1493
Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
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3.7 • 386 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A deeply engaging history of how European settlements in the post-Colombian Americas shaped the world—from the highly acclaimed author of 1491. • "Fascinating...Lively...A convincing explanation of why our world is the way it is." —The New York Times Book Review
Presenting the latest research by biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Mann shows how the post-Columbian network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City—where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted—the center of the world. In this history, Mann uncovers the germ of today's fiercest political disputes, from immigration to trade policy to culture wars. In 1493, Mann has again given readers an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Having resurrected the isolated splendors of the pre-Columbian Americas in his bestselling 1491, Mann explores the global convergences and upheavals inaugurated by their discovery in this fascinating survey of the "Homogenocene" era. Mann traces the subtle, epochal influences of the intercontinental "Columbian Exchange" of flora, fauna, commodities, and peoples, showing how European honeybees and earthworms remade New World landscapes; how New World corn, potatoes, and fertilizer ignited Eurasian population booms; how Old World diseases prompted an eruption of slavery in the Western Hemisphere (the influx of Africans, not Europeans, to the Americas, Mann notes, was the main demographic result of the Contact); how Latin American silver undermined China's Ming Dynasty; and how the decimation of Indian peoples changed the world's climate. The author interweaves research on everything from epidemiology to economics into a lucid historical panorama that's studded with entertaining studies of Chinese pirate fleets, courtly tobacco rituals, and the bloody feud between Jamestown colonists and the Indians who fed and fought them, to name a few. Brilliantly assembling colorful details into big-picture insights, Mann's fresh, challenge to Eurocentric histories puts interdependence at the origin of modernity. 35 illus.; 12 maps.
Customer Reviews
A new view of the story of the Americas and their impact on the world
I have read this book and it's companion 1491. I have an undergraduate degree in history. I read history and biography as my 'relaxing' reading even though my advanced degrees are in theology. I must say these two books have changed how I view the pre- and post-Columbian worlds. This is not the way I learned history in school more than 50 years ago.
Definitely Reading for High School Students
The best book ever written on the Columbian exchange.
A significant book for High School and College students.
A rewriting of all American History books should occur as well as discussion that has far-reaching implications concerning slavery ,formal state apologies and the concept of learning from the past in order to create a better future for all of humankind.
1491 1493
Fascinating and extremely we'll researched chronicles of the Americas before Columbus visit and it's subsequent effect on world trade and development!
Two of the best books I have ever read!