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cacae4c
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In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great's expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degree..
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Charles C. Mann |
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27f3298
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The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.
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Charles C. Mann |
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4fc3417
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I kept waiting for the book to appear. The wait grew more frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had been taught, beliefs I knew had long been sharply questioned. Since nobody else appeared to be writing the book, I finally decided to try it myself. Besides, I was curious to learn more. The book you are holding is the result.
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Charles C. Mann |
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73d651a
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Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had existed.
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Charles C. Mann |
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c5f5927
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Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence--and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.
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Charles C. Mann |
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e38f98e
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On Columbus's later voyages, his crew happily accepted godhood--until the Taino began empirically testing their divinity by forcing their heads underwater for long periods to see if the Spanish were, as gods should be, immortal.
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Charles C. Mann |
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95b08d7
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Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to "the good hand of God," which "favored our beginnings" by "sweeping away great multitudes of the natives ... that he might make room for us."
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Charles C. Mann |
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26d07ee
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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, ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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463d027
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all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people's will; "great beast," in which the rulers' power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed; and "great fraud," in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority."
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Charles C. Mann |
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4950cf3
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Scholars had known for more than fifteen hundred years that the world was large and round. Colon disputed both facts.
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Charles C. Mann |
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241066d
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Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes--all gone.
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Charles C. Mann |
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0faea1b
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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.
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Charles C. Mann |
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85f3a6f
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Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoag families were close and loving--more so than English families, some thought. Europeans in those days tended to view children as moving straight from infancy to adulthood around the age of seven, and often thereupon sent them out to work. Indian parents, by contrast, regarded the years before puberty as a time of playful development, and kept their offspring close by until marriage. (Jarrin..
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Charles C. Mann |
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92d3e14
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Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world's most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world's squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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855b2ac
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Maize had an equivalent impact on much of the rest of the world after Columbus introduced it to Europe. Central Europeans became especially hooked on it; by the nineteenth century, maize was the daily bread of Serbia, Rumania, and Moldavia. So
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Charles C. Mann |
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a4386d3
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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.
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Charles C. Mann |
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85d1672
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mistaken. The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colon'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 lightho..
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Charles C. Mann |
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b87b3d3
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In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly inefficient and environmentally unsound. The burning sends up in smoke most of the nutrients in the vegetation--almost all of the nitrogen and half the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts of carbon ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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37dc843
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responses to my questions fell into two broad categories, each associated (at least in my mind) with one of two people, Americans who lived in the twentieth century.
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Charles C. Mann |
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1af5565
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The Wizard and the Prophet is a book about the way knowledgeable people might think about the choices to come, rather than what will happen in this or that scenario. It is a book about the future that makes no predictions.
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Charles C. Mann |
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5ee274f
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TAWANTINSUYU In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great's expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thir..
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Charles C. Mann |
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919e78d
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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 n..
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Charles C. Mann |
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aa8d44d
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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 t..
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Charles C. Mann |
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0d8e89d
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Indian farmers grow maize in what is called a milpa. The term means "maize field," but refers to something considerably more complex. A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume). In nature, wild b..
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Charles C. Mann |
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497f630
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Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust.
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Charles C. Mann |
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22aaeed
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Before Columbus, Holmberg believed, both the people and the land had no real history. Stated so baldly, this notion-that the indigenous peoples of the Americas floated changelessly through the millenia until 1492-may seem ludicrous. But flaws in perspective often appear obvious only after they are pointed out. In this case they took decades to rectify.
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Charles C. Mann |
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788fba8
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The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priority to what might be called connection.
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Charles C. Mann |
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f193209
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Those looking for a tale of cultural superiority can find it in zero; those looking for failure can find it in the wheel. Neither line of argument is useful, though. What
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Charles C. Mann |
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b7571eb
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visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant, sometimes in another, like the themes in a jazz improvisation.
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Charles C. Mann |
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577c317
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Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures.
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Charles C. Mann |
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8e35108
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T]he Indian deaths were such a severe financial blow to the colonies that...[t]o resupply themselves with labor, the Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa.
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Charles C. Mann |
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d23bfbd
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Nature's success stories, they are like Gause's protozoans; the world is their petri dish. Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environment as if no force opposed them. Then they hit a barrier. They drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food. Something figures out how to eat them.
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Charles C. Mann |
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a8015a1
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think of the adherents of these two perspectives as Wizards and Prophets--Wizards unveiling technological fixes, Prophets decrying the consequences of our heedlessness. Borlaug has become a model for the Wizards. Vogt was in many ways the founder of the Prophets.
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Charles C. Mann |
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e0ff53d
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testament to the human capacity to adapt (or, less charitably, to our ability to operate in ignorance).
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Charles C. Mann |
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ba9742f
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By fall the settlers' situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety people, most of them young men with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food, and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving.
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Charles C. Mann |
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7a33037
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A prerequisite for a successful scientific career is an enthusiastic willingness to pore through the minutiae of subjects that 99.9 percent of Earth's population find screamingly dull.
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Charles C. Mann |
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64e367a
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Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants' Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states.
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Charles C. Mann |
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8d3bcc7
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What Vogt saw in Peru would crystallize his picture of the world and the human place in it--a vision of limitation. It would bring him to the Prophet's essential belief: humans have no special dispensation to escape biological constraints.
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Charles C. Mann |
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158fcfc
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Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows from the limited areas they saw to every corner of the hemisphere, wreaking destruction in places that never appeared in the European historical record.
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Charles C. Mann |
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042ca4f
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Dobyns argued that the Indian population in 1491 was between 90 and 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.
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Charles C. Mann |
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82e4473
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One way to sum up the new scholarship is to say that it has begun, at last, to fill in one of the biggest blanks in history: the Western Hemisphere before 1492. It was, in the current view, a thriving, stunning diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a regiin where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as people do everywhere. Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjuga..
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Charles C. Mann |
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8a5da02
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He that speaks seldom and opportunely, being as good as his word, is the only man they love," Wood explained. Character"
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Charles C. Mann |
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fa9cecc
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When microbes arrived in the Western Hemisphere, he argued, they must have swept from the coastlines first visited by Europeans to inland areas populated by Indians who had never seen a white person. Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows from the limited areas they saw to eve..
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Charles C. Mann |
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cf3e977
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Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years.
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Charles C. Mann |