EXCHANGE Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
30th Anniversary Edition
ALFRED W. CROSBY, JR. Forewords by J. R. McNeill and Otto von Mering
PRAEGER Westport, Connecticut
London
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian exchange.
(Contributions in American studies, no. 2) Bibliography: p. 1. Indians—Diseases. 2. Indians—Agriculture. 3. Medical geography—
History. 4. Geographical distribution of animals and plants. I. Title. E98. D6C7 574.5 73-140916 ISBN 0-8371-5821-4
Chapter 2, originally entitled “Conquistador y Pestilencia: The First New World Pandemic and the Fall of the Great Indian Empires,’’ first published in Hispanic American Historical Review, XLVI1 (August 1967), 321-327. © Duke University Press.
A large part of chapter 4 first published in American Anthropologist, LXXI (April 1969), 218-27.
Copyright © 2003 by Alfred W. Crosby, Jr.
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the author and publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-140916
ISBN: 0-275-98073-1 0-275-98092-8(pbk)
First published in 2003
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
P
In order to keep this title in print and available to the academic community, this edition was produced using digital reprint technology in a relatively short print run. This would not have been attainable using traditional methods. Although the cover has been changed from its original appearance, the text remains the same and all materials and methods used still conform to the highest book-making standards.
TO ALL THE RULEY GIRLS
Contents
List of Illustrations ix Foreword by J. R. McNeill xi Preface to the 2003 Edition xvii Foreword by Otto von Mering xxiii Preface to the 1972 Edition xxv
1 The Contrasts 3 2 Conquistador y Pestilencia 35 3 Old World Plants and Animals in the New World 64 4 The Early History of Syphilis: A Reappraisal 122 5 New World Foods and Old World Demography 165 6 The Columbian Exchange Continues 208
Bibliography 222 Bibliography to the 2003 Edition 261 Index 2T1
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List of Illustrations
King Ferdinand Looks Across the Atlantic 2 Distribution of Blood Group Gene A 24-25 Distribution of Blood Group Gene B 26-27 Distribution of Blood Group Gene O 28-29 The Conquest of Mexico 128 Smallpox Strikes the Indians of Mexico 128 Preparation and Use of Guaiacum 129 Treponema pallidum 129 Durer’s The Syphilitic 130 Sixteenth-century Drawing of Maize 131 Sixteenth-century Drawing of the Tomato Plant 131 Slaves on the Voyage to America 132 The Immigrants 133 Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters 134 Indians Working in the Potato Fields 134 Portrait of John Gerard 135 Irish Famine Sufferers Searching for Potatoes 136 Sixteenth-century Drawing of a Buffalo 136
ix
Foreword
In A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, Aldo Leopold, the American naturalist, essayist, and godfather of modem envi ronmentalism, called for a rewriting of history from an ecological perspective. A generation of historians ignored him. In the social ferment and intellectual tumult of the 1960s, Alfred W. Crosby came, by his own path, to the same conclusion as Leopold. But he then took the further step of actually writing a book that took seriously the importance of ecological shifts in human affairs. You hold that book in your hands.
Leopold would have been pleased; Crosby’s professional col leagues were less than pleased. The Columbian Exchange had difficulty finding a publisher until Greenwood published it in 1972. The reviews in scholarly journals ranged from ungenerous to polite, and many journals did not bother to review it. Crosby’s colleagues at his own university expressed some skepticism as to whether this was really history or not, but the book refused to go away. It dealt in a clear, compact manner with subjects that seemed ever more important, which helped it to find its way onto reading lists at many colleges across the United States. It was also translated into Spanish and Italian.
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My first encounter with the book came on a rainy afternoon in 1982 when I picked it off of a shoulder-high shelf in an office I temporarily occupied. I read it in one gulp, neglecting the pos sibility of supper. Only rarely can I recall precisely the circum stances in which I read a book long ago, but The Columbian Exchange, and the sense of excitement it provoked in me, etched itself into my memory. History has never seemed quite the same for me since. Perhaps I was unusually receptive, having been steeped for many, many months in works concerning the consti tutional histories of the British Commonwealth.
Many others found new vistas on American, Latin American, European, African, and world history in Crosby’s book. It became one of the foundational texts for the field of environmental his tory, which emerged in the U.S. in the 1970s. Mainstream his torians gradually took notice too, and by the 1990s the notion of the Columbian Exchange had worked its way into several text books on American and world history.
The phrase “The Columbian Exchange” did as well. It is not often that a historian coins a new phrase that becomes standard shorthand for some complex phenomenon, but today almost every practicing historian in the U.S., and many overseas, recognize the words “The Columbian Exchange.” Most could give a fair ren dition of what Crosby meant by the phrase, even those who had not read the book. Whereas thirty years ago Crosby’s ideas met with indifference from most historians, neglect from many pub lishers, and hostility from at least some reviewers, they now fig ure prominently in conventional presentations of modem history.
Crosby, of course, built on the work of previous scholars. He did not poke around in archives looking for documents dealing with measles, sheep, and bluegrass. But geographers were interested in crop dispersals. Anthropologists and a few historians tried to make sense of the epidemics and the demographic catastrophe that befell the Americas after 1492. Readers will find their works in Crosby’s footnotes. No one had put these pieces together be
FOREWORD I xiii
fore, and no one had written on these subjects with such wit and verve.1
So for historians Crosby framed a new subject. He pursued the issue of ecological factors in his 1986 book Ecological Imperi alism, which looked at some other parts of the world, including Australia and New Zealand, and argued for a systematic, asym metrical impact of biological exchange which helped Europeans dominate much of the world in recent centuries. Others have en riched his account by drawing attention to some of the West African components of the Columbian Exchange, such as the rice that underpinned the plantation economy of the Carolina lowlands after 1690.2
Crosby did not discuss Africa very much in The Columbian Exchange, but he had a very good reason. In the 1960s, the his toriography of Africa was just taking shape, and information of the sort he needed was not as easily available as it became. He explored the importance of American crops for modem Africa, but African crops, diseases, and people formed a crucial part— in some places the dominant part—of the Old World’s biotic donations to the Americas. It is well to remember that before 1880 most of the people who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas were Africans, and before 1820 four out of every five transatlantic migrants hailed from Africa. Although they came in chains, parts of their flora and fauna came with them, including African rice, okra, yams, black-eyed peas, millets, sorghum, sesame, and the pathogens that cause yellow fever and malaria. Coffee came from Africa, although not in slave ships. Africans also brought their highly effective techniques of growing rice and their not so ef fective means of healing yellow fever and malaria sufferers.
Crosby’s legacy lies not in the comprehensiveness of chroni cling the Columbian Exchange, but in the establishment of a per spective, a model for understanding ecological and social events. Indeed, with a little imagination one can find exchanges of the sort Crosby illuminated almost everywhere. Most of these are shrouded in the mists of time and will never be understood in
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the detail that Crosby was able to provide for the Columbian Exchange. Long before Columbus, mariners on the Indian Ocean learned to navigate the monsoon winds and sail between the coasts of East Africa and India. They carried crops, pests, weeds, and diseases back and forth, bringing sorghum, pearl millet, and finger millet to India. Similar exchanges on the monsoon winds took place between the archipelagoes of southeast Asia and China. Champa rice, an early-ripening variety, made southern China much more productive from the thirteenth century onwards and helped underwrite the prosperity and power of Song and Ming China. More recently, as Crosby explored in his later book, a large-scale, if rather one-sided, biological exchange took place between Pacific Islands and Australia on the one hand, and Eur asia on the other. This took place after the navigations of Captain James Cook in the late eighteenth century, uniting previously separate ecosystems with dramatic results that paralleled the Columbian Exchange. The antipodes had no equivalent of the potato or maize to give to the world (eucalyptus trees are perhaps their most successful biological export), but for the peoples and ecosystems of Australia, New Zealand, or Tahiti, the Cook Exchange, as it might be called, proved jarring in the extreme.
Parallels to the Columbian Exchange occurred on land as well. When caravan traffic first sustained commercial exchanges be tween China and the Mediterranean world at around 100 b.c.e., seeds, spores, and germs went along for the bumpy ride. Cherries, and perhaps smallpox and measles, came to the Roman world; China acquired grapes, alfalfa, donkeys, camels, and also perhaps smallpox and measles, among other items.
Something similar must have happened when caravans crossed the Sahara Desert between the Maghreb and the West African sahel. An African Columbus, whose name we will never know, inaugurated regular traffic sometime before 500 c.E. Horses came to West Africa, with revolutionary political consequences that roughly paralleled the impact of horses upon the Plains Indian of North America, although the difficulty of raising horses in West
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Africa altered the situation somewhat. Nonetheless, the military use of horses, especially against peoples who did not have them, helped reorganize West Africa, giving rise to large empires such as Ghana, Mali, and Songhai.
Trans-Saharan caravans probably also exchanged pathogens between West Africa and the Mediterranean world. The syphilis outbreak of the 1490s, which may have resulted from an import from the Americas, could also represent a mutation of West Af rican yaws. In the reverse direction, some of the crowd and herd diseases of Eurasia may have entered West Africa in the tissues of camel drivers. Rats and fleas may have crossed the Sahara this way too, bringing bubonic plague to the sahel in the great pan demic of the fourteenth century.
These biological exchanges, if indeed they occurred as I sug gest, helped shape the history of Eurasia and Africa as surely as the Columbian Exchange. Their impacts were perhaps smaller in scale and, at least at the moment, less well documented than the impacts that Crosby put in the spotlight. But perhaps one day they too will find their Crosby, who will write books that would both please Aldo Leopold’s ghost and change someone’s vision of history on a damp afternoon.
J. R. McNeill
NOTES
1. A predecessor of sorts was Hans Zinsser’s delightful Rats, Lice, and History (1934), a medical doctor’s irreverent biography of typhus.
2. E.g. Judith Carney, Black Rice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer sity Press, 2001).
Preface to the 2003 Edition
I don’t read my books after they come out because publication is a hard freeze that makes imprecisions, lapses in taste, and mis takes permanent and painful to the touch. However, in prepara tion for writing this preface I pulled The Columbian Exchange down from the shelf and did go through it. Flaws? Oh, yes; I’ll talk over a few of them with you. But it is a good book; I’ll talk some about that, too.
First, my apologies. Thirty years ago I used “man” to mean all members of the Homo sapiens species. So did most people, but it was stupid then and it is now. I used the word “race” as if I actually knew what it meant. I referred to the Maya as the most “sensitive” of all the indigenous peoples of the Americas without realizing how patronizing that is. Was I implying that Cortés might have invited the Maya for cocktails, but certainly not the Aztecs?
And so on. I invite you to make your own selection of yester day’s plastic blossoms pressed between the pages of my book.
I made some flat-out mistakes, some of them pretty good. All smallpox epidemics in previously uninfected populations did not produce thirty percent mortality rates. Only the worst epidemics
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did that. The indigenous inhabitants of the Antilles were not al most all extinct by the mid-sixteenth century, only those of the Greater Antilles. The Caribs hung on in the Lesser Antilles. An cestral wheat was not, like the ancestors of maize, markedly in ferior in yield to its cultivated descendents. Wild wheat was awkward to harvest but very productive, which may be one of the reasons why the peoples of southwest Asia got the jump on the rest of humanity in fanning, urbanization, etc.
x3 My biggest mistake was a matter of general ignorance at the time and I like it a lot. On page 218 I announced, ex cathedra, that there has been no extreme and permanent physical change affecting the entire globe in half a billion years. Since the pub lication of The Columbian Exchange, geologists and paleontolo gists have amassed evidence that an asteroid or some such object hit the Earth about sixty-five million years ago, killing off the dinosaurs, clearing the way for mammals, and making a fool out of me.
The chapter which has weathered the last thirty years the least successfully, though it has not been completely superseded, is number four, ‘The Early History of Syphilis: A Reappraisal.” The geographical homeland of the disease was a mystery when I wrote of it and still is, whatever the newspapers proclaim, as they do at least once every five years. Did syphilis exist in the New World before 1492? There are a good many skeletons with dis torted and scarred bones that seem to indicate that it did. But by “it” do we mean venereal syphilis or one of the nonvenereal “syphilises,” or are they all just manifestations of the same thing?
Did “it” exist in the Old World before 1492? There are pre- Columbian skeletons in the Old World similar to those termed syphilitic in the New World, but only a very few. Their tiny number doesn’t, of course, prove that their wretched owners did not have syphilis, but if they did the disease must have been of a different character, certainly less communicable, than sixteenth century Europe’s venereal pox. Either that, or before 1492 Old World people must have been close to one hundred percent cel-
PREFACE TO THE 2003 EDITION | XÍX
ibate or monogamous, an admirable, and therefore unlikely, state of affairs.
To my knowledge the oldest cadaver thus far proved syphilitic by actual evidence of the presence of Treponema pallidum in its tissues is that of Maria d’Aragona of Naples. This noblewoman died in 1568, long after Columbus sailed, so her tissues tell us no more than that the disease was circulating in Europe in her lifetime, which we knew for sure anyway.1 Unfortunately, trep onemal traces fade with time and any in pre-Columbian bones would probably be so faint as to defy investigators using present technology.
We don’t know where venereal syphilis started. It could have come from here or there or here and there and have leaped in deadlines when mild strains of treponemas met and crossed the Atlantic in 1492, or its increase in virulence circa 1500 may have had nothing whatsoever to do with Columbus and simply have been a coincidence.
Anyway, I should not have ennobled syphilis with a whole chapter as if it were Montezuma’s Revenge. Its Old World debut was spectacular and, like all things venereal, fascinating, but it was not a history-maker like the plague in the fourteenth century or smallpox in the sixteenth century. I cast it in a major role because I was uneasy about so many diseases crossing west over the Atlantic and none crossing east. I was like the geographers who believed for generations, before Captain Cook proved oth erwise, that there must be a continent, a Terra Australis, in the far, far south vast enough to balance all off of Eurasia, the bulk of Africa, and North America. Chapter four was my try for a sort of epidemiological-geographical symmetry. The aforesaid geog raphers were wrong, and so was I. There was little symmetry in the exchange of diseases between the Old and New Worlds, and there are few factors as influential in the history of the last half millennium as that.
I should have no more than nodded to the French Pox and included not pages but a whole chapter on the crops of the post-
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Columbian slave plantations, particularly southeast Asia’s sugar and America’s tobacco. European desire (addiction might be a better word) for the sweetener served as a motivation to transport millions of Africans across the Atlantic. Tobacco, which has killed many more than syphilis, is the true Montezuma’s Re venge.
But enough of my self-abasement, however noble. Let’s proceed to what is worthwhile about my book. It is about something so huge that we often overlook it, much as we tend to be uncon scious of the air we breathe, and that is the full story of our species since the melting back of the continental glaciers. That is to say, it is the story of the divergent evolution of the ecosystems and associated societies, isolated by rising sea levels, and when they did meet, the catastrophic and bountiful effects they had on each other. Those effects are so great as to defy containment in our usual intellectual divisions: archaeology, history, botany, medicine, demography, etc.
Thirty years ago I was so naive that I thought I could function usefully in all these disciplines. Naivité, if insisted upon, can guide you through the trees to some very interesting forests, which it did in my case.
I doubt that I would have gone hiking there but for the tumble and tumult of the 1960s (which in defiance of the decimal system lasted to the Watergate crisis of the early seventies.) I had studied for a doctorate in United States history in the starchy 1950s. I had been trained by men (always) who, most of them, were vet erans of the Second World War, men who rarely entertained doubts about the basic goodness of the society for which they had fought. For these men American history was political before all else and came in four-year presidential compartments occa sionally illuminated by wars, which the good guys always won. The good guys consisted of people who looked quite a lot like me. History was the story of people like me (Americans or, if not so blessed, at least European) and was, all and all, a record of progress, and would continue to be.
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Then, just as I started teaching, along came the Civil Rights struggle and the Black Power movement, which taught me that people who didn’t look like me had been appallingly mistreated by people who did look like me. Then came the Vietnam War, which taught me that the world was much more than North Amer ica and Europe, that people who looked like me did not neces- ( , – sarily win all the wars, and that there were big pieces missing from the kind of history I was teaching.