Virgin soil epidemic

Transcription

As everybody knows, when Europeans arrived in the New World in the late 1400s, they find the land already occupied. What not everybody knows, perhaps, is how heavily occupied it was. Many historians now think that somewhere between 50 million and 100 million Native Americans lived in North and South America. And many of them lived in large, complex societies, states, if you will, that were larger than any European state. So the New World was not truly virgin soil for the European settlers. But the immune systems of the people who lived there were, in fact, virgin soil for the bacteria and the viruses that Europeans unwittingly brought with them. And they began to die in droves. In fact, some people think 90% of them died within the first century after contact with Columbus. As European settlers moved in, they still faced considerable resistance, but they had the opportunity to grab far more land and riches than many of them would have ever been able to obtain in the Old World. The result for them is a shift in expectations, a shift away from narrower constraints, a shift towards a more open world, in which, perhaps, we see the beginnings of an expectation, a set of expectations that would play a role in moving people to push beyond the old constraints of the Malthusian economy, the old constraints of the agricultural world that had limited people for over 10,000 years. So the numbers I was talking about, 50 million, 60 million, 80 million dead, are so big, and the geographical scope, an entire hemisphere, North and South America, is so extensive that at times it can seem like all of the death and destruction blurs together. So let me try to get a little bit more specific and a little bit more localized. Let's talk about the island of Hispaniola, one of the first places Columbus comes to in 1492. At that time there are approximately 1 million Taino Indians living on the island of Hispaniola. By the time a century has passed, a century a Spanish domination, of enslavement and violence, and above all death from disease, there are only 5,000 Tainos remaining. Virtually the entire population had been wiped out, and soon all that remains of their culture and their history is what had been written down by the conquerors. The devastation is so complete that when escaped slaves are wandering in the mountains they find artifacts left behind by the Tainos, and they wonder who those people were. But when the slaves rise up, in what becomes the world's biggest slave rebellion, 1791, a rebellion that ultimately becomes a war for independence, in which they create a new nation, and they come together to decide what to call that nation, they decide to memorialize the people who came before them. And again, they have to go to the Spanish books to find the name that the conquerors had written down, the name that the people who came before had actually given the island. And that name is Haiti. And that's what they call their new country. Historians call the movement of people, products, ideas, and organisms across the Atlantic in both directions in the years after 1492, the Columbian Exchange. And it's an apt term because things were moving in both directions. Obviously, disease organisms move west across the Atlantic. And what Native Americans receive, above all, is death and the destruction of societies. Europe, on the other hand, benefits directly from products that move across the Atlantic to the East. Spain, in particular, gets tons, literally tons, of gold and silver in the first century after 1492. And they're able to use that gold and silver to build an empire, an empire that doesn't last, but is very powerful in Europe and around the world while it does. Other countries, of course, benefit as well economically, and we'll talk more about them as we go along. But we should mention that if organisms are moving west across the Atlantic, they're also moving east. Organisms, like the plant that we know as corn or maize, the potato, the sweet potato, cassava, tomatoes, and many other products, which are today essential parts of European, African, and Asian cuisines, and help through their benefits and the way that they can produce many calories from relatively small inputs of labor and land, through those abilities they're able to increase the population of the Old World tremendously between 1500 and today. Now, for settlers who move west, there are many benefits as well. For European settlers, it is. For enslaved Africans, not so many. But for free Europeans, what they find is not only that they can have much more wealth, not only that they can have much more status than they had in the old world, they even find that their bodies are different. They are, if you will, beneficiaries of the catastrophe that hits Native Americans and enslaved Africans so hard. By the 1700s, Europeans or people of European descent, I should say, born in the New World colonies are visibly healthier, stronger, and taller on average than their cousins who are born in Europe. There's a famous anecdote of a dinner in Paris, where Thomas Jefferson was present. And there was also a French philosoph there, who had the theory that things in the New World were degenerate compared to those in the Old World. The animals were smaller, he claimed. The bears were smaller. Jaguars were smaller than tigers, and so on and so forth. Jefferson simply said, let's all stand up. All the Americans are on this side of the table. The French are on this side of the table. And he said, once they did, who is smaller now? That's an entertaining anecdote, but if we had gone back to Monticello and measured the height of Jefferson's slaves, we would find that on average they would have been at least an inch shorter then people of the corresponding gender and age who were at Jefferson's side of the table in Paris. The fact is for the first 300 years of the Columbian Exchange, the movement from the old world to the new, of the people who come from the old world to the new, 8 million of the 11 million come in the bottom of slave ships, chained together, many of them not even surviving the voyage. Enslaved Africans, in fact, would be a majority of all immigrants from the old world to the new until deep into the 19th century. And of course, at the same time, it was the deaths of well over 50 million people from epidemic disease that had cleared the way for the farms and the plantations and for whites, at least, the opportunities that would so characterize the New World experience for many centuries after. So it's fair to say that the European colonies and the colonists who come to them are able to get a new sense, a new set of dreams and a new set of ideas in large part because they are, as one historian put it and I just put it a few minutes ago, beneficiaries of catastrophe.