Charles C. Mann, author of the 2005 study 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and the subsequent 2011 volume 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, has a clever method for dealing with the controversial nomenclature surrounding any discussion of the pre-Columbian Americas: he calls peoples by the names which present-day members call themselves, and stays true to the historically self-described titles used by individuals and groups that existed in the past. So “Native American” is rendered as the less misleading and more widely self-identified “Indian,” while “Christopher Columbus” appears as “Cristóbal Colón.”
But two terms Mann makes a repeated point of not mincing in 1491 and 1493 are “New World” and “globalization.” Simply put, the “New World” is not so new—not even close; “globalization” is not just about economic integration. These are the respective and heterodox points of the two books. And in making them, Mann radically alters our conception of the Americas before Colón, while redefining the world that came after this fateful encounter.
Mann is a journalist, focusing on scientific subjects for publications like Wired and The Atlantic, as well as the co-author of several general-audience books on topics ranging from aspirin to 20th-century physics. As such, he draws on legion experts across academic fields in addition to his own research to inform his enquiries—though not without frequent clashes with scholarly orthodoxy and popular knowledge. What emerges from Mann’s 1491 and1493, two serial studies as exhaustive as they are accessible, is an important new view of our world, radically reconceived of as a place vastly older and more interconnected than previously realized.
The Pristine Myth
1491 is not for the sentimental reader. The elementary school view that the Western Hemisphere before the arrival of European explorers was an Edenic paradise meagerly populated by primitive bands of natives is wrong—verywrong. As Mann notes, “the Americas were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously thought. And older, too.” And the beloved Bering Strait story of how these populations migrated to the Americas in the first place, via a mammoth bridge of ice, is similarly misguided: “In 1997 the theory abruptly came unglued,” writes Mann. Archaeologists uncovered traces of human habitation in what is now Chile that dates back over twelve thousand years—a distance from the Bering Strait implying arrival before the opening of the “ice-free corridor.” Faced with this new evidence, the academic jury is still out.
Such notions are all part of what University of Wisconsin geographer William Denevan derides as the “pristine myth,” envisioning the Americas as uncultivated and largely vacant of pre-existing inhabitants. But thanks to an abundance of new research—archaeological, biological, and geographic—this myth is being steadily dismantled, and a vastly altered mosaic of the Americas before 1492 is emerging from the strata of time. “It seems incumbent on us to take a look,” argues Mann. His book 1491 compiles a prodigious and strikingly lucid survey. Delving into the thriving and advanced world preceding Columbus, as well as its mystifying demise, the author makes a compelling case for reevaluating our notions of the pre-Columbian Americas.
An Older, More Sophisticated World
In the first place, these pre-Columbian societies were far older and more sophisticated than previously believed by scholars and schoolchildren alike. The Olmec, for example, who ruled what is now Mexico circa 1800 B.C., devised the concept of zero—perhaps their greatest accomplishment—but also, Mann documents, “invented a dozen different systems of writing, established widespread trade networks, tracked the orbits of the planets, created a 365-day calendar (more accurate than its contemporaries in Europe), and recorded their histories in accordion-folded ‘books’ of fig tree bark paper.” These were no slouches by any current or historical measure, to say the least, and 1491 brims with such factoids to prove it.
Meanwhile in North America, trading systems had already quilted the most of the sprawling continent “for more than a thousand years” with goods like mother-of-pearl and copper. And indigenous technological advancements were awe-inspiring to early European explorers. For instance, when Tsenacommacah Chief Powhatan captured John Smith of Pocahontas fame in the Tidewater Virginian area, the colonist and self-promoter broke his own gun. Smith wanted to ensure the natives would not discover his European weaponry’s inferiority to the Indians’ lethally effective bows and arrows.
To the south, the half-dozen societies of Mesoamerica (including the brainy Olmec) had already developed almost “three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation” according to one recent estimate, including many beans, tomatoes, peppers, and, perhaps most vitally, maize. Geneticists still cannot crack these Indians’ secrets to breeding this last crop—which was accomplished before the birth of Christ. In terms of agriculture alone, the achievements of these pre-Columbian inhabitants are at least on par with their contemporaries in ancient Mesopotamia. Would that they find room amidst the ziggurat-filled pages of high-school history textbooks.
Terraforming
Not only were the inhabitants of the Americas before 1492 anything but “primitive,” the environment in which they lived was a far cry from the unruly biosphere described in popular conceptions of the New World. In fact, the deliberate environmental impact of these natives on the Americas was far more profound than most scholars had realized. As Mann shows, indigenous groups across both continents were intentionally transforming their environments before Colón, primarily utilizing controlled fires to tailor nature to fit their needs. Opening a copy of1491, one is confronted with a map of the Americas demarcating Indian environmental projects across the two continents. I was stunned to see my home, Central Pennsylvania, traversed by the red-orange dashes denoting pyro-modification. “Rather than domesticate animals for meat,” the author explains, “Indians retooled ecosystems to encourage elk, deer, and bear.” So when Europeans began exploring the Americas, they encountered woodlands more like English parks than Edenic wilderness; nature had been so tactically tamed that European carriages could reportedly be driven straight through the forests. Bison were even being “imported” to the East coast at this time by strategically burning pastures all the way from New York to Georgia, with the natives using these manmade paths to rustle herds far from their natural Midwest habitats. What’s more, large-scale engineering operations had rerouted whole waterways in North America.
The same is true for South America, which had long been consigned by mainstream scholars to primal jungle status. But, 1491 cites University of Pennsylvania Archaeologist Clark Erickson, who characterizes the Amazon as a “built environment,” forged by the flames creating rich terra preta (Portuguese for “black earth”). What spawned was a teeming, chaotic garden. “Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it,” admires Mann. “They were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.” Since Indians had been administering the environment of the Western Hemisphere for thousands of years before 1492, with the managers wiped out, nature sprawled into the thicket of Denevan’s “pristine myth.” It was a wilderness brought about by the European encounter, not its absence.
American Autopsy
If the Americas up to 1491 were such a vibrant, long-established realm, why did this world so swiftly vanish? A theory (or maybe mantra) one has likely heard enumerated is “guns, germs, and steel.” Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist and author Jared Diamond’s 1997 book, aptly titled Guns, Germs, and Steel, originally advanced this reductive, albeit illuminating formula to explain what he calls “historical inequalities” between more dominant regions like Europe and less developed ones such as Africa. It is a rule Diamond thinks holds no less for the Americas of the 15th century. Take the components of Conquistador Francisco Pizarro’s successful campaign against the Inka: “Those factors included Spanish germs, horses, literacy, political organization, and technology (especially ships and weapons),” he writes. All are “proximate,” or most immediate causes, as Diamond duly qualifies, but in general, “those technological and political differences as of A.D. 1500 were the immediate case of the modern world’s inequalities. Empires with steel weapons were able to conquer or exterminate tribes with weapons of stone and wood.” Case closed.
Except that contra Diamond’s account, Mann counters that Indian “societies were destroyed by weapons their opponents could not control and did not even know they had,” i.e. germs. What happened to guns and steel in1491? Drawing on research of anthropologist Henry Dobyns, who scoured Spanish traveler accounts of Pizarro’s campaigns, the weapon of mass destruction in this account was in fact smallpox (with some infighting on the side). The Inka, then, “were not defeated by steel and horses,” concludes Mann, “but by disease and factionalism.”
University of Texas historian Alfred W. Crosby, who coined the term “Columbian Exchange” in his 1972 text of the same name, came to similar conclusions as Mann in his 1986 publication Ecological Imperialism (which turned a much less popular phrase than his earlier book). “European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place,” wrote Crosby in the book’s prologue, “which requires explanation.” In short, he surmised that even though European conquerors were usually better equipped than their resisters, the more long-term, salient edge lay in epidemiology. It was guns, steel, but, in the end, mostly germs. In Hernando de Soto’s conquest of present-day Florida, for example, it was the conquistador’s pigs—not his troops—that sealed the fate of the region, de Soto’s infectious livestock serving as what the author calls an “ambulatory meat locker” for diseases like measles and smallpox.
Quantifying the Tragedy
As insightful as this bio-historical analysis may be, it is also profoundly funereal. Says Mann, “In our antibiotic era, how can we imagine what it means to have entire ways of life hiss away like steam? … It seems important to try.” This imagining is of particular importance inside academia, for rather political reasons: these historical theories have become a matter of deep academic feuding.
Consider the bickering “Counters” found in 1491; that is, the “High Counters” and “the Low Counters.” These are the names of two opposed camps within the academy, each comprising an intellectual phalanx of scientists and historians, engaged in prolonged, at times “vehemently personal” war over…counting. The numbers, however, are the population figures of the Americas before European colonization. Until quite recently, the Low Counters’ account of two sparsely populated continents was predominant, establishing a view of the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere as devoid of any teeming civilizations and dotted by transient bands of natives. They see it as implausible that supposedly titanic populations could collapse in such short time. It is more likely that the European invaders never encountered that many residents in the first place.
But with fresh biological and historical research in their arsenal, the High Counters have been advancing an increasingly accepted account of the Americas prior to 1492 as bristling with human life. European diseases drastically reduced this burgeoning populace, a hemispheric, epidemiological extinction with no parallel. In this story, history can at last be squared with the emerging trail of statistical figures. 1491 seconds the revisionist arguments of the High Counters.
The Old “New World”
So what is Mann’s aim behind these engrossing revelations about the Americas? His project, I think, is to give readers a new lexicon, not merely changing the conversation, but rethinking its very vocabulary. As he states bluntly in 1491 “the Western hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the ‘New World’”; Britain, for example, was entombed in glaciers till approximately 12,500 B.C. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, “people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.” In truth, the only “New World” here is the lost one Mann has sweepingly illuminated in this book. But then again, it is not really new—we were just stuck in the old, elementary school ways of thinking about the Americas before Colón. This simplicity is in many ways understandable. As Mann notes, reconstructions of the pre-Columbian past rely on “arguing from silence,” working around the lamentable absence of voices to recount this era, its diverse peoples, vibrant cultures, and sophisticated societies. Silence must not serve as license to forget or mischaracterize the past. In this way, 1491 stands as encyclopedic justice to the Americas before the Europeans.
. . .
There is, however, a “New World” in Mann’s chronicle—it just came into existence after 1492 and not a quaver before. This New World, the one Colón incidentally created rather than “discovered,” is the subject of Mann’s succeeding installation, 1493. While 1491 may be the more historically interesting of the two, its counterpart is more germane to today’s world. The former is overflowing with information but the latter has a far more pertinent argument, one that reconsiders the past, present, and future of globalization.
The debate on globalization has long had two viciously opposed sides. On one end, the “economists and entrepreneurs” and on the other, the “environmental activists, cultural nationalists, labor organizers, and anti-corporate agitators.” These two groups came to blows at the Molotov Cocktail-lit protests of the World Trade Organization’s 1999 meeting in Seattle. The truth is, predictably, somewhere between these two ideological extremes. Global exchange has been making humanity richer for centuries, as Mann notes, but it carries with it the baggage of environmental desecration and political upheaval. To the author, this “inconceivably complex progress of life on this planet” is what he eventually dubs a “fractured celebration,” bringing global gains accompanied by intense turbulence. In probing the subject of globalization, 1493 seamlessly traces this complex process from the first encounters between European explorers and indigenous Americans, through the exchanges crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and concluding with the modern slave trade. Along the way, Mann lays the groundwork for a drastically deeper theory of globalization, widening our analytical aperture from mere markets to a more comprehensive and instructive outlook.
A Biological Phenomenon
Mann’s qualified view of globalization stems largely from his conception of the phenomenon itself. “Newspapers usually describe globalization in purely economic terms,” he notes, “but is also a biological phenomenon: indeed, from a long-term perspective it may be primarily a biological phenomenon.” It is here that 1493 departs from conventional studies of worldwide interconnectedness and says something particularly novel.
In the past, many prominent studies of globalization have espoused a narrow view of the subject. Take a look at a passage from the contentious 2002 book Globalization and its Discontents by Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a longtime left-wing critic of global economic policymaking:
What is this phenomenon of globalization that has been subject, at the same time, to such vilification and such praise? Fundamentally, it is closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world which has been brought about by the enormous reduction of costs of transportation and communication, and the breaking down of artificial barriers to the flow of good, services, capital, knowledge, and (to a lesser extent) people across borders.
Stiglitz’s very conception of globalization is economic and institutional in nature—less than half of Mann’s aforementioned picture of worldwide exchange. It is no wonder Stiglitz’s critique sets its sights on the “Washington Consensus” policies of the WTO, the IMF, and World Bank. In his view, these institutions have given the developing world the short end of the market’s stick, the policy-making process in the thrall of Western (primarily American), neoliberal influence. Stiglitz’s critique is provocative—but incomplete; he has settled primarily on only economicglobalization.
For Mann, the phenomenon of globalization concerns more than just markets; it unites the planet’s previously discrete hemispheres into a single global organism. 250 million years ago, recounts the author, Pangaea split, creating separate hemispheres with “wildly different suites of plants and animals.” But it only took one eccentric Genoese explorer to reverse the process. “Colón’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea,” declares Mann. This encounter would bring tomatoes to Italy, oranges to the United States, chocolate to Switzerland, and chili peppers to Thailand. Along with this, an “invisible wave” of upheaval would wash across this newly united world as new diseases went global and cultural conflict became exacerbated. And, this cataclysm would annihilate the vibrant, teeming, and ultimately lost world of 1491 in the process.
The project of 1493 is in large part informed by Crosby’s seminal and svelte book The Columbian Exchange. “The first step to understanding man is to consider him as a biological entity which has existed on this globe, affecting, and in turn affected by, his fellow organisms, for many thousands of years,” Crosby argued. After placing man in this “proper spatial and temporal context,” it becomes clear that “the most important changes brought on by Columbian voyages were biological in nature.” Taking his cue from Crosby, Mann pinpoints 1493 as the first year in a “new biological era” following Colón’s voyage, dubbing it “the Homogenocene.” The term echoes the homogenizing character of this process, bringing ecologically isolated places into a more uniform global mixture—it is Pangaea reknit as per Crosby. Thus, concludes Mann, “Columbus’s voyage did not mark the discovery of the New World, but its creation.”
Columbian Explosion
The means to this globalized end lie in what Mann heralds as “the remarkable role of exchange” between all corners of the planet, and their epochal impacts. This “exchange” is not just trading goods and services. For instance, it was not the Spanish colonists themselves who made the decisive difference when they first crossed the Atlantic Ocean and landed at La Isabela, bearing their commodities and technology. Rather, the European ecosystem that “poured from hulls of Colón’s vessels” would christen the globalization process. Earthworms, mosquitoes, cockroaches, honeybees, dandelions, as well as a litany of new viruses and bacteria invaded Hispaniola in 1492 in the first truly global exchange since the continents ruptured.
Over on the Pacific Ocean, 1493 details the exchanges between the Spanish Empire and China. “Part of the reason China is the world’s most populous nation is the Columbian Exchange,” Mann points out. Thanks to the exploits of the Spanish Empire, worldwide access to maize, potatoes, and sweet potatoes planted the seeds for a population boom in Asia. On the downside, however, avalanches of silver from the hellish mines of Potosí in Chile would fuel heinous bouts of economic and political unrest in China.
In Europe, the globalization kick-started by Colón put the continent on the path towards international ascendency, thanks in no small part to, of all things, potatoes. “Compared to grains, tubers are inherently more productive,” the author explains. Growing underground, the potato could expand to unseen sizes without collapsing like wheat stalk. This “exotic” import from the Western Hemisphere effectively doubled the European food supply. Famine was next to eradicated in potato country, and standards of living skyrocketed from what would today be third-world metrics. “At long last,” Mann writes, “the continent could, with the arrival of the potato, produce its own dinner.” The effects of the initial Spanish voyages for “God, glory, and gold,” it seems, had metastasized into a thriving global phenomenon.
Undoubtedly the most brutal but perhaps most fascinating exchange documented in 1493 is what Mann considers “the foundational institution of the modern Americas.” He is talking about the modern slave trade, the first globalized system of labor. Yet it would entail consequences far beyond just the economics of plantation production. Specifically, the book deals with the long-overlooked “meeting of red and black”—Africans and Indians—that formed a surreptitious but mighty undercurrent in the globalized Americas. This encounter occurred primarily in maroon communities, settlements of fugitive slaves embedded alongside indigenous populations across the tropical areas of the Western hemisphere.
After the initial migration of homo sapiens out of eastern Africa 70,000 years ago, Mann thinks that the next turning point in mankind’s global journey was “the transatlantic slave trade,” an exchange necessitated by the plantation economy, but which would have implications reaching far beyond its immediate causes. “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,” he writes. This “complex interplay” accordingly occurred without European oversight, which regrettably also means out of the annals of most histories. But “arguing from silence” is music to Mann’s ears.
What follows is more a gripping intermezzo than digression, detailing the clandestine world of maroons and its resistance to European domination, allying with Indians and even pirates to maintain their freedom. If you’re looking for indigenous “agency”—assertions of human autonomy against Colonial domination—the pages of 1493are overflowing with material. It is a war that rages even today, though primarily on paper: descendants of these original maroons continue to wage legal battles for their land against commercial invaders in the Amazon. These raiders come hacking for açaí berries and hearts of palms, products that probably sit on your supermarket’s shelves. The global slave trade may be at an end in most places, but we all still wriggle, somehow, in its tumultuous, globalized wake. As in the rest of the expansive scope of areas covered in 1493, such a dynamic interaction between peoples and exchanges only becomes apparent by expanding one’s view of globalization and embracing Mann’s much broader conception.
. . .
The global fissure of the continents was tectonically slow; it was the rapid, pivotal integration, revealed in 1493, that has had a seismic impact on the last five centuries and should duly define popular notions of “globalization.” The phenomenon extends far beyond just trade. Our perpetually new world is also one with a far deeper, richer past than many had previously imagined—a newly revealed world of an irretrievable past, masterfully presented in1491. But what ultimately made the world “new” after this loss was the advent of globalized, galvanizing exchange, christened by the misguided voyage of three Spanish vessels in 1492 that triggered biological, commercial, and human exchange across the Earth. Rightly understood, it is a concept as expansive as the planet it covers. And humanity shows little potential of halting Colón’s course. To better understand our world, we would do well heeding Mann’s revelations and look upon the Earth as a far more ancient, more interconnected planet.