. Many scholars believe that the introduction of S. tuberosum to Europe was a key moment in history. This is because their widespread consumption largely coincided with the end of famine in northern Europe.

P]otatoes, by feeding rapidly growing populations, permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.”

Hunger’s end helped create the political stability that allowed European nations to take advantage of American silver. The potato fueled the rise of the West.

Today we know why: the potato can better sustain life than any other food when eaten as the sole item of diet.

Part of the impact was direct: potatoes prevented deaths from famine. The greater impact, though, was indirect: better-nourished people were less likely to die of infectious disease, the era’s main killer.

destroying their pastureland soil by overgrazing. The advances were not confined to agriculture. American silver let Europeans build ships to increase trade, raising living standards. Some improvements occurred in the continent’s governance and even in its abysmal hygiene standards. As in China, the Little Ice Age began to wane.

S. tuberosum was responsible for about an eighth of Europe’s population increase. Put baldly, the figure may not seem high. But the continent’s long boom had many causes. One way to think of this calculation is to say that it suggests the introduction of the potato was as important to the modern era as, say, the invention of the steam engine.

Before the potato and maize, before intensive fertilization, European living standards were roughly equivalent with those today in Cameroon and Bangladesh; they were below Bolivia or Zimbabwe.

average, European peasants ate less per day than hunting-and-gathering societies in Africa or the Amazon.

Industrial monoculture with improved crops and high-intensity fertilizer allowed billions of people—Europe first, and then much of the rest of the world—to escape the Malthusian trap.* Incredibly, living standards doubled or tripled worldwide even as the planet’s popula...

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.

The guano trade that launched modern agriculture was also the beginning, via the Columbian Exchange, of one of its worst pitfalls: the intercontinental transport of exotic pests.

No matter what degree of culpability should be assigned to Britain, the consequences of the famine to Ireland are indisputable: it broke the nation in half. At a million or more fatalities, it was one of the deadliest famines in history, in terms of the percentage of population lost. A similar famine in the United States today would kill almost forty million people.