We’ve all heard stories about lottery winners who squander their newfound wealth, go on misguided adventures, become addicted to expensive substances, and wind up poorer and unhappier than they ever were before fortune found them.
In the rush to claim the Americas following Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1492, Spain wound up with the winning Powerball number. And that prize, writes journalist and historian Charles C. Mann in his new book, “1493,” “threw Spain’s elite into delirium.” The country’s rulers launched wars against the mighty Ottoman Empire and other Muslim powers, to say nothing of fellow Christians elsewhere in Europe. The wealth from the newfound silver mines of Potosi didn’t begin to cover the bill, so the Spanish crown borrowed from foreign powers and banks, mortgaging the country’s future and amassing vast debts. The rich worked out tax exemptions and retreated behind the walls of their villas, while the small middle class and peasantry shouldered the burden, the latter struggling to grow food in the face of a worsening climate.
(Knopf) - ‘1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created’ by Charles C. Mann
It all sounds familiar, and terribly modern — and that’s no accident. Mann’s book, a successor to his best-selling “1491,” takes a god’s-eye view of the world as it began to change, rapidly and inexorably, in the face of the wealth a restless Europe discovered in the Americas — and, at about the same time, in Asia and Africa.
For all the talk we hear today about globalization, that process began with the onset of what historians call the Columbian Exchange half a millennium ago. The very word “exchange” lets us know that the encounter was two-way — and sometimes more. America, that vast new market, was soon absorbing European goods and customs, even as indigenous homelands were being transformed by introduced animals and crops into “ecological versions of Europe, landscapes the foreigners could use more comfortably than could their original inhabitants.” America became an extension of Europe, its people and resources commodities to use up.
Meanwhile, new crops and goods were arriving in the Old World as well, some brought over on Columbus’s first return trip. Moody and god-haunted, Columbus had hit the lottery, but retirement into the easy life did not suit him, so he asked the Spanish king to allow him to go off to convert the emperor of China to Christianity. Columbus died before he could undertake that quest, but one of the goods he helped introduce arrived in China soon after, “exciting, habit-forming, vaguely louche” — namely, tobacco, which found a ready market there. Smoking the imported luxury wasn’t cheap, though, and the khan of Manchuria was shocked to learn that his soldiers were selling off their weapons and armor to buy the weed.
Europe was already addicted. Tobacco was so much at home there that in the 17th century, Mann writes, “priests were celebrating Mass with lighted cigars.” Pope Urban VIII sent out a memo banning smoking in church, but no matter; across the whole of the Eurasian landmass, the New World had found vast markets for its signal product, which has only recently begun to relax its hold.
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