The cover image appears in a fascinating section about racial mixing in the Americas.
Author: Charles C. Mann
Publication: 2011
Genre: History
1493 is a reflection on the Columbian exchange. That phenomenon, initiated with Hispaniola’s first contact with Columbus the preceding year, encompassed not only agriculture and animals but disease, ideas, practices, and most critically, people.
Mann’s narrative pans back and forth across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas as well as up and down the historical timeline. We learn about diseases that contributed to the rise of chattel slavery, how Spain’s desire for silver upended hemispheres, and how the exchange of new crops enabled population booms around the world. We often get a look at how these historical happenings are still affecting the present day (and the future).
Mann delights in calling out the European conquistadors, profiteers, etc. on their atrocities. (The book opens with a subsection on Columbus, which is, shall we say, not flattering.) Mann attempts to pull in non-European experiences despite their lack of voices in a lot of the recorded history. E.g., one of my favorite passages, pp.443 of the paperback:
“Labor was to be provided by enslaving local Indians, some of whom would also be sold in Hispaniola. The Indians saw no reason to participate in this scheme and expressed their lack of enthusiasm by riddling the invaders with poisoned arrows.”
I had read 1491, Mann’s book on pre-Columbian cultures in the Americas, over the previous summer while in Mauritius. I found 1493 a bit less interesting, perhaps because the society building focus of the previous book appeals more than economics and virology. In 1493 I could have had less about potatoes and malaria, and shorter chapters on the whole. However, the chapters on human movements during the Colombian exchange were fascinating. They should teach us more of that history in school!
A few worldview-shifting fun facts I learned:
-Potatoes really are superfoods that provide almost all the nutrients humans need.
-The Jamestown settlers struggled with bad water in part because they were setting up shop in the Chesapeake Bay impact crater. Geology affects everything.
-There are a lot of escaped slave and native communities in the Americas that haven’t gotten much historical recognition.
While 1493 drags occasionally, on the whole I recommend it as a sweeping history of a critical shift in the course of human existence.