CultureWatch Review of 1493 by Charles Mann: Pause and batten down the hatches before you plunge in!
Having reviewed Mann's mind-bending 1491 a few years back, I looked forward to this new book with some trepidation: would it come up to the standard he had set so high? The answer, dear reader, is a resounding “Yes!” That answer does not, however, come without a few caveats. If you’re looking for a casual overview or a quick read, you need to pause and batten down the hatches before you plunge in. Mr. Mann is a gardener, and what he has produced with this book bears testimony to a gardener’s patience, planning, and careful weeding and pruning.
The gardening metaphor crops up often in this book, which is in essence the story of the world’s on-going globalization that has its roots in the voyages of Columbus. Mann refers to it thus: “…Columbus’s voyage did not mark the discovery of a New World, but its creation.” (emphasis mine)
The continents of our earth once were one land mass that we refer to as Pangaea which, over many millennia, split apart to create our continents. Using the term “the Columbian Exchange,” Mann describes how those continents have, in essence, come back together, not physically, but economically and ecologically. He uses “The Homogenocene” to describe this new epoch, and examines in detail the economic and ecological ramifications of our ever-growing inter-connectedness.
Along the way, he drops in all sorts of interesting new facts, such as: Who knew that earth worms aren’t native to the Americas? He traces their introduction to the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, where British ships dumped out their ballast of rocks and dirt from England before they took on huge shipments of that new fad, tobacco. Bless their little hearts, the worms dug themselves into their new home with such speed and spread that gardeners all over this country owe a big debt to those ballast-dumping, tobacco-loving Brits.
1493 abounds in such bits of seemingly trivial knowledge that tell of huge and important consequences, some of which are not so positive as the story of the earthworms. Before long those bits add up to a staggering amount of information. Mann is a master researcher and purveyor of facts, but it’s his story-telling ability that grabs you. He is a lively, engaging writer, who gives presents far more than chronological facts, enlivening them with lots of human interest stories.
Although Mann credits Columbus with the start of globalization, he extends his reach far beyond the discovery of America. The book is organized into four main sections subdivided into discussions of economic and ecological impacts. For instance, the first part, “Atlantic Journeys,” begins with a section called “The Tobacco Coast,” followed by one titled “Evil Air,” which covers the exchange of diseases that were new to either settlers or natives, unfortunate exchanges like malaria, Yellow Fever, syphilis, etc.
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