CultureWatch Review of 1493 by Charles Mann: Pause and batten down the hatches before you plunge in!
Part Two, “Pacific Journeys,” reaches to the Orient, discussing trade (“silk for silver”) and the exchange of new plants (tubers, rice, grasses).
Part Three, “Europe in the World,” covers the slave trade as well as the “Agro-Industrial Complex.”
Part Four, titled “Africa in the World,” delves into the importation of Africans into the Americas, and reaches farther than we have ever imagined. One learns of “the maroons,” descendants of 17th and 18th century escaped African slaves and indigenous peoples. (“Maroon” is thought to derive from a Taino word used to describe the flight of an arrow). There are communities and enclaves of maroons all over the Americas, in many cases quite unaligned with the governments of the area in which they live.
It is in this part of the book that one learns (if one hadn’t already figured it out) that our hemisphere’s majority population is not white or of European descent. Perhaps beginning with the Conquistadores, who “took consorts from the elite of peoples they conquered,” assimilation has been on-going for a good six hundred years.
Mann offers a careful explication of slavery as practiced in Africa long before whites showed up to buy slaves to transport to the New World. He claims that to be a slave in Africa was not like being a slave in early America. This revelation may be questionable, but before you get into that argument, you had better be sure to marshal your facts as carefully as Mr. Mann has marshaled his.
There is a delightful little paragraph near the end of the book in which Mann takes on the concept of environmental activism that so often crusades against the dangers of invasive species. What is, after all a “foreign invader?”
“… it occurred to me: I, too, thought of my garden as a kind of home. Futzing around with the plants was my refuge from e-mail, deadlines, and my office desk. Much like [the activists], I wished more of the local nurseries sold local plants – I had complained in one of them that there was nothing in the entire space that was from anywhere within hundreds of miles. Embarrassing in retrospect, I issued this gripe as I was at the nursery cash register, paying for seedlings of bell pepper (origin Mesoamerica), eggplant (origin: South Asia), and carrot (origin: Europe). I was simultaneously promoting and denouncing the Columbian Exchange, and the globalization that trailed in its wake.”
This book is, perhaps, best read in small increments because there is such a lot of territory to cover. It is certainly never dull or boring, but short respites are indicated as one absorbs the remarkable concept of The Homogenocene, that era being marked by the long arm of humanity as it changes the face of the earth.
1493
By Charles C. Mann, © 2011
A Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf
>Hardcover: 398 pp. plus extensive Appendix, Notes, Bibliography, and index
— J.S. ©2011 for SeniorWomen.com
Pages: 1 · 2
More Articles
- Jo Freeman's Review of The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparations Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia
- The Cantor Arts Center, Sally Fairchild and Sargent's Women, A New Book About the Artist
- CultureWatch Review: Anna Quindlin's Still Life With Bread Crumbs
- CultureWatch: A Review of Louise Erdrich's The Round House
- CultureWatch Review: The Receptionist: An Education at the New Yorker
- Where Has Joy Gone?
- CultureWatch: Jane Fonda and Red Grooms
- CultureWatch Review — In Defense of Women
- Book Review: Oldman's Brave New World of Wine: Pleasure, Value and Adventure Beyond Wine’s Usual Suspects
- A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot