1493 Quotes

“mistaken. The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colón’s voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike. In this sense the world has become one, exactly as the old admiral hoped. The lighthouse in Santo Domingo should be regarded less as a celebration of the man who began it than a recognition of the world he almost accidentally created, the world of the Homogenocene we live in today.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“As it does today, malaria played a huge role in the past—a role unlike that of other diseases, and arguably larger. When Europeans brought smallpox and influenza to the Americas, they set off epidemics: sudden outbursts that shot through Indian towns and villages, then faded. Malaria, by contrast, became endemic, an ever-present, debilitating presence in the landscape. Socially speaking, malaria—along with another mosquito-borne disease, yellow fever—turned the Americas upside down. 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.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Puebla shopkeepers complained that the country was fighting an invasion of counterfeits from China—a Chinese imitation of a Chinese-made Mexican imitation of a Chinese original.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth

“Scholars had known for more than fifteen hundred years that the world was large and round. Colón disputed both facts.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“How could the colonists starve in the midst of plenty? One reason was that the English feared leaving Jamestown to fish, because Powhatan’s fighters were waiting outside the colony walls. A second reason was that a startlingly large proportion of the colonists were gentlemen, a status defined by not having to perform manual labor.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“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. Much of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world thus was less a meeting of Europe and America than a meeting of Africans and Indians—a relationship forged both in the cage of slavery and in the uprisings against it. Largely conducted out of sight of Europeans, the complex interplay between red and black is a hidden history that researchers are only now beginning to unravel.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Technologically speaking, China was so far ahead of the rest of Eurasia that foreign lands had little to offer except raw materials, which could be obtained without going to the bother of dispatching gigantic flotillas on lengthy journeys. Beijing easily could have sent Zheng past Africa to Europe, observed the George Mason University political scientist Jack Goldstone. But the empire stopped long-range exploration “for the same reason the United States stopped sending men to the moon—there was nothing there to justify the costs of such voyages.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“The portraits were intended to parade their fellows like specimens in a zoo. Yet at the same time most show the castizos, mestizos, and mulattos dressed sumptuously, moving happily about their daily business, tall and robustly healthy each and every one. Looking at the smooth, smiling faces now, one would never know that on the streets of the cities where they were painted these people were scorned for their very diversity. One would also never know that the casta paintings were not diverse enough—not a single one portrayed New Spain’s Asian population, by far the biggest outside Asia. SHOOK-UP”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“testament to the human capacity to adapt (or, less charitably, to our ability to operate in ignorance).”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot periphery, battered by a corrupt and inept civic and religious establishment, troubled by a past that it barely understood—to the contemporary eye, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City looks oddly familiar. In its dystopic way, it was an amazingly contemporary place, unlike any other then on the planet. It was the first twenty-first-century city, the first of today’s modern, globalized megalopolises.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Their alarm was easy to understand. The law would give control of a substantial part of the Amazon to its residents,”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“the indigenous arsenal of cure.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“(the hearts can be removed without killing the tree, but this takes more time).”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“For each European, the colony had more than twenty-five Africans.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“under bridges is only air.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“a new bishop finally had the courage to land in São Tomé in 1675. He was dead in two months.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Trying to build up the colonial population, the monarchy ordered that female African slaves be awarded to every new male European arrival, along with exhortations to breed.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Not until the 1440s did they learn that the island’s warm climate was better suited to another, more profitable crop: sugarcane.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“This last sentence is imprecise.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Blinded by the shine from Potosí silver, the Spaniards paid little attention to conquered peoples’ excremental practices.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the Johnny Appleseed of S. tuberosum.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“In England, farmers denounced S. tuberosum as an advance scout for hated Roman Catholicism. “No Potatoes, No Popery!” was an election slogan in 1765.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Sweet potatoes in China are often eaten raw, the skin whittled off in a fashion that makes them somewhat resemble ice cream cones.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“They keep it carefully tended and gaily decked, and esteem it as highly as ladies in Europa.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Spanish merchants doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled the price and still sold their goods in the Americas for a third the cost of Spanish textiles. Incredibly, they sold silk from China—silk that had crossed two oceans!—in Spain for less than silk produced in Spain.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Because he controlled food negotiations with Powhatan, the colony’s men of consequence swallowed their displeasure.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“that both sides of an uncoerced exchange gain from it.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Lynne Guitar”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Sebastian Lemba, they refused to come back. “Lemba” was a kind of spiritual association of wealthy merchants—a mix, perhaps, of a church and the Rotary club—based in Kongo.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created