The Columbian Exchange and the Dawn of the Homogenocene

When Columbus reached the Americas in 1492, the ecosystems of the Western and Eastern hemispheres had remained isolated for millennia and were strikingly different. His voyage set in motion what has come to be known as the Columbian Exchange, a vast transfer of plants, animals, people, and diseases between the Old and New Worlds. This exchange laid the foundation for what Charles C. Mann calls the Homogenocene—an epoch defined by the global mixing and homogenization of species, cultures, and ecosystems driven by human activity.

In his wonderful book 1493: : Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Mann explains the key events that shaped the Exchange:

• The discovery of the largest silver ore in Potosi, Bolivia powered Spain to trade with China and fulfil Europe’s insatiable demand for silk and porcelain. Overland trade between Europe and China had to pass through Islamic lands and the trade was completely controlled by the Merchants of Venice and Genoa. This was also one of the factors that spurred the voyages of discovery of the 15^th century. The Pacific Sea route through the Philippines sorted out this problem. (Once the ore ran out, the Spanish economy collapsed like ash).

• Horses were unknown the Americas. The image we have of native Indians on horseback, roaming across the Wild West (immortalisd by writers like Cormac McCarthy) is one that emerged from the Columbine Exchange. Indian tribes racing to procure and breed horses was the Arms Race of the era that made these long-sedentary societies into wanderers

• From the Americas, came potato and maize which helped Europe and Asia overcome the Malthusian trap. Tobacco from the Americas began numbing the aristocracy and the gentry in equal numbers all over the world. Rubber, another American export, revolutionised our industrial world. (It’s hard to imagine transportation networks without tires, electric power plants without gaskets and seals, and hospitals without sterile rubber hoses and gloves.)

• Sugarcane imported into the Americas was the plantation crop par excellence. To farm it, the colonialists needed one more critical input – labour. And Africa supplied this in unimaginable numbers and with unimaginable cruelty involved. (Cotton too had a similar impact on slavery)

• The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and bacterial meningitis—by a quirk of evolutionary history, all were unknown in the Western Hemisphere until the arrival of the Europeans.

Here is Mann’s argument about Mexico City being the world’s first globalized city:

Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot periphery, battered by a corrupt and inept civic and religious establishment, troubled by a past that it barely understood—to the contemporary eye, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City looks oddly familiar. In its dystopic way, it was an amazingly contemporary place, unlike any other then on the planet. It was the first twenty-first-century city, the first of today’s modern, globalized megalopolises. It may seem foolish to use terms like modern and globalized to describe a time and place in which there were no means of mass communication and most people had no way of buying goods or services from overseas. But even today billions of people on our networked planet have no telephones. Even today the reach of goods and services from high-tech places like the United States, Europe, and Japan is limited. Modernity is a patchy thing, a matter of shifting light and dark upon the globe. Here was one of the spots where it touched first.

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