Germs, Seeds and Animals:

Studies in Ecological History

Alfred W. Crosby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317469841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Alfred Crosby almost alone redirected the attention of historians to ecological issues that were important precisely because they were global. In doing so, he answered those who believed that world history had become impossible as a consequence of the post-war proliferation of new historical specialities, including not only ecological history but also new social histories, areas studies, histories of mentalities and popular cultures, and studies of minorities, majorities, and ethnic groups. In the introduction to this volume, Professor Crosby recounts an intellectual path to ecological history that might stand as a rationale for world history in general. He simply decided to study the most pervasive and important aspects of human experience. By focusing on human universals like death and disease, his studies highlight the epidemic rather than the epiphenomenal.

Germs & Seeds Animals

1 The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians

DOI: 10.4324/9781315704104-1

The five hundredth anniversary of the Columbian discovery of America has come, and with it the obligation to assess existing interpretations of the significance of that voyage and the establishment of permanent links between the Old and New Worlds. The most influential of the several schools of interpretation are, on the one hand, the newest and analytic, and on the other, the classic and bardic. The former is for many recondite and discomforting. The latter, the one most often taught, dramatized, and believed in North America, is for most as comfortable as an old pair of slippers: we learned it in primary school.

The Bardic Interpretation

The bardic version of the Columbian voyages and their consequences was the product of narrative historians, most of them nineteenth-century writers, who did their work when the peoples of the republics of the New World looked upon the Americas as fresh and “without sin,” at least as compared to “decadent” Europe. These historians narrated the American past in ways consonant both with the documentary record then available and with the ethnocentrism of their fellow white citizens of the New World, particularly of the United States. Their readers wanted history books to provide a story of “the steps by which a favoring Providence, calling our institutions into being, has conducted the country to its present happiness and glory,” ¹ to quote the innocently arrogant George Bancroft, whose ten-volume History of the United States (1834–76) we no longer read but have never forgotten.

The classic narrative that Bancroft and his successors provided can be summarized as follows: At the end of the fifteenth century, Christopher Columbus discovered America, adding to the world two conti-nents populated sparsely with “savages” and, in Mexico and Peru, with “barbarians” experimenting with protocivilization. Then the conquistadores, few in number but courageous, conquered the Amerindian civilizations, which, for all their temples and gold, were evidently no more than paper tigers. Lesser conquistadores performed similarly, if less profitably, in other places, most of them also in tropical America, as did their Portuguese counterparts in coastal Brazil. British, French, Dutch, and other European soldiers, merchants, and settlers did much the same thing in those parts of the New World not occupied by the Iberians. The history of the New World subsequently became the struggle of European imperialist powers for domination, and Amerindians ceased to be important, except as enemies or allies of whites. African Americans, the other of the two non-European peoples who made major contributions to the development of the modern Americas, were obviously present in large numbers during the colonial period but were almost invisible in American history until the Haitian revolt at the end of the eighteenth century, usually viewed as a nightmarish aberration from the “normal” pattern of colonization in the Americas. The Columbian era, the period of European exploration and colonization, ended in the decades around 1800 with successful revolutions led by whites, usually of good family and education, against the parent-countries. Then came the maturation of independent societies and cultures in the New World, a development paradoxically confirmed and made irreversible by the migration of very large numbers of Europeans to the Americas after the mid-nineteenth century.

This narrative is the version of history that most Americans learn as children. It is also a cautionary tale (or interpretation) for scholars and teachers. The bardic version is as deceptive as it is popular because it is the product of an age that is past, with a characteristically selective view of history. It is as dangerous as it is deceptive because it reinforces Euro-American ethnocentrism and confirms historians and teachers in premises and approaches clearly obsolete in the era of the Columbian quincentennial. On the other hand, this classic interpretation is rational and true to the original sources. That it can be rational as well as deceptive is perhaps a useful lesson for seekers after absolute truth in history.

Rather than make a display of our “superiority” over scholars now dead and buried (thus anticipating the smugness of our own successors), let us praise our forebears. They were skilled practitioners of the historian’s craft who did their work well, enabling the present generation of historians to make progress, rather than mere corrections. Men like Spain’s Martín Fernández de Navarette and Canada’s Henri-Raymond Casgrain drew together the documentary evidence that forms the core of what even revisionists must begin with, and assembled the bare data of who was who and where and when. These scholars performed the laborious work that is preliminary to creative scholarship in any field of history. Among them were creative scholars of the first rank who built a model of the past that reconciled the record as they knew it with the values of their own day and made sense to the literate classes of their time. This is what society pays historians to do.

Two of the best of these bardic historians were New England’s William Prescott, historian of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru, and Francis Parkman, the Homer of the struggle of Britain and France for empire in North America. Another was Samuel Eliot Morison, whose 1942 biography of Columbus and two-volume European Discovery of America (1971, 1974) are as close to being definitive works as one can expect in this mutable world. These men all liked to approach history through biography; they chose sides and were transparently loyal to their heroes. For all three men, the stuff of history was almost always documents, preferably letters, diaries, and memoirs, and not statistics. Seldom did they turn for help to economics, archaeology, biology, or any of the sciences, which resulted in some startling omissions. Prescott managed to write magnificent books on the conquests of Mexico and Peru and omit all but the bare mention of the conqueror’s best ally, smallpox. The information on smallpox was in the original sources but not within the range of what Prescott was equipped to perceive as important.

The books of the bardic historians were usually neatly organized around great white men, a strategy whose validity seemed to be confirmed by contemporary events. Prescott did not worry his sources like a dog with an old shoe to find the real reason for the success of Cortés and Pizarro, because he lived in an era when white people seemingly always won their wars with nonwhites. In the Second Opium War, Queen Victoria’s plenipotentiary opined that “twenty-four determined [white] men with revolvers and a sufficient number of cartridges might walk through China from one end to the other.” ² Bardic historians thought in terms of biography, and why not? They were children of the nineteenth century, the golden age of rugged individualism and industrial capitalism. The nineteenth century was also an age of rampant nationalism, and when historians thought in terms of large groups of humans, they thought of the nation-state and not of tribes or cultures or language families. It was an age of unembarrassed elitism and racism, and historians tended to ignore plebeians in particular and non-Europeans in general. (Prescott and Parkman were in part exceptions, paying a full measure of attention to Amerindians, at least insofar as they influenced EuroAmerican destinies.) These historians were not much better equipped intellectually to notice those whom Eric R. Wolf has called the “people without history” ³ than they were to judge the stability of ecosystems. The social sciences and biology were new; ecology was not born until after Prescott and Parkman died, and was still immature when Morison was middle-aged.

The Analytic Interpretation

America’s classic historians did not even try to answer many of the questions that concern us at the end of the twentieth century because neither they nor their audiences were asking such questions. There were a few fresh minds, however, who provided new ways of looking at the world, which led to new ways of sorting data and new kinds of inquiries. Among the greatest of these innovators were Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Louis Pasteur, celebrants of paradox who emphasized the importance of instability and the immense power of the humble, even the invisible. Travelers and archaeologists, at a different level intellectually but no less influential, kept exploring and digging, turning up evidence of dense pre-Columbian populations in the Americas, of peoples of undeniably high culture. Who could continue to think of the Maya as savages after John L. Stephen’s volumes and Frederick Catherwood’s prints? After the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and Melville Herskovits, what excuse remained for a historian to claim that there was nothing to learn about Africans or African Americans?

Above all, after the hell-for-leather advance of the Japanese military in the early 1940s and the swift collapse of Europe’s overseas empires in the following two decades (as astonishing, in its way, as the collapse of the Amerindian empires four centuries earlier), there could be no more doubt that a great many of the “people without history” must have at least some history. The effect on the historical profession of the experiences of the last half-century has been like that on astronomers of the discovery that the faint smudges seen between the stars of the Milky Way were really distant galaxies.

The obsolescence of old conceptions persuaded historians to take a fresh look at the origins of European imperialism_ perhaps elements less dramatic than gold and God and heroes had been involved. Charles Verlinden led the way by tracing the roots of European imperialism to the Mediterranean in the age of the Crusades, where organizational structures and exploitative techniques that would be imposed on America in the sixteenth century were first tried, and where Europeans first learned to like sugar and to raise it for profitable export to their homelands. Verlinden followed the precursors of conquerors like Cortés and the plantation owners of Brazil from the Levant to the islands of the eastern Atlantic. There, in the triangle of the great western ocean that has Iberia, the Azores, and the Canaries as its boundary stones—an expanse that Pierre Chaunu has shrewdly called the “Medi-terranean Atlantic” ⁴ —the sailors of southern and western Europe studied the patterns of oceanic winds and learned to be bluewater sailors and how to sail to America and Asia. In Madeira, white settlers, often led by down-at-the-heels Iberian nobility seeking land and wealth to match their titles, discovered how to make a lot of money raising sugar; in the Canaries they learned how swiftly a fierce aboriginal people, the Guanches, could disappear and how easily they could be replaced with imported labor to raise tropical crops for the European market.

While historians of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were disinterring the roots of European imperialism, the students of the Americas and Amerindians were revolutionizing their disciplines. Archaeology thrust the beginnings of American history back at least fifteen thousand years and populated these millennia and both American continents with myriads of clever and mysterious people. Social scientists devised means, often quantitative, to tap into the history of undocumented peoples. The contribution of demographic historians has been of particular value, providing a structure within which other historians can find niches for their own discoveries. Historians opened them-selves to (or, fearing obsolescence, rushed to ransack) geology, climatology, biology, epidemiology, and other fields. As a result, the kind of grain that is poured into the historian’s mill today would wear out Leopold von Ranke’s grindstones. Historians are scientific not only in the care they take with research and attempts to limit bias, but also in their exploitation of whatever the sciences provide that is pertinent to the study of the human past.

European historians of the Annales school, centered in France, have been the most noted practitioners of this new kind of history, but similar advances in technique have been developed in the New World and applied to the study of the Amerindian past and the impact of the Columbian voyages on American history. The Berkeley school, as it is loosely and sometimes inaccurately called, led by geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer, physiologist Sherburne F. Cook, and historians Wood-row Borah and Lesley Byrd Simpson, began as far back as the 1930s to reassess pre-Columbian and Amerindian history. They used many kinds of nondocumentary data—geological and botanical, among others—and re-examined, and many times examined for the first time, the yellowed sheets of tribute, tax, and population records of the Spanish Empire. The Berkeley school has revolutionized American historiography. Not everyone accepts its conclusions, but its questions—rarely asked before except by proponents of indigenismo—plot the course of historical research in the immediate pre- and post-Columbian centuries in America.

There has been a renewal of interest in the whole picture—the world—and therefore in global history. The forces that propelled Columbus and the forces that the European discovery and exploitation of America triggered were supranational and supracontinental. Columbian and post-Columbian exchanges of raw materials, manufactured products, and organisms cannot be described or analyzed to the full extent of their significance within any unit smaller than the world. Scholars of worldly sophistication have accepted the challenge: Fernand Braudel, William McNeill, Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric R. Wolf, and others. Their work leads us to lands, cultures, and questions that the bardic historians of Columbus rarely considered. To cite one example, nearly one hundred years before Columbus and other European mariners crossed the great oceans, the Chinese admiral Cheng Ho launched a succession of huge fleets, manned by thousands, around the Malay Peninsula and across the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa. After this the Chinese ceased their transoceanic voyaging completely. Cheng Ho inspires today’s world historians to ask two questions that would never have occurred to Prescott, Parkman, or even Morison: Why did the Chinese stop their voyaging, and, the obvious corollary but not a question asked by Western historians until the present, Why did European voyagers start and never stop?

There are vast expanses of time and territory in the new history of the Americas as yet not even roughly surveyed, and the wor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Germs & Seeds Animals
• Index