1493

In hindsight, 1492 might have been a good point at which to reset the calendar. Traditionally, the year in which Columbus discovered America is seen as the moment Europe began to shape a New World. Today it looks more like the start of a process that has stitched the drifting continents back together: 1492 was the Year Zero of globalisation, and 1493 was Year One.

It has been a thrilling and frequently catastrophic ride for humankind ever since, and science writer Charles C Mann’s excitement never flags as he tells his breathtaking story. His account enshrines Columbus as a founding father of globalisation, and recognises that its effects have been as much biological as economic. Here he borrows from the historian Alfred W Crosby, who in 1972 coined the phrase “Columbian Exchange” to describe the traffic of species between continents. The term is elegant, but the exchange was often anything but equitable. Europe sent malaria to the Americas; in return the Americas gave Europe a cure, the Andean cinchona bark from which quinine is derived.

Mann’s argument, in which human history is considered in the light of ecology and vice versa, adopts the approach epitomised by the scientist Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. (It also follows on from Mann’s earlier book 1491, which was about the Americas before Columbus crossed the Atlantic.) But although much of his narrative is inevitably devoted to the relentless violence that enforced the Columbian Exchange, and the pestilences that accompanied it, his sources of inspiration are often closer to home. How, he wonders, did a variety of tomato bred in Ukraine come to be cultivated in New England? And how did tomatoes travel north from the Andes to Mexico, where they were brought to a level of palatability that has made them indispensable to the cuisine of, among other places, Italy? In the Philippines, children sing a song about an idealised garden that lists 18 plants, every one of which was introduced from Africa, the Americas or east Asia. “Far from being an exemplar of age-old custom,” Mann observes, “it is a polyglot, cosmopolitan, thoroughly contemporary artifact.”

While Columbian Exchange can produce harmony and diversity in a Filipino garden, its effects are more often like those of Columbus himself: colossally disruptive, overwhelming, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Microbes devastate populations whose immune systems are unprepared for them; pests irrupt into habitats that contain nothing to check or balance them. Mann calls the post-Columbian era the “Homogenocene”, which conjures visions of the world as one immense golf course, interspersed by parking lots. But the world will never be homogenous. It will always have different landscapes and climates – indeed, it is likely to gain a range of new climates in the relatively near future. Genes mutate and, as Mann demonstrates so vividly in his survey of the Columbian mayhem, humans are always coming up with new ways to upset the balance of nature inadvertently. The planet is in for continuing disruption rather than homogenisation.

Perhaps because he is such an engaging storyteller, Mann can sometimes get carried away with an argument. He speculates that malaria may have prolonged the American Civil War by hampering the Union forces that had to advance into malarial zones of the South. Since the Union hardened its stance against slavery as the conflict became more protracted, Mann suggests that malaria might even take part of the credit for the Emancipation Proclamation. The statistics he cites are startling – infection rates never less than 40 per cent, 361,968 soldiers infected in one year. But although they demonstrate the Union army’s meticulous record-keeping, they do not establish that the northern forces were hit harder by malaria than their Confederate enemies. A prolonged investigation might, but Mann moves swiftly on: he has a world to tour.

His reports are a testament to humankind’s energy, but not to its rationality. Time and again a shipload of settlers is extinguished within weeks of landfall, yet fresh cargoes arrive with the regularity of buses. Rubber fever seizes the industrialising world and defies the laws of supply and demand: the price triples even though production increases by an order of magnitude. Globalisation starts to look like a vortex of fevers, both microbial and metaphorical.

And yet, as Mann observes, there is grandeur in this view of the past that looks afresh at the different parts of the world and the parts each played in shaping it. His phrasing echoes the close of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, affirming the power of a vision that sets human endeavours within the workings of nature as a whole.

As the effects of the Columbian Exchange combine with those of the Industrial Revolution to alter the Earth’s climate, embracing this view of life becomes increasingly urgent. Unlike the colonists who had no notion of the microbes they brought with them, we can now anticipate the consequences of what we are doing.

Marek Kohn is author of ‘Turned Out Nice: How the British Isles Will Change as the World Heats Up’ (Faber)

1493: How Europe’s Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth, by Charles C Mann, Granta, RRP£25, 535 pages