if Africa had somehow repelled European imperialists for centuries before succumbing, then why were American Indians, all and all, so easily con quered?
The sixties “globalized” my mind a quarter century before that word entered journalistic jargon. For instance, if the Viet Cong were successful against the American armed forces, despite all the latter’s technological advantages, and if Africa had somehow repelled European imperialists for centuries before succumbing, then why were American Indians, all and all, so easily con quered? Did Cortes just huff and puff and blow Monctezuma’s house down or were there other factors at work?
The sixties, which made ideologues of some, drove me to bi ology. I had always had an interest in biological matters, though nothing that leafing through Natural History or watching Nova on TV could not satisfy. That mild interest now came to my rescue. I recommend such professionally irrelevant inclinations to young historians—linguistics, architecture, jazz, etc. They may provide you with new questions to ask when you are weary of the old questions. Good questions are harder to come by than good answers.
Tfled from ideological interpretations of history and went in search of the basics, life and death. Alive is alive and dead is dead, whatever Adam Smith or Karl Marx, Richard Nixon or Leonid Brezhnev had to say. What kept people alive long enough to reproduce, and what killed them? Perhaps food and disease?
Asking big questions like that is like replacing the standard film in your camera with infrared or ultraviolet film. You see things you have never seen before. The indigenous peoples of the Greater Antilles appear and then disappear. Chinese peasants eating com on the cob, not rice, loom up.
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Big questions can, of course, lead to over-simplified answers. I probably did that with my telling of the arrival and first spread of smallpox in America, which, I indicated, led ipso facto to European triumph. Epidemics among immunologically unpre pared populations (often called virgin soil epidemics) often do produce high mortality rates, but if left alone the population will recover in numbers. -—j _> o
Europe, for instance, lost one-third of its population to the Black Death in the fourteenth century and recovered in time. If the Black Death had been accompanied by the arrival of Genghis Khan’s hordes, miraculously plague-proof, the story would have been very different. It might have been similar to what happened when European settlers followed on the heels of smallpox and other infections previously unknown to American Indians.
If, by the way, the plague and the Mongols had arrived in tandem, I think it is unlikely that I would be writing this preface in an Indo-European language.
If Columbus had sailed directly from the western extreme to the eastern extreme of Eurasia—if there had been no Americas— Spain and Europe would have probably been the richer for his success and perhaps the Ottoman Empire a bit poorer. There would have been major shifts of power, technologies, and pos sibly of religions. But even so, post-Columbian developments would have been only more of what had gone before. Columbus, however, couldn’t get to Asia—there were two continents full of biological and cultural improbabilities in his way—and life on our planet changes drastically and forever as the eastern and west ern hemispheres began to exchange life forms, both macro and micro.
NOTES
1. Gino Fomaciari et al, “Syphilis in a Renaissance Italian Mummy,” Lancet 2 (1989): 614.
Foreword
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., belongs to a select company of social historians. He has devoted his special scholarly talents to re examine the record of the perduring interaction between man’s ways and changes in his condition since Columbus found the New World. As an exponent of what I should like to call “an thropomedical” historiography, he informs us succinctly about this many-faceted chain of altered conditions of life and well being. His retelling of it is an eloquent testimony to man’s un quenchable drive to explore his habitat and himself, not always wisely, sometimes too well.
The reader is taken on an engrossing intellectual voyage through the facts and interpretations of the salient cultural and bio-social consequences of 1492. He will gain a balanced view of the worldwide exchange and sociopolitical sequelae of the pro tean disease, syphilis, and the major communicable diseases of influenza, smallpox, measles, and pneumonia. He can also learn important historical answers to the complex connection between the international movement of disease and man, the cumulative transformation of world food suplies, and some of the noteworthy changes in world population growth.
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Professor Crosby is commendably precise in delineating the global dispersal and exchange of the leading New World culti gens (e.g., maize, potato, sweet potato, bean, and manioc) and the characteristic Old World plant and animal food staples (e.g., rice, wheat, barley, oat, and fruit crops; cattle, pig, sheep, goat, chicken, and horse). We are also persuaded by his argument link ing the progressive restructuring of national, regional, and local agricultural economies to notable historical declines in food sup ply and to the continuous rise in the quality, availability, and level of basic world food sources.
The author’s thoughtful consideration of the historically sig nificant human and ecological effects of the world exchange of cultigens and micro-organisms should appeal to all serious stu dents of the present human condition. He concludes his well paced history of the Columbian exchange with an evocative reexamination of the most recent, and, in the long run perhaps, most significant human “resultant” of 1492: the post-1800 phe nomenon of vast intercontinental migration.
Is it not ironic that, although worldwide population movements profoundly influence our daily lives, we know far more about the cause, meaning, and consequences of migratory behavior among animals? Should we remain as grossly uninformed about it as at present, we will soon become foolishly uncertain about its prob able role in the future course of man’s way with fellow man. As a provisional antidote to our lack of knowledge in this area, the reader may wish to join me in pondering over Professor Crosby’s observation that today “there are two Europes and two Africas: one on either side of the Atlantic.”
Otto von Mering October 1971
Preface
Nothing can be understood apart from its context, and man is no exception. He is a living entity, dependent on a number of other living entities for food, clothing, and often shelter. Many living things are dependent upon him for the same. Man is a biological entity before he is a Roman Catholic or a capitalist or anything else. Moreover, man’s history did not start when he first began to keep records, nor is it limited to only the aspects of his exis tence of interest to the literati. The first step to understanding man is to consider him as a biological entity which has existed on this globe, affecting, and in turn affected by, his fellow or ganisms, for many thousands of years.
Once we have placed man in this proper spatial and temporal context, we can begin to examine single aspects or events of his history with the assurance—or at least the hope—that the results will have a meaningful relationship to that context and will not merely send us off down the weedy little paths that lead from one antiquarian’s gazebo to another.
Before the historian can judge wisely the politcal skills of hu man groups or the strength of their economies or the meaning of their literatures, he must first know how successful their member
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human beings were at staying alive and reproducing themselves. He must have some idea of how their efforts in accomplishing these tasks affected their environments. It is to the ecologist and not to the philatelist that the historian should look for his model of scholarly virtue.
You may have been taught as children to recite: Columbus sailed the ocean blue In fourteen hundred and ninety-two …
and few of us really get beyond that kind of description of what happened in that year. We acquire more and more facts, which enable us to paint more and more elaborate pictures of that event and the sensational accomplishments of the conquistadors which followed quickly thereafter. These pictures are so hypnotically interesting that most of us never shake loose from their surface fascination to seek the real significance of the events they depict.
Tradition has limited historians in their search for the true sig nificance of the renewed contact between the Old and New Worlds. Even the economic historian may occasionally miss what any ecologist or geographer would find glaringly obvious after a cursory reading of the basic original sources of the sixteenth cen tury: the most important changes brought on by the Columbian voyages were biological in nature.
To illuminate just that point is the raison d’être of this book. It is a brief book and, I hope, an unpretentious one, but I am the first to appreciate that historians, geologists, anthropologists, zoologists, botanists, and demographers will see me as an amateur in their particular fields. I anticipate their criticism by agreeing with them in part and replying that, although the Renaissance is long past, there is great need for Renaissance-style attempts at pulling together the discoveries of the specialists to learn what we know, in general, about life on this planet.
I apologize to Native Americans for my constant use of the ambiguous and innacurate term Indian. I realize that Columbus’s use of that word was an egregious error and that there is no reason
PREFACE I xxvii
except inertia to repeat it; however, the word Amerindian offends me as jerrybuilt, and few of my prospective readers are yet using Native American. For their sake I have continued with the time- hallowed and confusing Indian.
I would like to thank Washington State University for provid ing a grant to support the researching and writing of this book. I must also thank the editors of The Hispanic American Historical Review and The American Anthropologist for permisssion to re publish those parts of Chapters 2 and 4 that first appeared in those journals. I owe a great debt to Barbara S. Crosby, for her per ceptive stylistic criticisms. Last of all but most of all, I thank my whole family—Barbara, Kevin, and Carolyn—who endured so many twinkling little anecdotes about maize and smallpox.
34 I THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE
38. Quoted in D. P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Car goes, 5-6.
39. Cobo, Obras, 2:13; Waldseemüller, Cosmographiae Intro ducilo, 92.
40. Frederick S. Hulse, The Human Species, An Introduction to Physical Anthropology, 346.
41. J. V. Neel and F. M. Salzano, “A Prospectus for Genetic Studies on the American Indians,” 249.
42. A. E. Mourant, Ada Kópec, and Kazimiera Domaniewska- Sobczak, The ABO Groups, Comprehensive Tables and Maps of World Distribution, 268-270.
43. Neel and Salvano, “Genetic Studies,” 253. 44. T. D. Stewart, “A Physical Anthropologist’s View of the
Peopling of the New World,” 262. 45. W. S. Laughlin, “Human Migration and Permanent Occupa
tion in the Bering Sea Area,” 416. 46. Charles W. Brooks, Japanese Wrecks Stranded and Picked
up Adrift in the North Pacific Ocean, 10. 47. Fredeick E. Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals,
436-439. 48. Stewart, “Peopling of the New World,” 265.
Conquistador y Pestilencia 2
Why were the Europeans able to conquer America so easily? In our formal histories and in our legends, we always empha size the ferocity and stubbornness ‘ of the resistance of the Aztec, Sioux, Apache, Tupinamba, Araucanian, and so on, but the really amazing thing about their resistance was its ineffectiveness. The Orientals held out against the Europeans much more successfully; they, of course, had the advantage of vast numbers and a technology much more advanced than that of the Indians. The Africans, however, were not “thou sands of years ahead” of the Indians, except in possessing iron weapons, and yet the great mass of black Africans did not succumb to European conquest until the nineteenth century.
There are many explanations for the Europeans’ success in America: the advantage of steel over stone, of cannon and firearms over bows and arrows and slings; the terrorizing effect of horses on foot soldiers who have never seen such beasts before; the lack of unity among the Indians, even within their empires; the prophecies in Indian mythology about the arrival of white gods. All these factors combined