1493 by Mann
Ref: Charles Mann (2011). 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. NY Publishing.
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Summary
A history of how the world changed following Columbus’ 1492 discovery of the Americas.
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Human Psychology
Humans have a propensity to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end.
The same people who want to satisfy their desires also resists the consequences of satisfaction. They want to have what everyone else has, but still be aggressively themselves- a contradictory enterprise.
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—The Columbian Exchange—
Sugarcane
Sugarcane: Initially domesticated in New Guinea ~10 Ka. As much as half of the plant by weight consists of sucrose (table sugar- C12H22O11). The sugarcane in farm fields is a hodgepodge of hybrids from two species in the grass genus Saccharum.
Sugarcane is a tall, tough Asian grass, vaguely reminiscent of its distant cousin bamboo. Plantations burn the crop before harvest to prevent the knifelike leaves from slashing workers. Swinging machetes into the hard, soot-smeared cane under the tropical sun, field hands quickly splattered themselves head to foot with a sticky mixture of dust, ash, and cane juice. The cut stalks are crushed in the mill and the juice boiled down in great copper kettles enveloped in smoke and steam; workers ladled the resultant hot syrup into clay pots, where the pure sugar crystallized out as it cooled. Most of the leftover molasses was fermented and distilled to produce rum, a process that required stoking yet another big fire under yet another infernal cauldron.
Sugar: Refers to a few dozen types of carbohydrates with similar chemical structures and properties.
Sucrose: A type of sugar: one molecule of glucose (the type of sugar that provides energy for most animal bodies) joined to one molecule of fructose (the main sugar in honey and fruit juice).
Tobacco
Tobacco (N. tabac): A plant that is a sponge for N and K. Because the entire plant is removed from the soil, harvesting and exporting tobacco was like taking those nutrients from the Earth and putting them on ships. “Tobacco has an almost unique ability to suck the life out of the soil. In this area, where the soils can be pretty fragile, it can ruin the land in a couple of years.” Constantly wearing out fields, the colonists had to keep moving to new land.
Tobacco was the magnet that pulled Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium falciparum across the oceans.
Tubers (Potatoes)
1769-1770: unseasonable rain and snow led to crop failures in parts of Eastern France, a local academy announced a competition for "Plants that could in times of Scarcity be substituted for Regular Food to Nourish Man." Five of the seven entries touted the potato. Four years after the famine, one of the first acts of the newly anointed King, Louis XVI, was to lift price controls on grain. Bread prices shot up, sparking what became known as the flour war. Parmentier tirelessly advocated the potato as the solution. Proclaiming that France would stop fighting over bread if the French would eat potatoes. He presented an all-potato dinner to high-society guests. Supposedly one guest was Thomas Jefferson, then US ambassador to France. He is said to have liked one potato dish so much that he served it in the white House. In this way Jefferson introduced the US to french fries.
Today the potato is the 5th most important crop worldwide, surpassed in harvest volume only by sugarcane, wheat, maize, and rice. Originally it came from the Andes.
Many scholars believe that the introduction of S. Tuberosum to Europe was a key moment in history. The German Historian Joachim Radkau was blunter: the key environmental innovations of the 18c, he wrote, were "the potato and coitus interruptus").
The average yearly harvest in Eastern England from an acre of wheat, barley, and oats was between 1300-1500 lbs. By contrast, man acre of potatoes yielded more than 25,000lbs. Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result was, in terms of calories, to double Europe's food supply.
The potato can better sustain life than any other food when eaten as the sole item of the diet. It has all essential nutrients except vitamins A and D.
If potatoes ever became, "like rice in some countries, the common and favorite vegetable food of the people," he wrote, "the same quantity of cultivated land would maintain a much greater number of people." Ineluctably, Smith believed, "population would increase."
The potato was helping to lift populations in Europe- the more potatoes, the more people. In the century after the potato's introduction Europe's numbers roughly doubled.
According to the two researchers "most conservative estimate", S. Tuberosum was responsible for about an eighth of Europe's population increase.
Agriculture, Farming, & Pesticides
The Agro-Industrial complex rests on three pillars: improved crops, high intensity fertilizers, and factory-made pesticides.
Beetle populations have high heterozygosity. Confronted with new circumstances, they adapt quickly.
Swiss farmers spent the second world war testing an entirely new type of pesticide on the potato beetle: DDT, a chemical bug killer with unprecedented range and sweep.
Many researchers believe that the chemical assault is counterproductive. Strong pesticides kill not only target species but their insect enemies as well. When the targets species develop resistance, they often find their prospects better than before -everything that had previously kept them in check is gone. In this way, paradoxically, insecticides can end up increasing the number of harmful insects unless farmers control them with yet more chemical weapons. "Secondary pests," insects that previously were controlled by some of the species killed off by insect tends, also profit. Here, too, industry has a solution: more pesticides.
Irish Potato Famine: For the potato, the solution was more consequential: Paris Green. Paris Green's insecticidal properties were supposedly discovered by a farmer who finished painting his shutters and in a foot of annoyance threw the remaining paint on his beetle -infested potato plants. The emerald pigment in the paint was Paris Green, made largely from arsenic and copper. Developed in the late 18th century, it was common in paints, fabrics, and wallpapers. Farmers diluted it heavily with flour and dusted it on their potatoes or mixed it with lots of water and sprayed. Paris Green was a simple, reliable solution: buy the pigment, mix in flour or water according to the manufacturer's instructions, apply it with a sprinkler or dust box, and watch potato beetles die. It arsenic killed potato beetles, who not try it on other pests. Arsenic killed them all. The dust changed to liquid; the copper-arsenic mix changed to a lead-arsenic mix and then a calcium-arsenic mix. In the mid 1880's a French researcher discovered that the Bordeaux Mixture - copper sulfate. Spraying potatoes with Paris Green, then copper sulfate, would eliminate both the beetle and the blight.
Pathogens & Disease
Yellow Fever Virus: Originated in Africa; spread by the mosquito Aedes aegypti. The virus spends most of its time in the mosquito, using human beings only to pass from one insect to the next. Typically, it remains in the body no more than two weeks. During this time, it drills into huge numbers of cells, takes over their functioning, and uses the hijacked genetic material to produce billions of copies of itself. These flood the bloodstream and are picked up by biting aegypti. For imperfectly understood reasons this cellular invasion usually has little impact on children. Adults are hit by massive internal bleeding. The blood collects and coagulates in the stomach. Sufferers vomit it blackly up- the signature symptom of Yellow Fever. Another symptom is jaundice, which gave rise to the diseases nickname of "yellow jack" (which was a flag flown by quarantined ships). The virus kills about half of its victims.
Malaria (Plasmodium): A tropical pathogen that is exquisitely sensitive to temperature. Around 72f it hits a threshold; the parasite needs 3w at this temperature to reproduce, which approaches the life expectancy of its mosquito host; below 66f it effectively cannot survive. Vivax, less fussy, has a threshold of about 59f. In the body, Plasmodium apparently users biochemical signaling to synchronize its actions: most of the infected RBCs release their parasites at about the same time. Victims experience these eruptions as huge, coordinated assaults- a single infection can generate 10B new parasites. Overwhelmed by the deluge, the immune system sets of paroxysms of intense chills and fever. Eventually it beats back the attack, but within days a new assault occurs; some of the previous waves of parasites, which have hidden themselves in RBCs, have produced a new generation of Plasmodium, billions strong. The cycle repeats until the immune system at last fights off the parasite. Or seems to- Plasmodium cells can secrete themselves in other corners of the body, from which they emerge a few weeks later. Half a dozen episodes of chills and fever, a bit of respite, then another wave of attacks: the badge of full blow malaria.
Plasmodium falciparum: Inserts itself inside RBCs and, unlike vivax, alter them so that they stick to the walls of the tiny capillaries inside the kidneys, lungs, brain, and other organs. This hides the infected cells from the immune system but slowly cuts off circulation as the cells build up on the capillary walls like layers of paint on an old building. Untreated, the circulation stoppage leads to organ failure, which kills as many as one out of ten falciparum sufferers.
Plasmodium vivax: Inserts itself inside RBCs using the Duffy antigen as a receptor and fools the blood cell into thinking it is one of the intended compounds and thereby gaining entrance.
Researchers generally agree that human malaria did not exist in the Americas before 1492.
When Europeans brought smallpox and influenza to the Americas, they set off epidemics: sudden outbursts that shot through Indian towns and villages, then faded. Malaria, by contrast, became endemic, an ever-present, debilitating presence in the landscape.
Unlike the acquired immunity to chickenpox, though, acquired malaria immunity is partial; people who survive vivax or falciparum acquire immunity only to a particular strain of vivax or falciparum; another strain can readily lay them low. The only way to gain widespread immunity is to get sick repeatedly with different strains.
Slavery & the Slave Trade
According to a 2009 study, estimates that between 1500 and 1840, the heyday of the slave trade, 11.7M captive Africans left for the Americans.
Textbooks commonly present American history in terms of Europeans moving into a lightly settled hemisphere. In fact, the hemisphere was full of Indians- tens of millions of them. And most of the movement into the Americans was by Africans, who soon became the majority population in almost every place that wasn't controlled by Indians. Demographically speaking, Ellis has written, "America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the 19c.”
This great transformation, a turning point in the story of our species, was wrought largely by African hands. The crowds thronging the streets in the new cities were mainly African crowds. The farmers growing rice and wheat in the new farms were mainly African farmers. The people rowing boats on rivers, then the most important highways, were many African people. The men and women on the ships and in the battles and around the mills were mainly African men and women. Slavery was the foundational institution of the modern America's.
Slavery had existed in the Iberian Peninsula since at least roman times. At first many slaves had been taken from Slavic countries (the origin of the word Slave) but in the intervening centuries the main source of bondsmen had become captured Muslim soldiers. As a rule, they worked as domestic servants and were treated in much the same way as other domestic servants. Their main purpose was as sumptuary articles- status symbols.
The Gulf of Guinea: The origin of the great majority of slaves in the Americas.
Madeira was where plantation agriculture was joined to African Slavery.
The rise of sugar production in Mexico and the concurrent riser in Brazil opened the floodgates to slavery. Between 1550 and 1650, slave ships ferried about 650,000 Africans across the Atlantic (split between the Portuguese and the Spanish).
Casta System: An early Spanish attempt to racially separate the mixed hybrid societies produced by Colombian exchange inter-mixing.
Calabar, was the great bay of all saints, the second biggest slave harbor in the world, the first glimpse of the Americas for more than 1.5M captive Africans.
One of the most persistent myths about the slave trade is also one of the most pernicious: that Africans role was wholly that of hapless pawns. Except for the trade's last few decades- and arguably not even then- Africans themselves controlled the supply of African slaves, selling them to Europeans in the number they chose at prices they negotiated as equals. Africans sold their fellows into slavery more often than Europeans less because of their different attitudes toward liberty than because of their different economic systems. Broadly speaking, according to Thornton, the Harvard historian, "slaves were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized in African Law." In Western and Central Europe, the most important form of property was land, and the aristocracy consisted mainly of large landowners who could buy or sell property with little legal restriction. In Western and central Africa, by contrast, land was effectively owned by the government- sometimes personally by the king, sometimes by a kinship or religious group, most often by the state itself, with the sovereign exercising authority in the manner of CEO. No matter which arrangement held true in a given polity, though, the land could not be readily sold or taxed. What could be sold and taxed was labor. Kings and emperors who wanted to enrich themselves thus didn't think in terms of occupying land but of controlling people. Napoleon sent his army to seize Egypt. An African Napoleon would have sent his army to seize Egyptians. Because labor was the main form of property in West Africa, rich West Africans almost by definition owned a lot of slaves. Plantations were rare in that part of the world- coastal West Africa's soil and climate typically won't support them- so big groups of slaves were rarely found working in fields as was common in American sugar or tobacco plantations. Instead slaves were soldiers, servants, or construction workers, building roads and fences and barns. Often enough they did almost nothing; wealthy, powerful landowners in Europe would pile up unused land. In addition, much slave labor consisted of occasional work performed as a tax or tribute. When Europeans arrived, they easily tapped into the existing slave trade. African merchants bought slaves from African armies, raiders, and pirates and paid Africans to convey them to African-run holding tanks. Once the contract was arranged, Africans loaded the slaves aboard the ships, which often had crews with significant numbers of Africans. Other Africans supplied the slave ships with food, rope, water, and timber for the voyage out. Europeans naturally played a key role; they were customers, the demand side of the basic economic equation. A few even braved the African coast, marrying Africans; their children frequently became negotiators and middlemen in the African slave trade. A combination of disease and watchful African armies otherwise kept Europeans confined to outposts on the edge of the continent. 17th and 18th century European maps proudly depicted Africa's Atlantic coast as bristling with Danish, Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish forts, garrisons, and trading posts. But most of the stars on the map had fewer than 10 expatriate residents and many had fewer than five. The principality of Whydah, in today's Benin, exported 400,000 people in the first quarter of the 18th century- it was the most important depot in the Atlantic Slave trade in that time. Not 100 Europeans lived there permanently.
Under Seminole Law, most Africans in those towns had the legal status of slaves, but native bondage resembled European feudalism more than European slavery.
"The good prices the English traders give them for slaves encourages them to this trade extreamly."
Slavery & Disease
Because both diseases killed European workers in American tobacco and sugar plantations, colonists imported labor in the form of captive Africans.
Plasmodium vivax (and falciparum) uses the Duffy antigen as a receptor. Like a burglar with a copy of the front-door key, it inserts itself into the Duffy antigen, fooling the blood cell into thinking it is one of the intended compounds and thereby gaining entrance. Every man who didn't get malaria was a Duffy-negative African American. ~97% of the people in West and Central Africa are duffy negative, and hence immune to vivax malaria…For Europeans, the economic logic was hard to ignore. If they wanted to grow tobacco, rice, or sugar, they were better off using African slaves than European indentured servants or Indian slaves. "Assuming that the cost of maintaining each was about equal, the Slave was preferable at anything up to 3x the price of the European." Slavery and Falciparum thrived together.
Malarial places drift easily towards "exaggerated economic polarization." Plasmodium not only prodded farmers towards slavery, it rewarded big plantations, which further lifted the demand for slaves.
Little evidence exists that the first slave owners clearly understood African immunity, partly because they didn't know what malaria was and partly because people in isolated plantations could not easily make overall comparisons. Regardless of whether they know it, though, planters with slaves tended to have an economic edge over planters with indentured servants. If two Carolina rice growers brought in 10 workers apiece and one ended up after a year with nine workers and the other ended up with 5, the first would be more likely to flourish. Successful planters imported more slaves. Newcomers imitated the practices of their most prosperous neighbors. The slave trade took off, its sails filled by the winds of Plasmodium.
All American colonies, in sum, had slaves. But those to which the Columbian exchange brought endemic falciparum malaria ended up with more. Falciparum Virginia and Brazil became slave societies in ways that non-falciparum Mass and Argentina were not.
Sickle Cell Anemia: Caused by a small genetic change that deforms the RBC, making it unusable to the Plasmodium parasite but also less functional as a RBC.
19c parliamentary reports on British Soldiers in West Africa concluded that disease killed between 48-67% of them every year. The rate for African troops in the same place, by contrast, was about 3%.
1768: The PA-MD border is surveyed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. The Mason-Dixon line roughly split the East Coast into two zones, one in which falciparum malaria was an endemic threat, and one in which it was not. It also marked the border between areas in which African slavery was a dominant institution and areas in which it did not. The line delineates a cultural boundary between Yankee and Dixie that is one of the most enduring divisions in American Culture.
Only in the 18c did foreigners gain a foothold in South America, aided by the introduction of European diseases: smallpox, tb, and flu cleared the way for malaria. Indians retreated into the interior as Europeans seized the coast, creating sugar plantations in what eventually became Guyana (French Guiana), Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana), and Guyana (formerly British Guiana).
Unable to settle in disease zones, Europeans never established communities there. The ideal was offshore ownership. Europeans would remain in the safety of the home country while small numbers of onsite managers directed the enslaved workforce. Because the captives would outnumber captors, intimidation and brutality would be necessary to keep the sugar mills grinding.
Gold & Silver
16-18c: The Americas produce a river of Ag; >150,000 tons.
Somewhere between a third to half of the Ag mined in the Americas went to China.
Traversing the Nombre De Dino's road between Columbia and Panama (with silver from Potosi) terrified the Spaniards- the forest, one chronicler complained, swarmed with "lions, tigers, bears, and jaguars."
Potosi (Southern Bolivia): The biggest, richest Ag strike in history.
Spain, formerly a “pore and barren nation,” was now so rich that, incredibly, its seamen had almost stopped being thieves.
To get the Ag necessary to keep business going, merchants turned to Wokou. Businesspeople sold silk and porcelain to brutal men with silver, then turned around and used the Ag to pay their taxes, which in turn was spent on military campaigns against those brutal men. The Ming Government was at war with its own money supply.
By the 1570's, as the Wanli reign began, >90% of Beijing's tax revenue arrived as lumps of shiny metal- therefore, the Chinese had to switch to trade with Spain.
Rubber
1833: Goodyear announced his intent to produce temperature stable rubber. He began mixing rubber with sulfur. Nothing happened, he said later, until he accidentally dropped a lump of Sulfur-treated rubber onto a wood stove. To his amazement, the rubber didn't melt. The surface charred, but the inner material changed into a new kind of rubber that retained its shape and elasticity at high temperatures. Immersing rubber in melted sulfur would transform it into something that would stay stretchy in cold weather and solid in hot weather. Later he called the process "vulcanization.”
All rubber molecules are made up of tens of thousands of identical, repeating links, each consisting of 5 C and 8 H atoms.
Immersing rubber in S causes a chemical reaction in which rubber molecules link themselves together with chemical bridges formed of S atoms. So ubiquitous are the bonds that a rubber band- a loop of vulcanized rubber- is actually a single, enormous, cross linked molecule. With the molecules anchored together, they are more resistant to change: harder to align, harder to entangle, more resistant to extremes of temperature. Rubber suddenly becomes a stable material.
The financial center of the rubber trade was Belem. Founded in 1616 at the entrance to the greatest river. Belem was the bank and the insurance house of the rubber trade while Manaus was the center of collection.
Organizations from the UN to the US DOD list Microcyclusulei as a potential biological weapons (destroys rubber trees).
Rubber Trees are endemic to Brazil.
Rubber shrinks when it is heated up- unlike most other substances.
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Ecology & Economics
The birds (from the Guano Islands off Peru) are attracted by the strong coastal current, which pulls cold water from the depths. Phytoplankton feast on the nutrients that rise with the water. Zooplankton eat the phytoplankton and in turn are the primary food of the anchoveta fish, a cousin to the familiar anchovy. Anchoveta live in vast schools that are preyed upon by other fish. Predators and prey are both preyed upon by the Peruvian booby, cormorant, and pelican. All three have nested on the Chincha Islands for millennia. Over time they have covered the islands with a layer of guano as much as 150' thick.
Few conventional annual crops grow in the Amazon's aluminum saturated soil.
In all of human history, humankind has been able to domesticate only 25 mammals, a dozen or so birds, and, possibly, a lizard.
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Trade, Economics & Industrialism
In his classic Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1999), Landes argued that Europe had developed ways of organizing people and resources- private joint-stock companies, for instance- that fostered and rewarded individual initiative, which in turn promoted these virtues. Other places did not develop them. The result of these innovations, North argued, was economic growth so robust that it led to “a new and unique phenomenon”: the ascension of European Societies to world power.
History suggests that industrialization cannot occur without "both investment from a large number of people who were not previously part of the ruling elite and the emergence of new entrepreneurs." Both are next to impossible in extractive states.
The ethnic group generally indicated by the word Chinese is the Han. The Manchu were pushing Han from the Chinese core into peripheral areas settled by other peoples.
Three fundamental materials were required for the industrial revolution: Steel, Fossil Fuels, and Rubber.
The overland route to China was dominant until the Mongol Empire began falling violently apart, at which point the nautical route became safer.
Principal Agent Problem: When one party pays another to act on its behalf but can't readily measure its performance.
In understanding economics in regards world history; some economists regards European Expansionism as the primary motivating force in world affairs; the other views the Earth as a single economic unit largely driven by Chinese demand.
Typically one country (the US, for example) can produce Good A (wheat, say) cheaply and well, while the other (Japan) can better produce Good B (consumer electronics). By exchanging Good A for Good B (that is, wheat for DVD players) people in both nations will be better off- a classic win-win situation. This is the theory of Comparative Advantage, a building block of economic theory. Vast amounts of evidence support the theory's veracity, which is why almost all economists firmly believe it, and firmly support free trade, which maximizes the potential for all sides to benefit. In the textbooks, government appears mainly as an outside factor that imposes tariffs, quotas, levies, and so on, influencing the outcome of private trade, often reducing the net economic benefit. But the state does this because trade has two roles: one highlighted in economic textbooks, where private markets allow both sides to gain economically, and one that rarely appears in those textbooks, in which trade is a tool of statecraft, the goal is political power, and both sides usually do not win. The government imposes subsidies to industry, exchange-rate manipulations, and export-import regulations.
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Population- Problems
Between 1961 and 2007, humankind's numbers doubled, roughly speaking, while global harvests of wheat, rice, and maize tripled. As population has soared, in fact, the percentage of chronically malnourished has fallen- contrary to Malthus's prediction. Hunger still exists, to be sure, but the chance that any given child will be malnourished has steadily, hearteningly declined. Hong, by contrast, pointed to a related but more complex prospect. The continual need to increase yields, Hong presciently suggested, would lead to an ecological catastrophe, which would cause social dysfunction- and with it massive human suffering.
"The power of Population," Malthus proclaimed, "is indefinitely greater than the power in the Earth too produce subsistence for man." Every effort to increase the food supply, Malthus argued, will only lead to an increase in population that will more than cancel out the increase in the food supply- a state of affairs today known as a Malthusian Trap. Forget Utopia, Malthus said, Humanity is doomed to exist, now and forever, at the edge of starvation. Forget charity, too: helping the poor only leads to more babies, which in turn produces increased hardship down the road. No matter how big the banquet grows, there will always be too many hungry people wanting a seat at the table. The Malthusian Trap cannot be escaped.
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Chronology
2009: Brazilian president Ignacio Lula da Silvia signed Provisional Law 458, a remarkably ambitious attempt to straighten out land tenure in Amazonia- a root cause of the violence and ecological destruction of the past 40 years. It gave title to maroon communities whose members already occupied the land and had less than 200 acres apiece, effectively bringing a struggle that has lasted for centuries to a victorious close.-1493 by Mann.
1998: Suriname set aside 10% of its territory to create the Central Suriname Nature Reserve.-1493 by Mann.
1861-1865: At least 600,000 soldiers died in the civil war, the deadliest conflict in US History. Most of those lives were not lost in battle, Disease killed twice as many union troops as confederate bullets or shells.-1493 by Mann.
July, 1861: The Battle of Bull Run (aka the Battle of Manassas); three months after the conflict began, the Union Army of the Potomac marched from Washington to the confederate capital of Richmond, VA and was repulsed.-1493 by Mann.
During the civil war the annual caster rate never dropped below 40%. In one year, Plasmodium infected 391,968 troops.-1493 by Mann.
1845-1852: The Great Famine aka The Great Hunger aka The Irish Potato Famine occurs after the plant blight, Phytophthora infestans (P. Infestans) explodes through Europe’s potato fields in the 1840s, killing ~2M people, half of them in Ireland.-1493 by Mann.
13 Sep, 1845: Potato Blight is first reported in Ireland. At that time, nearly 40% of Irish ate no solid food except potatoes. Additionally, Ireland was one of the poorest nations in Europe. At a stroke, the blight removed the food supply from half the country- and there was no money to buy grain from outside.-1493 by Mann.
July, 1845: Potato Blight reaches Kortrijk in West Flanders, 6 miles from the French border. Carried by windblown spores, the oomycete hopscotched to farms around Paris by August. Weeks later, it was in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and England. Governments panicked and ordered more potatoes from abroad.-1493 by Mann.
1821: The US takes Florida.-1493 by Mann.
1812: The Seminole Indians violently oppose US efforts to annex Florida.
England had held onto Florida after the American Revolution.
The Seminole strategy was twofold: First, they destroyed the plantations that supplied US troops, capturing their slaves to bolster the native Army. Second, they waited for yellow fever and malaria to kill northern soldiers.-1493 by Mann.
1802: E.I. Dupont begins manufacturing gun powder in Delaware.-1493 by Mann.
Feb, 1802-1803: Haiti, a French possession, sprang up with slave-revolts. A French Force numbering upwards of 65,000 landing in February 1802. By September some 28,000 French were dead; another 4400 hospitalized (due to disease). Two months later the French commander died. The effort collapsed in November 1803, having lost 50,000 of its 65,000 troops. Napoleon, his hopes for a Caribbean empire in ruins, sold the US all of France's North American territories: the Louisiana Purchase.-1493 by Mann.
1769-1770: Unseasonable rain and snow lead to crop failures in parts of Eastern France. Early French nutritionists began advocating for the potato.-1493 by Mann.
1768: The PA-MD border is surveyed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. The mason-dixon line roughly split the East Coast into two zones, one in which falciparum malaria was an endemic threat, and one in which it was not. It also marked the border between areas in which African slavery was a dominant institution and areas in which it did not. The line delineates a cultural boundary between Yankee and Dixie that is one of the most enduring divisions in American Culture.-1493 by Mann.
Mason Dixon Line: Instituted to settle a boundary dispute between Penn Family of Pennsylvania and the Dixon Family of Maryland.
1670: The colony of Carolina is founded when about 200 colonists from Barbados relocate to the banks of a river that empties into Charleston Harbor (it was initially called Charles Town, after the reigning king).-1493 by Mann.
For its first four decades the colony was mainly a slave exporter- the place from where captive Indians were sent to the Caribbean, Virginia, NY, and Mass.-1493 by Mann.
Regarding the Carolina Colony: One German visitor's summary: "in the spring a paradise, in the summer a hell, and in the autumn a hospital."-1493 by Mann.
1667: the Netherlands won Suriname, with its rich potential. As a kind of booby prize, the English received official title to a cold, thin soiled island known to its original inhabitants as Mannahatta.-1493 by Mann.
1661: The first European bank notes appear.
1644: The Qing Dynasty succeeds the Song Dynasty after it is taken over by the Manchus (the ethnic “Han”) following the fall of Beijing). For the following three decades the shoreline was emptied to a distance inland of as much as 50 miles. It was scorched Earth policy, except that the Qing scorched the enemy's Earth, not their own.-1493 by Mann.
4 Dec, 1619: John Woodlief landed with 35 men at a new plantation, upstream from Jamestown, called Berkeley Hundred. Woodlief had been instructed by his backers to celebrate the day of arrival “as a day of thanksgiving to the almighty god”- the first thanksgiving in English America. Berkeley Hundreds founders had ordered the date to be observed every year. By the next December 4, thirty one of the thirty-five tassantassas who had landed that day were dead.-1493 by Mann.
Pocahontas was a teasing nickname that meant something like “little hellion.”
Summer, 1619: A Dutch pirate ship lands at Jamestown. In its hold is 20 and odd negroes- slaves taken by the pirates from a Portuguese slave ship destined for Mexico. They are the first Africans brought to Jamestown as indentured servants, marking the beginnings of slavery in the US.-1493 by Mann.
1616: The city of Belem (Brazil) is founded as the the financial center of the rubber trade. Belem was the bank and the insurance house of the rubber trade while Manaus was the center of collection.-1493 by Mann.
1589: England sends a fleet to invade Spain but fails primarily due to violent weather. Ultimately, Elizabeth relied upon a more successful tactic: sponsoring what is remembered in England as “privateering” and in Spain as “terrorism.”-1493 by Mann.
1588: Spain sends a fleet to invade England but fails primarily due to violent weather.-1493 by Mann.
1572: Sir Francis Drake, then on his first major independent voyage, came to the Isthmus, looking to loot Spanish treasure.-1493 by Mann.
1520s: Portugal, NL, Spain, and Britain dragged sclerotic China into the rough and tumble of the outside world.-1493 by Mann.
1519-1521: Hernan Cortes, acting without the authorization of the Spanish throne, invaded Mexico and toppled the Triple Alliance (Aztec Empire).-1493 by Mann.
13 Aug 1521: Fall of Tenochtitlan.
May, 1521: The Spanish-Indian army attacked the capital a second time with as many as 200,000 troops.
Spanish Mexico City was erected literally atop the wreckage of Indian Tenochtitlan.
Triple Alliance, commonly known as the Aztec Empire, was a consortium of three militarized city states in the middle of Mexico: Texcoco, Tlacopan, and Tenochtitlan, the last by far the most powerful partner.-1493 by Mann.
Never before seen in the Americas, transmittable with horrific ease, the virus (smallpox) swept through densely packed central Mexico, killed a third or more of its population in a few months.-1493 by Mann.
In the first attack on the city, the Spaniards were routed and the Aztecs, In an act meant to terrify and demoralize Alliance soldiers and priests ripped open the captive Spaniards chests, tore out their hearts, and kicked the bodies down the temple steps.-1493 by Mann.
Cortez' conquest of mexico- and the plunder that came from it- threw Spain's elite into delirium. Enraptured by sudden wealth and power, the monarchy launched a series of costly foreign wars, one overlapping with another, against France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire. Even as Spain defeated the Ottomans in 1571, discontent in the Netherlands, then a spanish possession, was flaring into outright revolt and secession. The struggle over Dutch independence lasted eight decades and spilled into realms as far away as Brazil, Sri Lanka, and the PI. Along the way, England was drawn in; raising the ante, Spain initiated a vast seaborne invasion of the nation: the Spanish Armada. The invasion was a debacle, as was the fight to stop rebellion in the NL.-1493 by Mann.
To pay for its foreign adventures, the court borrowed from foreign bankers; the king felt free to incur debts because he believed they would be covered by future shipments of American treasure, and bankers felt free to lend for the same reason. Debt piled up hugely- 10 or even 15x annual revenues. Spain defaulted on its debts in 1557, 1576, 1596, 1607, and 1627. Economics 101 predicts what will happen in these circumstances. New money chases after the same old goods and services. Prices rise in a classic inflationary spiral. In what historians call a price revolution, the cost of living more than doubled across Europe in the last half of the 16th century, tripling in some places, and then rose some more. Because wages did not keep pace, the poor were immiserated; they could not afford their daily bread. Uprisings of the starving exploded across the continent, seemingly in every corner and all at once. (Researchers have called it the general crisis of the 17th century).-1493 by Mann.
1503: Spain comes out with the Encomienda System- Individual Spaniards became trustees of indigenous groups, promising to ensure their safety, freedom, and religious instruction.-1493 by Mann.
1405-1433: Voyages of Chinese Commander Zheng He. The flagship was more than 300 feet long and 150 feet wide, the biggest wooden vessel ever constructed. Records claim it had 9 masts. Zheng' grandest expedition had 317 ships, an amazing figure even now. The spanish Armada, then the largest fleet in European History, consisted of just 137; the biggest was half the size of Zheng's flagship. Zheng's voyages began in 1405 and ended in 1433 and took Zheng across the Indian Ocean as far as Southern Africa.-1493 by Mann.
1161: The song Dynasty introduces Huizu, the first modern paper currency.-1493 by Mann.
10 Ka: Sugarcane is domesticated in New Guinea.-1493 by Mann.
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Origins of International Trade
Bell Pepper
Origin: Central and Southern America.
First Extractor: Spanish.
Carrot
Origin: Iran
Chincha Guano
Origin: Chincha Islands, Peru
First Extractor: Spanish
Chocolate (Cacao)
Origin: Central and Southern America.
First Extractor: Spanish.
Cinchona Bark (Quinine)
Origin: Amazon Rainforest.
Coffee
Origin: East Africa
First Extractor: Spanish
Eggplant
Origin: India
Influenza
Origin: Asia
Maize (Corn)
Origin: Mexico
Malaria
Origin: Central America
Pepper
Origin: SE Asia
Potato (Tuber)
Origin: Andean Highlands
Potato Blight Parasite
Origin: S. America
Rubber
Origin: Brazil
Smallpox
Origin: Europe
Sugar (Al Zacar)
Origin: New Guinea, discovered again by conquistadores in the Middle East in 1096.
Tobacco
Origin: Central and S. America
Tomato
Origin: Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador.
Tuberculosos (Tb)
Origin: Middle East.
Water Hyacinth
Origin: Africa.
Wheat
Origin: Middle East
Yellow Fever
Origin: Central Africa.
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