Saturday, April 19, 2014

1493 - Charles Mann

The coming of Columbus to the Americas would inaugurate a series of biological, economic, and ecological transformations unlike any previously experienced in human history. Much has been written about the social, cultural, and political transformations which cannot be imagined without the bridging of the new and old worlds. Yet what Charles Mann argues in 1493, the companion piece to his 1491, is that the previously underappreciated aspects of what Alfred Crosby termed “the Columbian Exchange” had further reaching consequences in altering the social-ecological world co-inhabited by humans and nonhumans. What we would term “globalization” first took flight in the transportation of different biological entities across the oceans.


Because we are linked together with the ecology of our world, human actions must also be viewed ecologically. Such is what Michel Serres termed the basis for our potential natural contract. Mann examines the implications of changing social and ecological relationships as they were transformed by the linking together of the old and the new world. This is a mighty task to address comprehensively – perhaps more than can be reasonably expected from one volume. The book is wide-ranging, to say the least, and Mann introduces some novel and necessary concepts for how we envision both our past and present. Most incisively the question arises: can we justifiably say that Europe, Europeans, or European culture dominated one side of the Columbian Exchange? Would it mean to suggest such a judgment? Too often, it seems, we assume that Europe expanded to fill the world. What if our assessments are misguided and the meaning of the West was irrevocably altered through contact? What would the implications then be? Mann’s book is too discursive to properly treat any certain aspect of such wide-ranging transformations. Nevertheless, it synthesizes a great deal of information and provides much food for thought.