1493

Christopher Columbus has long been credited with discovering the New World. According to contemporary scientists, Columbus didn’t discover a new world as much as create one. His voyages brought a plethora of species together, enabling the extraordinary exchange of plants and animals between Eurasia and the Americas. Some of these species were ferried by the ships that sailed across the Atlantic intentionally, others accidentally. The exchange took corn to Africa and sweet potatoes to Asia, horses and apples to the Americas and rhubarb and eucalyptus to Europe. Less familiar organisms like insects, grasses, bacteria and viruses were also exchanged.

Columbus’ landing in the New World marked the beginning of what scientists dubbed the “Columbus Exchange.” As 1493 reveals, this geological tumult underlies much of subsequent human history. Presenting the latest generation of research by scientists, Charles Mann shows how the creation of a worldwide network of exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Manila and Mexico City—where Asia, Europe and the new frontier of the Americas dramatically interacted—the center of the world.

Columbus and others had tried and failed to sail west to establish trade with China, then the richest, most powerful country in the world. It was not until 1571 that Spaniard Miguel López de Legazpi accomplished that feat. That same year, he founded Manila. There, silver from the Americas was mined by African and Indian slaves and sold to Asians in exchange for silk for Europeans. It was the first time that goods and people from every corner of the globe were connected in a single worldwide exchange. Much like Columbus created a new world biologically, Legazpi and the Spanish empire he served created a new world economically.

Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, is an early example of a purely economic venture. Mann shows how the colony’s fate was largely determined by the introduction of tobacco. He goes on to examine the roles the Columbus Exchange occupied in the agricultural revolution and later in the Industrial Revolution. He also looks at the most consequential and controversial exchange of all: the slave trade.

The economic drive for exchange ended up transforming the globe into a single ecological zone by the 19th century. The creation of this ecological zone helped Europe seize, for several vital centuries, the political initiative, which in turn shaped today’s world-spanning economic system. Enlightening and impeccably researched, 1493 illuminates the most important biological event in the history of life since the death of the dinosaurs.