1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B005GIH22A | Format: EPUB
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Description
From the author of 1491 - the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas - a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs.
More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together - and marked the beginning of an extraordinary exchange of flora and fauna between Eurasia and the Americas. As Charles Mann shows, this global ecological tumult - the "Columbian Exchange" - underlies much of subsequent human history. Presenting the latest generation of research by scientists, Mann shows how the creation of this worldwide network of exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Manila and Mexico City - where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted - the center of the world.
In 1493, Charles Mann gives us an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 17 hours and 51 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: August 9, 2011
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B005GIH22A
Charles Mann knows how to write. He also knows how to make history interesting and come alive.
The title "1493" refers to all that time since Christopher Columbus, for whom Mann has had a fascination with, first discovered the new world. With that new discovery came changes and exchanges that have transferred the world. The great trade routes that developed from the new American continent to Europe and Asia--The Columbian Exchange-- created both beneficial and devastating results and altered what people ate around the world.
The changes most of us learned about in high school social studies classes: new diseases were introduced into the indigenous peoples of the Americas and many died. Columbus came looking for gold and silver but found also sugar, corn, tobacco, beans, tomatoes and so much more. Coffee, chocolate, rubber all followed. The Spaniards in turn brought in the horse and sheep and we all know the legend of the horse in the American West.
Little did Columbus realize, Mann states, that he and the men who followed to America began what was known as globalization. Coveted items were used as trading items for other equally coveted items. Wars were fought over these items because every monarchy wanted to have the most power over the control of earth's resources, and this thirst for power spilled into Asia as well.
There may not be too much new to learn from Mann's book. I had been aware of the "Columbian Exchange" but terms such as"Homogenocene" and the dawn of globalization is new to me. Mann then uses his writing and research skills to create detailed and interesting chapters to show how the movement of animals, plants and humans have created new species, varieties and that this movement was not always bad.
I thought 1491, Mann's earlier book on pre-Columbian America, was fabulous. This one has a lot of very interesting information but it doesn't quite come together as well as the original.
The discussion of the immediate impact of European exploration covers some very familiar ground (importing European diseases, sending tobacco to Europe, etc.) and a lot of information that was completely new to me (the transformative impact on the Americas of earthworms and bees, for example). I've been a longtime student of US history and much of what he wrote (the broad-ranging impacts of the importation of malaria, for example) was new to me.
He branches out well beyond the immediate trans-Atlantic Columbian Exchange, which is where he gets in a bit of trouble. A major segment of the book is on the ecological and economic disaster in China following the beginnings of the importation of Spanish silver and American agricultural products (sweet potatoes and tobacco, most notably). While some of this discussion is interesting, it also seems too long and somewhat disorganized.
He totally loses focus when he gets to the importation of the potato into Europe. He does a good job of showing how the potato transformed nutrition and it seems well within the book's stated topic (the worldwide impact of the Columbian Exchange). But then his discussion of the great Irish potato famine wanders here, there, and everywhere. It's really more about English cultural imperialism and the replacement of tried and true peasant agriculture with "scientific agriculture" (monoculture, intense use of fertilizer, etc.) By the time he gets to the potato beetle in the American midwest, the book has become a general discussion of problems caused by industrial agriculture and world trade.
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