A Globalizing World, 1450-1750s

Although unaware of it at the time, Columbus’s unexpected landfall in the Americas in 1492 would change the course of human history. Over ensuing centuries, mar­itime trade came to span the globe, knitting together the fates of peoples and ecosystems around the world as commodities, peoples, plants, animals, and pathogens moved with increasing ease and speed.

Thanks to later historians, Columbus posthumously gave his name to one of the key drivers of this transformation—the Columbian exchange. Fundamentally, this involved the redistribution of people, plants, pathogens, and animals between the New and Old Worlds. A flood of Old World biota into the Americas matched the spectacular radiation of New World crops and other lifeforms into the Old. The earliest and most profound of these environmental changes came about in the Americas, following colonization first by Spanish and Portuguese, and then other European powers, such as the Dutch, English, and French.^[1174]

While utilizing private capital, imperial powers directed and benefited from re­source commodification. New World nature enabled Iberian maritime empires to evolve into substantial land empires. For example, Spain controlled the New World galleon trade and the supply of land and resources, provided military support and administrators, and levied taxes.

One of their most significant and devastating introductions was uninten­tional: colonists unwittingly introduced a host of pathogens against which indig­enous peoples had no immunity: Old World diseases (smallpox, measles, typhus, mumps, etc.) and violence reduced America's pre-1492 population of perhaps 100­125 million to about 5 to 10 percent of that by 1650. This precipitous demographic collapse speeded up conquest and reshaped America's ecologies, but it also created significant labor shortages. It enabled forests to recolonize “throughout most of Atlantic America,”^[1176] as indigenous ecological systems fell apart or disappeared en­tirely. In their place, came a variety of newly introduced plants and animals.

In Mexico, from 1519, in a process of “animal imperialism,” the Spanish replaced intensive indigenous agricultural systems with an extensive agropastoral economy. This became possible because Mexico's population declined from 15-25 million to approximately 1 million by the early 1600s, owing to disease and military takeover. While the Spanish also introduced a host of new plants—notably fruit trees and vegetables—and engaged in monocropping of European and New World varieties, pastoralism dominated Mexico's landscape. In the 1600s, some 7-10 million ani­mals grazed one-quarter of New Spain.^[1177]

Such animal invaders had profound impacts on humans and ecosystems alike. As Elinor Melville pointed out, “[m]eat animals converted previously unused grass and forage to protein,” storing it for use during drought conditions. Beasts of burden pro­vided motive power that extended the range of imperialists and pulled their plows. Animal manure fertilized fields, and their hides and meat provided a primary source of export revenue.^[1178] Animals and other species also “put in motion a vast number of changes that were augmented and complicated by the settlement process.”^[1179] Un­adapted to hooved animals or their manuring, the soils changed composition under the impact of animals.

The Spanish and Portuguese also plundered New World gold and silver, relying for labor on local Indians, forced and waged, and later African slaves. A chance discovery in 1545 turned Potosi (Bolivia) into a proto-industrial boomtown. Resembling a scene from Dante's inferno, dirt-coated men dug up silver ore as others, working in billowing smoke, fed timber from nearby forests into the hungry smelters. Within a decade, Potosi's once lushly forested hill was a scarred, denuded nightmare landscape. The industry itself collapsed once miners had exhausted the easily won, high-grade ore. It revived in the mid-1570s, thanks to the use of mer­cury, which “had a catastrophic impact on the environment, the people, and their communities, as well as a transformatory [sic] effect on the global economy.”^[1181] Huancavelica—2,000 kilometers northwest—provided Potosi with most of the mercury necessary to win silver through amalgamation, but its use precipitated “one of history's most massive and sustained cases of mercury intoxication.”^[1182] Potosi miners burned an estimated 39,000 metric tons of mercury over 1574-1810, poisoning the surrounding air, water, soil, plants, and animals.^[1183] Potosi's human population—at one time, 160,000—absorbed mercury from the surrounding en­vironment, plants, and animals, and developed a variety of maladies from mad­ness and insomnia, to hair loss and depression, and eventually death. Poor diet and abysmal living and working conditions facilitated the spread of pathogens, adding to the brutality of life in Potosi.

Latin American mines provided 80 percent of global silver production from 1550 to 1800. This was vital to the developing world economy, after China had moved from a paper money-system to accepting un-coined silver as the new monetary standard.^[1184] Spain used New World silver and gold to fund its increasingly expensive wars, support its colonies there and in Southeast Asia, and pay for luxuries from the East, especially manufactured goods from China, which also reached South American shores.

Another profoundly transformative component of the Columbian exchange involved agricultural plantations. In the Caribbean and along America's eastern seaboard, European powers imposed monocultures of export crops, especially sugar and tobacco, and later cotton, each of whose value was realized thousands of miles away in foreign markets. Representing “a short-term strategy for turning sunlight and soil nutrients into money as fast as possible,”^[1186] the system exploited the (initial) bounty of New World soils and the labor of imported slaves and ani­mals to establish new crops and processing systems. Vessels—umbilical cords in this inequitable and destructive system—brought slaves from Africa to the New World, taking raw products to Europe (and thence to trading partners elsewhere) and returning finished goods. Another triangle connected North America, Africa, and the Caribbean: North American rum financed the transportation of African slaves, who worked on Caribbean plantations producing molasses for rum-making.^[1187]

Slavery peaked in the eighteenth century and was progressively stopped, though not totally, in the nineteenth. Slavery drained Africa, in particular, of its labor. Slaving wars destroyed entire states and cities, disrupting or making cultivation im- possible.^[1188] Some 12-15 million^[1189] enslaved Africans reached the New World. Deaths in slave-taking wars and under the Middle Passage's appalling conditions were many times greater: at least three people died for every enslaved person reaching the New World, sometimes as high as 10 people for every one.^[1190]

Sugar plantations transformed the Caribbean and represented a conjuncture of global trade, as sugar was added to a host of new drinks becoming available in Europe: tea (China), coffee (North Africa), and cocoa (New World).^[1191] Caribbean sugar exports to Europe averaged 186,241 metric tons each year over 1770-1774; increasing to 271,102 over 1815-1819.^[1192] Although begun by the Portuguese, other colonial powers moving into the region—English, French, and Dutch—rapidly de­veloped plantations in the seventeenth century.

On Barbados, sugar growers' demand for land and wood precipitated wholesale deforestation by the mid-1660s, save for private woodlots. Extinctions, soil ero­sion, soil compaction, and even climatic changes resulted on this small island (440 square km). Production declined rapidly by the mid-1680s, despite attempts to con­serve soil and woods, and annually replant sugarcane. A high and dense popula­tion and a landmass almost totally devoted to sugar made Barbados dependent on enormous outside inputs of energy and nutrients—livestock (New World), wood (Baltic), food (Americas), and above all humans (Africa).^[1193]

In contrast, Jamaica's much larger size (almost 11,000 square km) gave it greater self-sufficiency in energy, food, and livestock than Barbados. Jamaica also sus­tained a more varied land use and ecology that enabled sugar producers to leave land fallow. Conquered by the English from the Spanish in 1655, these factors enabled Jamaica to become the Caribbean's leading eighteenth-century producer of sugarcane, averaging over 42,000 metric tons of sugar annually from 1770 to 1774, nearly doubling by 1815-1819.^[1194] The island had indigo, cotton, coffee, and ginger plantations, and was large enough to raise livestock to provide food and motive power. Although it did not suffer from the same degree of ecological problems as Barbados, humans depleted turtle stocks to the point of extinction.^[1195]

Wholesale ecological and demographic transformation resulting from planta­tion economies and other activities had unanticipated impacts on European col­onization by producing disease regimes conducive to malaria and yellow fever. According to John McNeill, “[plantations and the ports that sent sugar to Europe made ideal incubators and larders for” the mosquito carrier of yellow fever, Aedes aegypti, of African origin.^[1196] The lowland Caribbean's warm temperatures enabled mosquitoes to survive year-round.

McNeill shows that yellow fever hindered eighteenth-century British and French colonization of the Greater Caribbean, such that a degree of immunity from yellow fever actually protected some of Spain's colonies from further con­quest. For example, yellow fever (and malaria) thwarted Britain's amphibious as­sault on Spanish Cartagena in 1741. Overall, 74 percent of Britain's 10,000 troops sent to the West Indies over 1840-1842 had perished by late 1842; only 6 percent in fighting.^[1198]

As McNeill shows, malaria spread quicker than yellow fever because several species of mosquito capable of hosting the parasite already lived in the Americas, whereas yellow fever required both the disease and its mosquito vector to arrive in the New World. Malaria came with African slaves, whose bloodstreams carried the plasmodia. Environmental change associated with plantations encouraged malaria's spread. Deforestation and soil erosion created brackish swamps. Introduced cattle enabled mosquitoes to reproduce more rapidly and live longer, as did favorable warmer, wetter conditions associated with the Little Ice Age's end. But above all, irrigated rice agriculture's calm, warm, enriched waters created ideal conditions for mosquito reproduction, especially during the rainy season.^[1199]

The Columbian exchange propelled products, people, plants, animals, and pathogens across continents. For example, Africans introduced okra, pigeon peas, bananas and plantains, and some other crops. They brought knowledge of ideal cul­tivation techniques for peanuts (similar to African groundnuts), sweet potatoes (much like African yams), and above all, rice. Slaves introduced West African rice (Oryza glaberrima), but also applied their knowledge to growing India-originated rice in the United States, allowing it to become a major rice-producer. American rice-cooking owes many techniques and dishes to this exchange.^[1200] Introduced New World products like sugar and New World food plants like potatoes—along with other such foods, such as cod from the Atlantic New World^[1201]—revolutionized diets across Eurasia, providing vital caloric inputs, and changing ecologies and increasing population.

The arrival of these crops could not have come at a more propitious time: the Little Ice Age global temperature plunge narrowed the geographical range of foodplants, leading to total abandonment of some varieties in some places. Cold, wet summers imperiled harvests. Famine stalked Eurasia, fanning social and political unrest. Colder weather meant fewer animals and fish, but intensified overharvesting as hungry humans hunted or fished out resources. Settlement patterns changed. Greenland became too cold and was abandoned. Icelanders gave up cereal cultiva­tion altogether.^[1202]

Famine stalked China's north and northwest, too, as the Little Ice Age pushed the monsoon too far south, contributing to social and political instability. In China, “New World food crops such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, and peanuts... served as brakes on starvation during harvest failures of the more preferred staples, rice and wheat.”^[1203] Introduced maize and sweet potatoes enabled previously marginal land to be brought into production:^[1204]

Chillies, tomatoes, papayas, New World squash (nan gua), and similar crops had truly revolutionary effects on vitamin nutrition in the warmer parts of the country. They removed a serious roadblock to population increase by providing readily grown, easily stored sources of vitamins A and C.^[1205]

New World crops, such as tobacco, also sustained South China's growing economy, despite government protestations that a cash-crop economy made a population much more vulnerable in times of dearth.^[1206] New World crops, in combination with eighteenth-century frontier expansion, enabled China's highly efficient, small­family agro-ecosystem to continue as long as possible, and to rely on biological (rather than fossil-fuel) inputs to feed its population.^[1207]

This marked the beginning of the end for the biological Old World. Not just China, but so too the Spanish Americas were facing an ecological crisis, exacerbated by long-term environmental destruction and a worsening climate from the 1700s.