Webs+of+Humankind%2C+519-528.pdf

# What were the most important effects of the biological globalization initiated by the oceanic voyaging of Atlantic Europeans? ## Magellan's Circumnavigation - The Genoese cartographer Battista Agnese made this map of the world in 1540, showing the route Magellan took across the Pacific and Indian...

# What were the most important effects of the biological globalization initiated by the oceanic voyaging of Atlantic Europeans? ## Magellan's Circumnavigation - The Genoese cartographer Battista Agnese made this map of the world in 1540, showing the route Magellan took across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. - The extent of Portuguese and other European navigation enabled Agnese to produce detailed renderings of the world's coastlines. ## Unwelcoming Aborigines - European sailors refined their knowledge of Pacific shores and blundered into most of the inhabited Pacific islands, including the remotest outposts of Polynesia in Easter Island and Hawaii. - They charted the American coastlines from Alaska to Chile. - By 1780, every significant coast of every ocean had been mapped, and every important island located. - European mariners failed in their quest to find a direct route from Europe to Asian spices and failed to find powerful Christian allies against Islamic polities. - They succeeded in uniting the world's coasts and harbors into a single network and to build geographical knowledge so that any competent navigator, with the right equipment and ship, could go anywhere on the sea with a reasonably good idea of where he was and what lay ahead. - The confidence with which merchants had long sailed the South China Sea, the Arabian Gulf, or the Mediterranean European merchants now extended to the deep oceans. ## Biological Globalization, 1492-1800 - One of the most important consequences of the discovery of the oceans and their prevailing winds, and the establishment of regular traffic linking the world's shores was a surge in biological globalization. - This process reshuffled the continents' flora and fauna, bringing both searing new epidemics and useful new food crops to many peoples. - It changed the world's demographic balance and altered political and economic fortunes. - It eased life for millions in Eurasia and Africa, and ended it prematurely for millions in the Americas and Oceania. - It provides an excellent example of the fact that in world history major consequences often flow from events in ways that no one intended or foresaw. ## Movement of Plants, Animals, and Microbes - As earlier chapters have noted, over the centuries people moved plants, animals, and microbes around the world. - Sometimes they did it on purpose, like the first settlers of North America who brought dogs with them, or the Polynesians who ferried crops and animals to uninhabited Pacific islands. - Sometimes they did it by accident, like the anonymous people who brought the plague bacillus out of Central Asia in the fourteenth century. - Biological exchange has long been an important part of history, with powerful effects on food supplies, disease burdens, and the availability of useful animals. ## The Pace of Biological Exchange - The pace of biological exchange sped up whenever web connections boosted trade and migration. - For example, when the Roman and Han Empires were at their height in the first and second centuries CE, and trans-Eurasian trade and travel reached a temporary peak along the Silk Roads, so did biological exchange. - China acquired camels, donkeys and grapes. - Mediterranean peoples added cherries, apricots, and walnuts to their gardens and diets. - When commerce quickened in the Arabian Sea after 800 CE, the exchange of crops among India, East Africa, and the Mediterranean picked up speed. ## Americas Biologically Apart - Biologically, as in other respects, the Americas had remained a realm apart from these Old World web exchanges. - Aside from the import of the dog from Siberia about 15,000 years ago and the export of sweet potato to Polynesia about 1,000 years ago, the American hemisphere before 1492 exchanged nothing consequential with the wider world. - American plants and animals included many unknown elsewhere- tobacco, armadillos, and grizzly bears, for instance. - Australia and New Zealand even more isolated, each hosted flora and fauna- eucalyptus trees, kangaroos, and moas, for example- found nowhere else on Earth. ## After the Voyages of Columbus - After the voyages of Columbus, mariners linked almost every nook and cranny of the humanly habitable Earth into a biologically interactive web. - The world's oceans no longer served to isolate ecosystems from one another. - Biological borders disappeared as plants, animals, and pathogens scattered wherever ecological conditions permitted. ## Columbus's Contribution - Columbus inaugurated regular exchanges of plants, animals, and microbes across the Atlantic in 1492. - On his second voyage, he deliberately brought a ship full of species new to the Americas and brought home to Spain some biological souvenirs. - Over the next few centuries, his followers did the same in an ongoing process known to historians as the Columbian Exchange. - The most conspicuous result was that indigenous Americans acquired hundreds of new plants and animals from Eurasia and Africa, as well as a dozen devastating diseases formerly unfamiliar to them. ## The Impact of Deadly Diseases, 1492-1700 - Upon arrival, transatlantic travelers coughed and sneezed billions of deadly microbes into the air that people in the Americas breathed. - Among these microbes were the pathogens (viruses, mainly) that cause smallpox, measles, mumps, whooping cough, and influenza. - All of these had become fairly widespread in the Old World web. - From West Africa to East Asia, they were usually endemic, childhood diseases, sometimes now called crowd diseases, that killed huge numbers of small children. - But in the Old World web, most adults were survivors, and either resistant or fully immune to most or all of these infections. - The Columbian Exchange brought some lethal vector-borne African diseases to the Americas. - The two deadliest were yellow fever and falciparum malaria- (the worst form of malaria), both spread by mosquitos. - In the Americas in 1492, none of the 40 to 70 million people had any prior experience with, and therefore no acquired immunity to, any of these diseases. - Their immune systems did not instantly "recognize" and neutralize the exotic pathogens. - This vulnerability was compounded by the weakening of their nutrition and health by Atlantic European colonization, which included loss of farmlands, enslavement, and forced migration. - The cascade of unfamiliar pathogens in the midst of conquests brought suffering and death on the largest scale. ## The Impact of the Deadly Diseases on a Mexican Village - The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move. - The sick were so utterly helpless that they could only lie on their beds like corpses, unable to move their limbs or even their heads. - A great many died from this plague, and many others died of hunger. - They would not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds. ## Consequences of the Epidemics - In many communities, the social fabric dissolved under this onslaught. - People lost all hope. - Few wanted to bring children into a world such as theirs had become, dominated by sickness and pain, and few were healthy enough to do so. - The scale of epidemics and death was gigantic. - Between 1492 and 1650, populations in the Americas fell by 70 to 95 percent in one of the largest-scale demographic disasters in world history. - The sharp decline in population in the Americas had many consequences that we will meet repeatedly in the chapters ahead. ## The Americas' Infectious Diseases' Lesser Impact on Africa and Eurasia - The Americas had little in the way of lethal infectious disease that transferred to Africa and Eurasia. - The first migrants to arrive in North America (23,000 to 15,000 years ago) had passed through northeastern Siberia and Alaska during an ice age. - The brutal cold probably killed off some pathogens. - And since they left Siberia when no animals but dogs had been domesticated, the human infections derived from herd animals (e.g., smallpox, measles, influenza) had not yet appeared. - So the first Americans arrived relatively free from infection. - Once in the Americas, people did not domesticate any herd animals other than alpacas and llamas, which seem, by chance, not to have hosted pathogens that evolved into agents of human disease. - If Eurasia and Africa acquired any new diseases from the Americas at all (syphilis is the leading candidate, but the evidence is far from conclusive), they had trivial consequences. - So, as regards disease, the Columbian Exchange was a notably one-sided affair. - The one-sidedness of the health consequences of the Columbian Exchange led Europeans who witnessed this devastation to see divine purpose at work. Francisco de Aguilar, who was present when Spaniards and their indigenous allies conquered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, wrote: "When the Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox, and there was a great pestilence in the city." - More than a century later in New England, John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, saw the disaster as divine endorsement of the seizure of land: "For the natives, they are neere all dead of small Poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess." ## The Columbian Exchange and Domesticated Animals - The Columbian Exchange was almost as one-sided with respect to domesticated animals. - People transported turkeys and guinea pigs from the Americas to other continents, but nowhere did they become important. - Alpacas and llamas never prospered outside their native Andes, although scattered populations do exist elsewhere. - Indigenous Americans had little in the way of domesticated animals, and those they had did not travel well. - In contrast, Eurasian and African animal species flourished when transported to the Americas. - Cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, and horses were the most important animal immigrants. - They all found empty niche space in the Americas, especially cattle and horses on the vast grasslands of both North and South America. - The new animals provided new sources of hides, wool, and animal protein. - Horses and oxen made plowing feasible in the Americas for the first time, allowed transportation with wheeled vehicles, and, together with donkeys and mules, provided a greater variety of pack animals. - Animal-powered transport extended the potential of commerce and economic specialization, which over centuries raised overall production levels considerably. ## The Impact of Animals in the Americas - In addition to economic growth, the new animals brought unwelcome frictions to the Americas. - They munched and trampled crops, provoking quarrels between herders and farmers of the sort familiar in Africa and Eurasia but almost unknown in the Americas before 1492. - In this respect, the Columbian Exchange helped make the Americas a bit more like the rest of the world, where such quarrels had long been routine. - In North America, the introduction of horses upset the political order. - The indigenous peoples of the prairies, from Texas to Manitoba, acquired horses from newly Spanish Mexico in the seventeenth century, and some of them quickly mastered riding and horse breeding. - On horseback, they became far more adept as bison hunters, solving any subsistence problems as long as the bison lasted. - Moreover, those with horses easily inflicted military defeats on those without. - Peoples such as the Sioux and Comanche eventually built considerable empires on the basis of mounted warfare, as Mongol and Malian horsemen had recently done in Asia and Africa. - In this respect too, the Americas became less distinctive, more like the rest of the world, thanks to the Columbian Exchange and biological globalization. ## The Columbian Exchange and Key Crops - The Columbian Exchange was more evenhanded when it came to crops. - The Eurasian staples of wheat, rye, barley, and rice flourished in the Americas. - Some of the new crops could survive in cold and dry landscapes where the indigenous crops fared poorly: wheat grows better than maize in North Dakota and Saskatchewan. - Others, such as rice, transplanted from both Asia and Africa, required heavy labor in order to produce bumper crops. - Rice became a plantation crop in the Americas, worked mainly by enslaved Africans. - Aside from grains, the Americas also acquired citrus fruits, grapes, and figs from Eurasia, and millets, sorghums, yams, bananas, okra, and watermelon from Africa. - So the new crops extended the possibilities of American agriculture somewhat and allowed a more varied diet. - But in many places they brought only a small improvement in nutrition, because people in the Americas already had maize or potatoes (or both) and plenty of fruits and vegetables. ## The Impact of New Drug Crops in The Americas - New drug crops changed the Americas at least as profoundly as the new food crops. - Sugar, both a mild drug and a food, is originally from New Guinea. It was as a commercial crop in South Asia, China, and the Mediterranean. - Iberians brought it to Brazil and the Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where, as we shall see, it became the mainstay of a plantation economy based on African slave labor. - Coffee, from Ethiopia and Arabia, also became a plantation crop in the eighteenth century. - We will see the full importance of these crops in a later chapter when we consider the plantation system in the Americas. ## The Americas' Contributions to Global Cuisine - The Americas' contributions to global cuisine included the staples maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and cassava, together with tomatoes, cacao, peanuts, pumpkins, squashes, pineapples, and a handful of other food crops. - Some of these crops had revolutionary consequences in sizeable regions of Africa and Eurasia. - Potatoes, for example, which nicely suited soil and climate conditions from Ireland to Russia, led to a spurt of population growth in northern Europe after 1730. ## Maize - This staple had a broader impact than potatoes. - It did well in conditions as varied as those of southern Europe, southern and central China, and much of Africa. - Maize allowed new lands to be brought under cultivation, because it prospered where grains an tubers would not. - It soon underpinned population growth and famine resistance in China and southern Europe. - But nowhere was it more influential than in Africa, where today it remains the single most important food corp. - In the two centuries after 1550, maize became a staple in Atlantic Africa, from Angola to Senegambia. - Different maize varieties suited the several different rainfall regimes in Africa and improved African peoples' chances of surviving drought. - While maize helped feed generations of Africans, it had bleaker consequences too. - Maize stores much better than millets, sorghums, or tubers, the traditional crops in most of Africa. - It thus allowed chiefs and kings to maximize their power by centralizing the storage and distribution of food. - In the West African forest zone, south of the Sahel, maize encouraged the formation of larger states than ever before. - The Asante kingdom, for example, embarked on a program of military expansion after the 1670s, spearheaded by maize-eating armies that could carry their food with them on distant campaigns. - Maize also served well as a portable food for merchant caravans, which contributed to commercialization in Atlantic Africa, including an expansion of existing slave trades. - Slave traders could operate over longer distances if they, and their human property, had an easily portable food supply that stored well. - Maize in Africa increased the practicality of the slave trade. - As we shall see, it helped make slaving an intercontinental business, linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas. ## Cassava - Also known as manioc, cassava was the Americas' other great contribution to African agriculture. - Native to Brazil, cassava is admirably suited to drought and poor soils, and resistant to many insect crop pests. - It too did well in many parts of Africa, and like maize provided a portable, storable food that underpinned state formation and expansion in West Africa and Angola. - Cassava, like potatoes, need not be harvested at a particular season but may be left in the ground for weeks or more. - So it is an ideal crop for people who might need to run away for their own safety and abandon their fields- for example, people routinely subject to slave raiding. - In this respect, it had the opposite effect of maize: it helped peasantries to flee and survive slave raids, while maize helped slavers to conduct raids and wars. ## The Human Web: The Columbian Exchange 1492 - 1800 - The Columbian Exchange was the largest-scale, fastest, and most important set of intercontinental biological transfers in world history. - But it was only part of the surge in biological globalization that followed upon the navigational exploits of Columbus's generation. - A modest transpacific exchange resulted from traffic that followed Magellan's voyages, at first affecting chiefly the Philippines. - That exchange intensified in the wake of later sea captains' travels throughout the world's largest ocean. - The Pacific islands themselves, rather than the ocean's rim, felt the greatest effects, and as in the Americas the most striking result was sharp depopulation in the wake of repeated epidemics. ## Guam - Guam, for example, in the seventeenth century became a Spanish outpost on the route between the Philippines and the Americas. - Its indigenous population, the Chamorro, whose ancestors had arrived some 3,000 years before, fell by about 90 percent within a century-mainly from the impact of smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, and other new diseases, although violence and loss of lands raised the Chamorros' vulnerability to infections. - Guam also acquired many new plants and animals, such as cattle, hogs, chickens, rice, maize, citrus trees, and a Mexican shrub tree called tangantangan. - The latter grew widely on Guam, especially in lands no longer farmed because of the population disaster. ## Other Pacific Islands and Australia - In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, other Pacific islands and Australia experienced similar biological disruptions when put into sustained contact with the wider world. - In every case, the demographic consequences overshadowed all others. - Population declines of roughly 90 percent befell many archipelagoes, primarily a result of newly introduced diseases combined with loss of land and resources. - A similar grim history befell aboriginal Australians after 1788 when contact with the wider world became routine, as the next chapter will explain. ## The Impact of Biological Exchange - Taken together, the whirlwind of intercontinental biological exchange in the centuries between 1492 and 1800 brought astounding changes around the world. - It led to long-lasting demographic catastrophes among peoples unfamiliar with the crowd diseases. - In the Americas and Oceania, indigenous population size typically fell for about six or seven generations before bottoming out and beginning to recover. - This rate of recovery was slow compared to the experience of Eurasian populations in the face of most epidemics. - That is testimony to the terrible impact of multiple infections assaulting peoples in the Americas and Oceania. - In many cases, it also reflects the significance of loss of the best lands; enslavement, and forced migration in escalating mortality and suppressing fertility. - The population disasters were a part of biological globalization, but they were not just biological processes: they arose from the interaction of biological and social processes. They represent a penalty of isolation from the bigger webs of world history, a theme we have encountered before. ## Improved Nutrition Due to Global Exchange - The surge in biological exchange eventually improved the quantity and reliability of food supplies almost everywhere. - Farmers had more crops to choose from and so more regularly raised those best suited to their soils and climate. - This process slowly reduced the frequency of starvation and the toll of epidemics (because well-fed bodies survive most diseases better than malnourished bodies). - The world's population almost doubled between 1500 and 1800, from about 500 million to about 950 million, and a big reason was improved nutrition thanks to food-crop globalization. ## Global and Local Webs - One agreeable way of thinking about the whole (admittedly often grim) subject of biological globalization in the wake Italian food without tomatoes? Or Polish cuisine without potatoes? What would the South African diet be without mealie maize, or West Africa's without peanuts? Cuba's without rice, or Argentina's without beef? New Zealand's or southern China's without sweet potatoes? What would Korean kimchi taste like without chili peppers? - If we are what we eat, then the Columbian Exchange and biological globalization not only shaped empires and demography but also helped to make us what we are. ## The Beginnings of a Global Web - The oceanic voyaging of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries united continents into a single Global web for the first time in human history. - The web-making process-at work from the very earliest human settlements onward- had developed an extended, multilayered fabric of connections across Eurasia and North Africa. - Significant webs had developed also in the Americas, and smaller, local ones elsewhere. - But for thousands of years before 1492, the Americas had largely stood apart from Africa and Eurasia, notwithstanding the brief Viking and Polynesian visits. - Now the history of the Americas unfolded in continuing connection with the Old World web. - Similarly, after the secrets of oceanic navigation spread and mariners sailed regularly among all the world's inhabited shores, the islands of the Pacific, the coastlands of South Africa, and a few other spots around the world became like the Americas-linked as never before to the new Global web now in formation. ## The Oceanic Voyaging Tightened Linkages - The oceanic voyaging also tightened linkages within the Old World web. - In some cases, the tighter links proved temporary, as with Zheng He's voyages to India and East Africa between 1405 and 1433. - But in others they endured much longer, as with Portuguese ties to African coasts, India, and the spice islands of Southeast Asia. So the three centuries after the 1490s saw a sudden spurt in web building, one that transformed human history and inaugurated a global age in which we still live. ## The Spinning of the Global Web - The spinning of the first truly Global web had many consequences. - The most enduring and important of these was the biological globalization that reshuffled the distribution of economically significant plants and animals around the world and brought devastating infections to the Americas and Oceania. - Another important consequence flowed from the fact that it was mainly Atlantic Europeans-not Chinese, Africans, Polynesians, or anyone else who first fully deciphered the oceanic winds and currents. - As a result, they were the first to sail the seven seas and learn of new long-distance trade possibilities. - They also found new opportunities to conquer peoples less militarily formidable than themselves. - The role of Europeans, especially seafaring Atlantic Europeans, in influencing world history rose to new levels. Over the prior millennia, only rarely could such a small minority of humankind exercise such outsized influence upon world history as Atlantic Europeans would wield in the three of four centuries after 1492. ## The Penalties of Isolation - The penalties of isolation for societies with few or no connections to the Old World web were now felt as never before. - These societies typically hosted a narrower range of infectious diseases than did peoples in the web that enveloped Eurasia and North Africa. - More specifically, they had no prior exposure to several highly transmissible and dangerous pathogens, such as measles, influenza, and smallpox, and so, unlike populations in the Old World web, had not converted these into endemic infections. - That left them vulnerable to shattering epidemics when European ships arrived with these and other unfamiliar pathogens. - In addition, isolated peoples possessed less formidable weaponry than existed in China, India, or Europe, using less metal, no firearms, and no horses. - These societies had not previously needed institutions and technologies that equipped them to deal with the challenges posed by seafaring, disease-bearing, horse-riding, well-armed strangers. ## The Transformation of Global Web - The weaving of the first truly Global web proved transformational in other respects too. - It continued the long-standing process by which cultural diversity narrowed. - The major religions, especially Christianity and Islam, spread to new ground. They became slightly more diverse themselves as a result, because in every case they adopted some local features, but they reduced the overall diversity of religion with their conversions in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. - The spread of Arabic, Spanish, and English also, on balance, reduced the variety of languages spoken around the world, even if the English spoken in Australia or Barbados was not the same as that spoken in London. - Many languages would gradually go extinct in the centuries after oceanic voyaging linked up the world. - The next few chapters will detail the formation of the Global web and how it affected political, economic, and cultural life. ## Conclusion - The world in 1400 included one big web and several smaller ones. - The Old World web was the big one, containing the majority of humankind and stretching across Eurasia and North Africa from Senegal to Japan. - A smaller one existed in the Americas, and local ones existed in several places around the world. - In the course of the fifteenth century, however, this longstanding pattern underwent a major reorganization. - Beginning early in the fifteenth century, Chinese and Atlantic European mariners undertook oceanic voyages that brought the world together as never before. - The most decisive changes came with the European, mainly Iberian, voyaging. - From 1460 onward, sailors brought an increasing number of African maritime ports (e.g., Elmina) into direct contact with communities of the Old World web. - From 1492 onward, they brought the Americas and the Old World web together on a sustained basis. - From the early sixteenth century onward, they brought an increasing number of Pacific islands into enduring touch with the Old World web. - So those mariners, in seeking fortune and glory for themselves and their monarchs, unintentionally created the first truly Global web. ## The Biological Global Web - Biological globalization in some respects was the deepest of all the Global web's consequences, affecting as it did the lives and deaths of hundreds of millions of people during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. - Exchanges of food crops resulted in changes to agriculture and diets and, in more cases than not, improvements in nutrition. - People in Africa and Eurasia acquired maize, cassava, and potatoes from the Americas, while those in the Americas acquired wheat, rye, barley, and new varieties of rice. - Exchanges of domesticated animals brought horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats (to name only the most significant) to the Americas. - These plant and animal exchanges were important in the sixteenth century and remain so today. ## The Exchange of Disease Pathogens - The other major component of biological globalization was the exchange of disease pathogens. - It was extremely one-sided and extremely costly to peoples of the Americas and Oceania. - Its toll varied from case to case, but generally was on the order of one-half to nine-tenths of each populations affected. - The population catastrophe, made more costly by violence, loss of lands, and other stresses, generally lasted for the first 150 years after sustained contact with peoples of the Old World web. - The oceanic voyaging of the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries did not start biological globalization, which can be traced back many thousands of years. - But it launched the biggest and most consequential spurt of it in world history. - The impact of American food crops on Africa was so great that it makes sense to think of African history, especially Atlantic African history, as divided into pre-Columbian and post-Columbian phases as is normally done for the Americas. - Maize, cassava, and a cornucopia of other crops from the Americas, including peanuts, pineapple, chili peppers, sweet potato, avocado, cacao, and a dozen others, gradually re-fashioned African cuisine and agriculture. - This was the second time in African history that imported crops made a big difference- recall the impact of bananas, acquired from Southeast Asia, many centuries before. - African farmers took to the new American crops eagerly, seeing them as either useful additions or even replacements for their old ones. - The greater variety of food crops provided a form of insurance against crop failure due to insect pests or bad weather. - Maize had the further attraction that birds usually find it too much trouble to poke through the husks to get at the grain. - Birds don't bother with cassava either. - Ripe millet and sorghum, in contrast, provide tempting targets for birds, and people must defend these crops day and night if they wish to enjoy a harvest. - The American crops brought a slow expansion of farming, state making, and perhaps even population growth in Africa after 1650 - despite the demographic effects of the transatlantic slave trade. # Biological Globalization in The Pacific - The Columbian Exchange was the largest-scale, fastest, and most important set of intercontinental biological transfers in world history. - It was only part of the surge in biological globalization that followed upon the navigational exploits of Columbus's generation. - A modest transpacific exchange resulted from traffic that followed Magellan's voyages, at first affecting chiefly the Philippines. - That exchange intensified in the wake of later sea captains' travels throughout the world's largest ocean. - The Pacific islands themselves, rather than the ocean's rim, felt the greatest effects, and as in the Americas the most striking result was sharp depopulation in the wake of repeated epidemics. - Guam, for example, in the seventeenth century became a Spanish outpost on the route between the Philippines and the Americas. - Its indigenous population, the Chamorro, whose ancestors had arrived some 3,000 years before, fell by about 90 percent within a century-mainly from the impact of smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, and other new diseases, although violence and loss of lands raised the Chamorros' vulnerability to infections. - Guam also acquired many new plants and animals, such as cattle, hogs, chickens, rice, maize, citrus trees, and a Mexican shrub tree called tangantangan. - The latter grew widely on Guam, especially in lands no longer farmed because of the population disaster. # The Impact of the Columbian Exchange on other Pacific Islands and Australia - In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, other Pacific islands and Australia experienced similar biological disruptions when put into sustained contact with the wider world. - In every case, the demographic consequences overshadowed all others. - Population declines of roughly 90 percent befell many archipelagoes, primarily a result of newly introduced diseases combined with loss of land and resources. - A similar grim history befell aboriginal Australians after 1788 when contact with the wider world became routine, as the next chapter will explain. ## The Impact of Biological Exchange - Taken together, the whirlwind of intercontinental biological exchange in the centuries between 1492 and 1800 brought astounding changes around the world. - It led to long-lasting demographic catastrophes among peoples unfamiliar with the crowd diseases. - In the Americas and Oceania, indigenous population size typically fell for about six or seven generations before bottoming out and beginning to recover. - This rate of recovery was slow compared to the experience of Eurasian populations in the face of most epidemics. - That is testimony to the terrible impact of multiple infections assaulting peoples in the Americas and Oceania. - In many cases, it also reflects the significance of loss of the best lands; enslavement, and forced migration in escalating mortality and suppressing fertility. - The population disasters were a part of biological globalization, but they were not just biological processes: they arose from the interaction of biological and social processes. - They represent a penalty of isolation from the bigger webs of world history, a theme we have encountered before. # Improved Nutrition Due to Global Exchange - The surge in biological exchange eventually improved the quantity and reliability of food supplies almost everywhere. - Farmers had more crops to choose from and so more regularly raised those best suited to their soils and climate. - This process slowly reduced the frequency of starvation and the toll of epidemics (because well-fed bodies survive most diseases better than malnourished bodies). - The world's population almost doubled between 1500 and 1800, from about 500 million to about 950 million, and a big reason was improved nutrition thanks to food-crop globalization. # Global and Local Webs - One agreeable way of thinking about the whole (admittedly often grim) subject of biological globalization in the wake Italian food without tomatoes? Or Polish cuisine without potatoes? What would the South African diet be without mealie maize, or West Africa's without peanuts? Cuba's without rice, or Argentina's without beef? New Zealand's or southern China's without sweet potatoes? What would Korean kimchi taste like without chili peppers? - If we are what we eat, then the Columbian Exchange and biological globalization not only shaped empires and demography but also helped to make us what we are. # The Beginnings of a Global Web - The oceanic voyaging of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries united continents into a single Global web for the first time in human history. - The web-making process-at work from the very earliest human settlements onward- had developed an extended, multilayered fabric of connections across Eurasia and North Africa. - Significant webs had developed also in the Americas, and smaller, local ones elsewhere. - But for thousands of years before 1492, the Americas had largely stood apart from Africa and Eurasia, notwithstanding the brief Viking and Polynesian visits. - Now the history of the Americas unfolded in continuing connection with the Old World web. - Similarly, after the secrets of oceanic navigation spread and mariners sailed regularly among all the world's inhabited shores, the islands of the Pacific, the coastlands of South Africa, and a few other spots around the world became like the Americas-linked as never before to the new Global web now in formation. # The Oceanic Voyaging Tightened Linkages - The oceanic voyaging also tightened linkages within the Old World web. - In some cases, the tighter links proved temporary, as with Zheng He's voyages to India and East Africa between 1405 and 1433. - But in others they endured much longer, as with Portuguese ties to African coasts, India, and the spice islands of Southeast Asia. - So the three centuries after the 1490s saw a sudden spurt in web building, one that transformed human history and inaugurated a global age in which we still live. # The Spinning of the Global Web - The spinning of the first truly Global web had many consequences. - The most enduring and important of these was the biological globalization that reshuffled the distribution of economically significant plants and animals around the world and brought devastating infections to the Americas and Oceania. - Another important consequence flowed from the fact that it was mainly Atlantic Europeans-not Chinese, Africans, Polynesians, or anyone else who first fully deciphered the oceanic winds and currents. - As a result, they were the first to sail the seven seas and learn of new long-distance trade possibilities. - They also found new opportunities to conquer peoples less militarily formidable than themselves. - The role of Europeans, especially seafaring Atlantic Europeans, in influencing world history rose to new levels. - Over the prior millennia, only rarely could such a small minority of humankind exercise such outsized influence upon world history as Atlantic Europeans would wield in the three of four centuries after 1492. ## The Penalties of Isolation - The penalties of isolation for societies with few or no connections to the Old World web were now felt as never before. - These societies typically hosted a narrower range of infectious diseases than did peoples in the web that enveloped Eurasia and North Africa. - More specifically, they had no prior exposure to several highly transmissible and dangerous pathogens, such as measles, influenza, and smallpox, and so, unlike populations in the Old World web, had not converted these into endemic infections. - That left them vulnerable to shattering epidemics when European ships arrived with these and other unfamiliar pathogens. - In addition, isolated peoples possessed less formidable weaponry than existed in China, India, or Europe, using less metal, no firearms, and no horses. - These societies had not previously needed institutions and technologies that equipped them to deal with the challenges posed by seafaring, disease-bearing, horse-riding, well-armed strangers. ## The Transformation of Global Web - The weaving of the first truly Global web proved transformational in other respects too. - It continued the long-standing process by which cultural diversity narrowed. - The major religions, especially Christianity and Islam, spread to new ground. They became slightly more diverse themselves as a result, because in every case they adopted some local features, but they reduced the overall diversity of religion with their conversions in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. - The spread of Arabic, Spanish, and English also, on balance, reduced the variety of languages spoken around the world, even if the English spoken in Australia or Barbados was not the same as that spoken in London. - Many languages would gradually go extinct in the centuries after oceanic voyaging linked up the world. - The next few chapters will detail the formation of the Global web and how it affected political, economic, and cultural life. ## Conclusion - The world in 1400 included one big web and several smaller ones. - The Old World web was the big one, containing the majority of humankind and stretching across Eurasia and North Africa from Senegal to Japan. - A smaller one existed in the Americas, and local ones existed in several places around the world. - In the course of the fifteenth century, however, this longstanding pattern underwent a major reorganization. - Beginning early in the fifteenth century, Chinese and Atlantic European mariners undertook oceanic voyages that brought the world together as never before. - The most decisive changes came with the European, mainly Iberian, voyaging. - From 1460 onward, sailors brought an increasing number of African maritime ports (e.g., Elmina) into direct contact with