Crosby Heirs of Columbus

ps
| The Heirs of Columbus
The bardic historians were relatively unconcerned with the geo-

graphic, biological, and demographic effects of the Columbian voyages,
but these are the themes of current scholarship. The bulk of the
research and analysis on these matters remains to be done, especially
on the Columbian influence in Africa and Asia, but I can offer an
interim report.
THE EFFECTS INTELLECTUAL
“Among the extraordinary though quite natural circumstances of my

life,” wrote Columbus’s countryman, the mathematician and physician
Girolamo Cardano in the 1570s, “the first and most unusual is that I was
born in this century in which the whole world became known;
whereas the ancients were familiar with but a little more than a third
part of it.” ° In 1491 the European conception of the universe was much
the same as it had been a thousand years and more before. The earth
was believed to be at the center of crystalline spheres carrying the sun,
moon, and stars, with the surface of the world above water divided into
three parts—Europe, Africa, and Asia. Humans lived in all three land
areas, but not in the Torrid Zone, which was dreadfully hot and there-
fore uninhabitable. The evidence that did not fit this model was still
small enough in significance and quantity to be ignored or subdued to
conformity by sophistry. But when Columbus returned in 1493 he
rendered the old model obsolete in a stroke. Few realized this immedi-
ately, but the system was obviously overloaded with new data and
bursting by the time Cardano wrote.
Columbus added a fourth part to the world, the Americas, and his
successors added the Pacific, an unimagined ocean of unimaginable
breadth beyond America. Columbus and his followers also provided
eyewitness testimony that torrid America was full of people. (Euro-
peans had somehow been able to ignore earlier reports of Portuguese
13
Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians.
E-book, Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1987, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb03124.0001.001.
Downloaded on behalf of California State University, Los Angeles
14
sailors that tropical Africa was heavily populated.) In addition, the New
World was full of plants and animals about which Aristotle and Pliny
had nothing to sayv—electric eels and camels without humps—and of
people who were neither Muslim nor Jew, and certainly not Christian.
Carolus Linnaeus papered his rooms and tormented his methodical
Scandinavian mind with drawings of exotic American plants, and
Alexander Humboldt and Charles Darwin puzzled over their American
experiences and based their generalizations in large part thereon.
Philosophers and thinkers from Michel de Montaigne to Jean Jacques
Rousseau to Henry David Thoreau pondered and wrote on the meaning
of Amerindians and their cultures. The Columbian discoveries
galvanized anthropology, the product of Europeans trying. to
understand non-Europeans, into unprecedented acceleration. Proto-
anthropologists and anthropologists from Pietro Martire d’Anghiera to
Lewis Henry Morgan and Claude Levi-Strauss struggled to fit
Amerindians, with all their variety of languages, technologies, religions,
and customs, into “rational” explanations of social behavior and
founded’ school after school of thought in the process.
Simply by making a round trip across an ocean, Columbus multiplied
humanity’s knowledge about its environment and itself many times
over, stimulating a multitude of philosophies, literary movements, and
sciences. He felt himself a crusader and painted crosses on his sails, but
he promoted skepticism. Girolamo Cardano worried that the geograph-
ical discoveries of his century would lead in just that direction, and
“certainties will be exchanged for uncertainties.” 1° He was right, of
course, but to humanity’s advantage.
THE EFFECTS ECONOMIC
Ask an economist about the significance of Columbus, and the econo-

mist might look for a connection between the great explorer and
Europe’s quantum leap in wealth, commerce, and productivity in the
centuries following his life. One of the most apparent and immediate of
American influences on Europe during the first post-Columbian cen-
turies was crudely financial. The gold and silver of the New World that
raised the pulse beat of ambitious hidalgos and landless younger sons
all over western Europe had much the same effect on the European
economy. There is no doubt that American specie made possible trade
with the Far East that would have been slight otherwise. The Chinese
were interested in trading their silks and porcelain with Europeans if
they brought Mexican silver. Even so, the exact effect of American
15
specie on Europe per se is a matter of controversy. The influx of

American bullion was surely an important factor in the inflation of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enriching some and impover-
ishing others and in general subjecting Europe to more chills and fevers
than historians have sorted out yet. If indeed prices, and therefore
profits, soared faster than wages and traditional fees and rents, and if
the decline of interest rates was due to the influx of precious metals
from America, then that influx hada great deal to do with the rise of
the commercial classes in power and influence and the decline of the
old aristocracy, and possibly with the Industrial Revolution.
One of the most important changes in the generations after
Columbus was Europe's creation of a world market, with itself as the
entrepot and bank. Vital to this new phenomenon was the trade
between the New World and Europe, the former supplying raw
materials and the latter manufactured goods. The American market for
manufactured goods became increasingly important as Euro-American
populations grew. For instance, English exports to the Americas and
Africa (where manufactured goods were exchanged for slaves for the
American colonies) increased ten times in the eighteenth century. But
for the sake of brevity, let us consider the New World colonies exclu-
sively in what was unambiguously their primary role for a very long
time, that of supplier of materials for European consumption and
processing.
Siberia, like North America, sent its furs to western Europe but alone
could never have satisfied the demand, which over centuries was
insatiable. The profits of the fur trade could be astonishingly high:
Hudson’s Bay Company produced an average of 23 percent profit
annually for the first fifty years of its existence, a total profit of 1143
percent on the original investment in a half-century. The islands of the
eastern Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the East Indian archipelago
could and did supply sugar and other tropic products to Europe, but
the mass of such goods came from America. In the eighteenth century
the most profitable colonies in the world were not African, Asian, or
even the burgeoning settlements of North America, but the West
Indies, or Sugar Islands, as they were often called. The French colony
of Saint-Domingue (Haiti and the Dominican Republic today) employed
700 vessels manned by 80,000 seamen in its trade in a good year. In
1789 about two-thirds of France’s total foreign investments were
involved in Saint-Domingue, the greatest of the Sugar Islands. Britain’s
West Indian colonies provided 20 percent of the homeland’s total
imports between 1714 and 1773, much of which were re-exported at a
profit. A contemporary estimated that an average Englishman driving
16
slaves in the sugar plantations brought twenty times more clear profit
to England than he would have had he stayed home.
The American plantations were the reason for the existence of the
Atlantic slave trade. The lands of southern Asia supplied their own
labor and even had a surplus to export when plantation agriculture
spread into Oceania. After the sixteenth century the varying, but in
total considerable, profits of the Atlantic trade in black laborers flowed
largely to the nations leading the commercial and industrial revolu-
tions: Holland, France, and Britain. Portugal was also a major recipient
of slave-trade profits but could not hold on to them; they slipped away
to join the main current of wealth streaming to Portugal’s northern
neighbors.
The world market, unimagined when Columbus sailed, was a hardy
infant by the end of the sixteenth century. A century later, the world
market was an important factor in the lives of millions of people in
every continent but Australia and Antarctica, drawing coffles of slaves
out of Africa every year, herding Amerindians up and down the
ladders of the Potosi silver mines, and dispatching Cree braves to trap
beaver in the Canadian forests, in addition to what it was dictating to
Gujaratis and Filipinos on the other side of the world. For the first time
human labor, raw materials, manufacturing, and transportation sys-
tems spanning scores of degrees of longitude and latitude by sail,
wheel, and beast of burden were organized on a world scale. The
world economy was created by bankers and statesmen, such as the
Fuggers and Colbert, but Columbus and his fellow explorers played
vital roles, too. These sailors presented entrepreneurs with access to
enough land in enough climates, enough bullion, enough visions of
potential profit, to spur them from a walk to a gallop. Once in existence,
the world market produced a torrent of wealth that swept round and
round the globe to and from Ceylon, the Ottoman Empire,
Pernambuco, Massachusetts, Java, Muscovy, Quebec, and on every
passage Europe took its tithe.
A lot of that capital went to building Brobdingnangian manor houses
and to providing fireworks on ducal birthdays, but much was also
invested in roads, canals, bridges, warehouses, and the training of
naval, clerical, mechanical, and executive talent. The wealth of the New
World was not the only cause of the Industrial Revolution, but it is
difficult to see how that mysterious and awesome transformation could
have happened when and as rapidly as it did without stimulus from the
Americas. The Industrial Revolution left Europeans and their descen-
dants overseas richer and with access to more power than men and
women of 1492 ever thought possible. Its effects continue today, as
17
other peoples break loose from old moorings and bobble along in the
European wake, heading for an age of either material satisfaction or
towering disappointment. Columbus’s bequest is a sharp sword, and in
this case we cannot be sure whether we hold it by the handle or the
blade.
THE EFFECTS NUTRITIONAL
“The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a

useful plant to its culture...,’! noted Thomas Jefferson. By this
standard, Columbus was the greatest benefactor of all time because by
bringing the agricultures of the Old and New Worlds into contact, he
added many useful plants to each. He enormously increased the num-
ber of kinds and quantities of food available to humans by giving them
access to all the masterpieces of plant and animal breeders everywhere,
and not just those of two or three contiguous continents.
In the last five hundred years food crops and domesticated animals
have crossed the Atlantic and Pacific in both directions, enabling people
to live in numbers in places where they previously had had only slim
means to feed themselves. The Argentine pampa, Kansas, and Saskatch-
ewan, too dry in large areas for Amerindian maize and in the latter case
too far north, are now breadbaskets, producing not only enough
Eurasian wheat for themselves but much more to export to the world.
Eurasia’s domesticated animals—cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and even
water buffalo—provide Americans from the Hudson Bay to the Straits
of Magellan with the means to do what was only meagerly possible
before 1492: to turn grass, which humans cannot eat, into meat and
milk. In 1983, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization
(FAO) of the United Nations, the New World slaughtered 84 million
cattle, 27 million sheep, and 139 million pigs; in 1492 none at all. New
World peoples derive all but a fraction of their animal protein, and
almost all their wool and leather, from Old World animals.
Conversely, cassava, a root plant of South American origin, provides
calories for multitudes of Africans and Asians in areas previously too
wet, too dry, or too infertile to support more than sparse populations.
Similarly, as the white potato of South America spread across northern
Europe, peasants from county Kerry to the Urals found themselves
with the means to raise more food in bulk per unit of land than ever
before (although ultimately there were dire results in Ireland, where an
American pestilence arrived to destroy the American plant in the
1840s). In the Far East the impact of the arrival of the products of
Amerindian plant breeders was at least as great as in Europe or Africa.
18
By the late 1930s New World crops amounted to 20 percent of the food
produced in China, where approximately one quarter of the human
race lived (and lives now). According to Ping-ti Ho, historian of Chinese
demography and agriculture: “During the last two centuries, when rice
culture was gradually approaching its limit, and encountering the law
of diminishing returns, the various dry land food crops introduced
from America have contributed most to the increase in national food
production and have made possible a continual growth of
population.” 1?
In 1983 Amerindian maize accounted for over one-sixth of all the
grain produced in the world. Not surprisingly, the United States is the
world’s largest producer, but, perhaps surprisingly, China is the second
greatest producer. China also harvests more sweet potatoes, a native
American plant that does marvelously well under conditions that
would discourage most other crops, than any other nation; sweet
potatoes are an old and dependable famine food for the Chinese.
Globally, American root crops, of which the most important are white
and sweet potatoes and cassava, exceed in quantity of production all
others combined. The world produced 557 million metric tons of root
crops in 1983, of which those of Amerindian domestication amounted
to 524 million metric tons. The world’s leading producer of white
potatoes is the Soviet Union, which forks up ten times more potatoes in
weight than South America, the home continent of the tuber. Africa
produces over 48 million metric tons of cassava, dwarfing the 28
million of South America, where the plant was first cultivated.
The significance of Amerindian crops in the future will increase
because all the most important ones were first domesticated in the
tropics, where many of them still grow best. The developing nations of
the world, where human populations are expanding fastest, are mostly
in the tropics and in hot, wet lands nearby. The maize production of
the developed world in 1983 was 187 million metric tons, and that of
the developing world about 30 million less, but a great deal of the
former tonnage went to feed livestock while almost all the latter went
directly to feed people. The sweet potato production of the developed
societies in the same year was 2 million metric tons, and that of the
developing societies over 112 million. All of the cassava raised in 1983
about which the FAO has statistics (123 million metric tons) was raised
in the developing nations. Compare these figures with those for wheat,
the traditional staple since the Neolithic Age in temperate Eurasia: 300
million metric tons were produced by the developed nations, and not
quite 200 million by the developing.
Between 1750 and 1986 the population of the world grew from
19
approximately 750 million to 5 billion. The exchange of crops and

domesticated animals between the Old and New Worlds cannot be
credited with being the sole cause of this awesome increase, any more
than the capital produced by Europe’s exploitation of America can be
said to be the only cause of the Industrial Revolution, but it is hard to
see how the colossal effect could have come about without the
Columbian exchange.
THE EFFECTS DEMOGRAPHIC
The impact of the Columbian exchange did not always enhance

population growth. Columbus triggered population explosion among
some peoples and implosion in others. His effect on the Amerindian
population, for example, was annihilating.
Fifty years ago Alfred Kroeber, then perhaps the premier
anthropologist in the United States, estimated the total Amerindian
population of 1492 at 8.5 million. He believed that his figure might
possibly be a bit low, but it is unlikely that he thought that scholars
would ever conservatively estimate the number of fifteenth-century
Amerindians at 30 to 50 million, or that others, at least as well
informed, would not hesitate to say 100 million. Extraordinary
numbers! At that time Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals had only
80 million people, with Spain’s population perhaps 7 million.
The mammoth increase in the estimates of fifteenth-century
Amerindian populations during the past few decades quite properly
arouses skepticism because the data these figures are based on are, by
twentieth-century standards, disconcertingly imprecise. These
estimates are the end results of careful examination and meticulous
analysis of all the sources available (which are admittedly doubtful, if
taken one at a time, but in total impressive). These include the off-the-
cuff guesses of the first Europeans to arrive in a given area, the sober
judgments and censuses of colonial administrators and churchmen,
travelers’ accounts, and whatever other scraps of _ pertinent
information that can be found. All are measured against
approximations of the carrying capacity of the environment and the
size of the Amerindian population suggested by the density of pre-
Columbian artifacts and ruins. These figures are matched against each
other and then tested by sophisticated demographic techniques, such
as careful extrapolation backwards from later and more credible data.
At the end the demographic historians make their estimates. We can
and should argue about these estimates, but we should also note that
they do not stand in suspicious uniqueness: The sources about
20
Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands also indicate that their
aboriginal populations were much larger when Europeans first arrived
than two or three generations later.
Skepticism is imperative in this new field, as it is in the field of the
demographic history of medieval Europe, but not stubborn adherence
to a half-century-old orthodoxy. After all, the New World had one-
fourth of the land surface of the globe and was rich in sources of food;
Amerindians had many thousands of years to expand their numbers
before Columbus arrived. It seems only sensible to begin with the
assumption that there were a lot of Americans in 1492.
The traditional underestimations of Amerindian populations were
due not so much to Euro-American ethnocentrism, though this may
have played a role, as to the steep plunge of New World populations
very soon after Old World peoples entered a given region. The germs
sickened and killed thousands, setting off cascades of mortality. For
instance, decimation of young adults interrupted farming and hunting,
and malnutrition and even starvation followed. As elders died, the old
customs went with them to the grave, leaving vacuums and
bequeathing despair and anomie to the young. Typically, by the time
two or three generations had passed after an initial white settlement,
the Amerindian population of the given region was so low that it made
the offhanded estimates of the first explorers and conquerors seem
extravagant. By the time libraries were founded, colleges were opened,
and historians were sharpening their pencils, the local Amerindians
were often either extinct or few in number. The crucial first step for
demographic historians of the Amerindians is to decide how steep their
plunge in numbers was.
The population losses were undisputably considerable and swift. The
angle of descent that Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah offer for
central Mexico starts at about 25 million Amerindians at the beginning
of the 1520s, falls to 11.2 million in 1532, to 4.7 million in 1548, to 2.2
million in 1568, and to a nadir of 852,000 in 1608. Even if the
controversial first estimate is ignored, the drop from 1532 to 1608 is
more than 90 percent. The drop from the dependable 1568 number to
1608’s equally respectable total is over 60 percent. David Noble Cook,
after painstaking research and analysis, puts forward an educated
guess of 9 million for the population of Amerindian Peru in 1520, anda
solid figure of 600,000 for the region of a century later, again a decline
of over 90 percent.
Relatively isolated regions like Yucatan, where the full impact of
European invasion was diffused over time, may have suffered smaller
declines. But peripheral areas did not necessarily suffer less because of
21
their remoteness or even because of a lower density of population;

climate and the amount and kinds of food available must always be
taken into consideration. In the cold regions of the far north and south,
a crisis, if it struck during the season when vital food resources such as
salmon were fleetingly available, could be extremely dangerous.
Feverish lowlands, whatever their populations and locations, often lost
close to 100 percent of their aboriginal populations. At the beginning of
the eighteenth century John Lawson estimated that smallpox and rum
had reduced the Amerindians within two hundred miles of Charleston,
South Carolina, by five-sixths in only fifty years. A governor of the
colony expressed thanks to God for having sent an “Assyrian Angel”
among the aborigines with “Smallpox &c. to lessen their numbers: so
that the English, in Comparison with the Spaniard, have but little Indian
Blood to answer for.”
The study of Amerindian demographic history is still at an early
stage, and even if enriched with scores of careful local studies (the
indispensable next step) will never be a precise science. Conclusions
will always be accompanied by caveats that the final figures are
probably accurate, plus or minus 10 or 20 or 30 percent. But careful
studies, fashioned by meticulous and mutually critical scholars, are
already producing great advances in the understanding of the
American past. After all, in a field where within living memory one
expert offered 8.5 million for the 1492 population of the New World
and others 100 million, studies producing conclusions dependable
within even 50 percent either way are encouraging.
Already we can be sure that in 1492 the populations of the various
regions of the New World were comparable in density to similar
regions of the Old. Columbus’s arrival in America was much more like
Marco Polo visiting the Far East, with its advanced empires and
primitive tribes, than Robinson Crusoe landing on a desert island.
Mexico and Peru obviously had millions of people living in complex
sacieties. Other regions had smaller populations and their societies
were not as advanced, but no informed person today would think of
endorsing George Bancroft’s statement that before whites came to
what is now the United States, the area was “an unproductive
waste...its only inhabitants a few scattered tribes of feeble
barbarians, destitute of commerce and of political connection.”
3
Assessing the Columbian Exchange
The effects of establishing permanent links between continents that

had been separate, and thereby interweaving divergently evolved
biotas and human cultures, were and are too vast to be measured for
many centuries and probably millenia, but already the demographic
effects of the Columbian exchange are awesome.
Of the three human groups chiefly involved in the linkages between
the two worlds—Europeans and Euro-Americans, Africans and Afro-
Americans, and Amerindians—the first has benefited most, by the
obvious standard, population size. According to the demographer
Kingsley Davis, about 50 million Europeans migrated to the New World
between 1750 and 1930, and the populations of the lands to which most
of them went increased 14 times, while that of the rest of the world
increased by 2.5 times. In that same 180 years the number of Cauca-
sians on earth increased 5.4 times, Asians only 2.3 times, and black
Africans and Afro-Americans less than 2 times. One may justifiably
question the definitions of the terms Caucasian, Asian, African, and
others. ,
Airo-American, but problems of differentiation should not prevent
noting that Columbus benefited some kinds of people far more than
Columbus's legacy to black Africans and their descendants is mixed.

An estimated 10 million Africans crossed the Atlantic to the Americas,
where they worked and died as chattel, to the incalculable benefit of
their captors and owners. The slave trade transformed West African
society, turning its commerce about-face from the Saharan border and
the Mediterranean societies to the Atlantic and the New World,
enriching some peoples and creating powerful states, and decimating
others and destroying them as political and cultural entities. A cold
reckoning of the number of black Africans and Afro-Americans
suggests that there are now more of them in total than there would be
if the slave trade had never existed. Even if the multitudes who died in
the Middle Passage and in African wars stimulated by the slave trade
23

Crosby Heirs of Columbus

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Crosby Heirs of Columbus

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Crosby Heirs of Columbus

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

ps

| The Heirs of Columbus

The bardic historians were relatively unconcerned with the geo-

THE EFFECTS INTELLECTUAL

“Among the extraordinary though quite natural circumstances of my

THE EFFECTS ECONOMIC

Ask an economist about the significance of Columbus, and the econo-

specie on Europe per se is a matter of controversy. The influx of

THE EFFECTS NUTRITIONAL

“The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a

approximately 750 million to 5 billion. The exchange of crops and

THE EFFECTS DEMOGRAPHIC

The impact of the Columbian exchange did not always enhance

their remoteness or even because of a lower density of population;

Assessing the Columbian Exchange

The effects of establishing permanent links between continents that

Columbus's legacy to black Africans and their descendants is mixed.

You might also like