1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Written by Charles C. Mann

Narrated by Robertson Dean

From the author of 1491—the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas—a deeply engaging new history of the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs.

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, he ended that separation at a stroke. Driven by the economic goal of establishing trade with China, he accidentally set off an ecological convulsion as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans.

The Columbian Exchange, as researchers call it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. More important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitched along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; bacteria, fungi, and viruses; rats of every description—all of them rushed like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before, changing lives and landscapes across the planet.

Eight decades after Columbus, a Spaniard named Legazpi succeeded where Columbus had failed. He sailed west to establish continual trade with China, then the richest, most powerful country in the world. In Manila, a city Legazpi founded, silver from the Americas, mined by African and Indian slaves, was sold to Asians in return for silk for Europeans. It was the first time that goods and people from every corner of the globe were connected in a single worldwide exchange. Much as Columbus created a new world biologically, Legazpi and the Spanish empire he served created a new world economically.

As Charles C. Mann shows, the Columbian Exchange underlies much of subsequent human history. Presenting the latest research by ecologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Mann shows how the creation of this worldwide network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City—where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted—the center of the world. In such encounters, he uncovers the germ of today’s fiercest political disputes, from immigration to trade policy to culture wars.

In 1493, Charles Mann gives us an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307913777

Charles C. Mann

Charles C. Mann is the author of 1491, which won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Keck award for the best book of the year. A correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Wired, he has covered the intersection of science, technology, and commerce for many newspapers and magazines here and abroad, including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, and more.  In addition to 1491, he was the co-author of four other non-fiction books. He is now working on a companion volume to 1491. His website is www.charlesmann.org.

Reviews for 1493

[tajohnson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not sure what Art Director chose the cover photo, I don't find it sells the book at all. You understand why the cover after reading the book but thats not what is important here. This book is a breadth of knowledge of cause and effect on the development of the new world.

[mattries37315 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Today we live in a globalized society that some accept and attempt to enter while others fight against to save their local culture and way of life, but what if it turns out our global society hasn’t just happened but been around since a man called Columbus arrived in the Caribbean? 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann is the follow up to his previous bestseller 1491 in which he shows the changes around the world that the ‘Columbian Exchange’ created.

Mann argues that Columbus, referenced as Colón based on untranslated surname, created the path to the homogenocene—the global homogenization of (agricultural) species, diseases, and tools brought about by the migration and transport that set in with the discovery of the new world. This homogenization includes “invasive species” that the modern world relies on for food and has allowed for the number of humans living on the planet. Throughout the book Mann not only studies the environmental impact of this global exchange but also the impact on humanity through food, diseases, migration (both voluntary and the slave trade), and on society. While much of the “story” of history of the Americas after Columbus focuses on Europeans, it turns out Africans were way more impactful not only in the future United States but everything south of the Rio Grande especially as Europeans were vastly outnumbered by Africans and their descendants for centuries. Mann brings out the history of Indian, African, and Asian populations in the Americas that created the Western Hemisphere a melting pot way before it became associated with the U.S., but also how Africans and Indians banded together against Europeans to create mixed societies or allied societies that main life difficult for colonial masters. Through 521 pages, Mann explores how one voyage created the world we live in today and ramifications everyone has had to deal with for over half a millennium.

1493 can be read after or independently of Charles C. Mann’s 1491, it is full of facts that are communicated well with connected with one another in a very understandable way that makes to see today’s world and history in a new way.

[rickgeissal · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As with the author's 1491, this book is encyclopedic about changes wrought onto the world's eco-systems as a result of Europeans, Africans, Native Americans and Asians - and their bacteria, viruses and parasites - across oceans.

[kylecarroll · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Audiobook. Just as dense as the first book. Interesting but seemed to go off on unnecessary tangents.

[markm2315 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Rambling collection of historical stories all ostensibly associated with the post-Columbian exchange. I found it more pedestrian than 1491, and had read much of it elsewhere.

[steve02476 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great stuff, but wasn't exactly a single book. Could have been three or four short books if it had been planned that way. But, a lot of fascinating history and science.

[jbgusa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book. I hope most of it is accurate since there seems to be some speculation in the pages of the book. However its contents do make sense. I preferred his other book on pre-Columbian America, 1491 but both are excellent and complementary, not duplicative.

[wren73-89184 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read most of it. It did seem to stay on a subject longer than necessary, but it had interesting information on the affect Columbus' discovery had on the world. It would have been better if I had the book form instead of audiobook, as it is easier to skim over areas in the written form.

[amphipodgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a fascinating book! Mann untangles many of the ecological and human consequences of the meeting of worlds and mixing of species and cultures that started with the establishment of an ongoing European presence in the Americas. For example -- Europeans overturned many Native American cultural practices in ways that made perfect breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes that were recently introduced from Africa. Africans were far more resistant to both malaria and yellow fever than were either Europeans or North Americans. This may have been one of the economic forces that caused the American south to be founded primarily on African chattel slavery rather than European indentured servitude. We see the potato go from America to Ireland and create a population boom, followed by the tragedy of the famine when the potato blight follows after. There are so many amazing stories here -- biology, warfare, economics, suffering, resistance. Highly recommended.

[dhmontgomery-265379 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not quite as paradigm-shifting as the author's first book, "1491," this is nonetheless a broad, comprehensive look at the aftermath of the European discovery of the Americas. Mann weaves in biology, agriculture, anthropology, warfare, ecology, economics and more disciplines to tell his story, which is consistently interesting if rarely earth-shattering.

[tuckerresearch · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent updating of Crosby's The Columbian Exchange. A good accounting of how Indian societies, African societies, and European societies were impacted by the encounter of Columbus with the Americas in 1492. An excellent book that should be read by any teacher of US History.

[librisissimo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

 Fantastic historically and rhetorically. Very clear writing, with good use of new discoveries and revised analysis of old ones.

If you think you know the history of the world(before and after Columbus sails across the Atlantic), think again.

[Pedromaggi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book to understand the economic choices that began with the "discovery" of America. (Translated from Spanish)

[patl_53 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5stars. Grand and sweeping, but not much momentum driving the reader to the next section. Fascinating, but a bit plodding. Feels like it would have been better either 35% shorter, or as 4 full volumes going crazy deep....

[liscarey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the follow-up to Mann's excellent 1491, and it's every bit as excellent. In this book, Mann creates a rich and detailed picture of the world after Columbus, form the first few years of Spanish-Indian interaction through the complex effects of globalization in the contemporary world.

He starts, for reasons that soon become clear, with his own garden, and his introduction to heritage tomatoes. Tomato varieties, differing widely in size, appearance, and color, now come from all over the world--but they began as barely edible fruits of the nightshade family in Meso-America. Why are there now wonderful tomatoes from Bulgaria? That's what this book is about in a microcosm: how Columbus's discovery of the Americas led to the dispersal of people, plants, and animals from both hemispheres all over the world.
This is a really fascinating exploration of the post-Columbian world, a world of complexity, unexpectedness, and unpredictable mixtures of good and bad effects that are completely lost in any standard telling of the European colonization and conquest of the Americas. It wasn't just European culture and disease impinging on the New World; in fact, Mann makes the point that Eurasia and the Americas in 1492 were both very old worlds, each filled with cultures, history, flora and fauna the other had not suspected.

The Europeans, at the beginning of this process, did not think of themselves as Europeans. They were Spanish and English and Portuguese and French and Dutch. The peoples of the Americas didn't think of themselves as Americans, Indians, or any other collective noun; they were Incas and Maya and Sioux and Cherokee and dozens of other names that most of us have never heard. Many of those cultures were virtually destroyed by the arrival of Europeans, not because of European weapons or superior European cultural development (the Triple Alliance, better known to us as the Aztec Empire, and the Inca Empire, were more developed and civilized in most respects than the Spanish who conquered them), but by disease--often before they'd had more than casual contact with Spaniards or any other Europeans. Some of the Indian cultures we think of as ancient, such as the nomadic, horse-riding, buffalo-hunting cultures of the plains Indians, were in fact responses to two effects of the Columbian discovery of the Americas: depopulation due to disease, and the arrival of the horse.

But the effects weren't all, or even mostly, one way. American gold and silver had enormous economic consequences in both Spain and China. The potato, the sweet potato, and the tomato had culinary, cultural, and environmental effects all over the world. The Americas had mosquitoes well designed to be vectors for malaria and yellow fever, which didn't exist in this hemisphere; Europeans and Africans brought malaria and yellow fever; the middle-term effect of this was to increase the Atlantic slave trade. This in turn led, eventually and among many other effects, to Toussaint's revolution in Haiti, which led to the sale of France's North American possessions to the US in the Louisiana Purchase...

But Mann looks most closely at the effects on smaller scales, all over the world, the impact on how ordinary people live their everyday lives, the good and bad effects of the globalization created by the connecting of the two hemispheres, and what people think of as "normal" and "traditional" that goes back a few hundred years at most--having been impossible before the hemispheres began to share their plants, animals, and diseases, and to trade with people on the other side of the globe.

Mann makes a fascinating, complex, and compelling story of something that could have been either tedious or depressing. Highly recommended.

I borrowed this book from a friend.

[addunn3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very interesting look at the results of exchange among lands of old and new worlds.

[untraveller · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent read that took me over nearly the entirety of the world explaining how C. Columbus' excursion to America resulted in an awesome array of physical and cultural exchange between continents. Quite the book. My standard retort on nearly every book published: better maps! Otherwise this would have been a 5.0

[pbjwelch · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a BIG book, and I love big books. By 'big' I mean it takes one subject and then examines it from myriad historical and cultural viewpoints. Author Mann's topic is the Columbian Exchange (hence the title 1493). In his own words (p. 365): First, he "looked at the Atlantic (Chapters 2 and 3), where the most important effects were caused by microscopic imports to the Americas (initially the diseases that depopulated Indian societies, then malaria and yellow fever, which encouraged plantation slavery). Next I treated the Pacific (Chapters 4 and 5), where the major introductions were American food crops, which both helped sustain a population boom and led indirectly to massive environmental problems. In the next section (Chapters 6 and 7), I showed how environmental historians have increasingly come to believe that the Columbian Exchange played a role in the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth..."

There comes a point in one's life when all the little pieces one has been accumulating--history, science, the arts, literature, culture, geography--literally BEG to fall into place and this is one of the books that does that. I love learning the links between the Napoleon Wars and the founding of Singapore, or what results in China when a tin mine is found in Malaysia. Aren't these those "ah ha!" moments that we all have earned as adults after decades of reading, listening, studying? (However, the 'Notes' are so good that I now have a desired reading list of dozens of additional new titles.)

The only reason this book gets 4 rather than 5 stars (I wanted to give it 4.5) is: I felt it was at times a little too repetitive and at times a little too environmentally 'preachy' (I am a believer but we needn't beat people over the head). I've recommended it to our Non-Fiction Reading Group and although there were groans at the size, I know most are going to really like it. If you know anyone who loved reading the encyclopedia while growing up, give them this book as a gift and they'll love you for life.

[whiskey3pa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Thorough and fascinating. The author asked for an update of The Columbia Exchange from Crosby (the author of same) until he was told to go write it himself. Mann did so, and 1493 is the result, a sequel to 1491 and the Crosby work at the same time.
The book he produced is a dandy. Chock full of information and content and exceedingly well written, this book is a page turner. Highly recommended.

[othemts · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A sequel of sorts to 1491, this book investigates the wide-ranging impact of contact between Eurasia & Africa and the Americas and exchange of people, animals, plants, and micorganisms that followed in the wake of Christopher Columbus' voyages. This is called the Columbian Exchange and is the root of today's globalism. Mann investigates a wide variety of topics, places, and times right up to the present day that resulted from this exchange. It's a fascinating overview of social and economical forces at work through history.

[jimocracy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I like that the author took the themes he expressed in 1491 and applied them globally. There was a lot of information presented and much of it was fascinating. Like his previous book, the author came across as fair and balanced in an attempt to show us a frank assessment of many historical factors. Overall, I think he pulled it off nicely.

[k5j5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I won't add any details from the book to support my belief that it is a brilliant and detailed description of how foodstuffs, precious metals insects, disease, slavery, Europeans and indigenous people were all intertwined to bring us the world we have today. I'll let it be a surprise. This was the beginning of globalization and it is a very interesting read, if you want to learn more about why we eat potatoes in Europe and why the Amazon looks the way it does. The truth about both will undoubtedly surprise you.

[jeffv_19 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

1493, the year after Columbus ostensibly discovered the new world, is also the starting point for what Mann describes as the Columbian Transformation. Much in the vein of Michael Pollan's natural histories of food, Mann shows many ways (by all means comprehensive) how mixing the old world with the new brought not only exciting new diseases such as small pox, but also abetted the spread of potatoes (the cloning method leading to the Great Potato Famine), rubber (a disaster in the making), earthworms, and, well, people. Some ports in Central and South America (as well as Caribbean islands) became crucial points of exchange. Trade with China, via the Philippines due to closed Chinese markets, exploited natives but brought them new, sometimes invasive crops. Tropical disease often made quick work of Europeans who lacked resistance, forcing their colonies to integrate with indigenous populations -- even slaves, just for mere survival. Policies regarding natives and slave peoples worked against occupying forces to create new racial combinations and new hybrid cultures to boot.

My only complaint is that, despite the size of the book, Mann probably tried to accomplish too much in this volume. Treating the mingling of cultures and native challenges should have been a book by itself, while a book on commodities, crops, and critters could have filled a second volume. I get he was trying to portray the similarities between people and things...but a little better focus would have worked better. Regardless, it's a fascinating read, and probably the first time I learned anything at all about the pre-Magellan Philippines.

[nosajeel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A remarkable global history from 1493 to the present, describes the trade and exchange of people, plants, commodities, and microorganisms between Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. It is nowhere nearly as original as Charles Mann's previous 1491, with presented a revolutionary portrait of pre-Columbian America, nor Guns, Germs and Steel, which covers some of the same terrain. But it is still a thoughtful, balanced, creative, and large-scale history of what the author, following earlier works, calls the "Columbian exchange." The book is journalistic in nature and draws on a wide variety of research including conventional history, genetics, environmental studies, farm studies, and economic history.

Mann's thesis is that since 1493, a massive Transatlantic and Transpacific trade has helped create a new era in global environmental history, the Homogenocene -- which is a homogenizing of the people, plants and people around the world. Some of the exchanges he describes are well known and well documented, like the slave trade. Others I had never heard of, like the large role that the guano mining and trade played in 19th century agriculture. All of them are described in a vivid and humanizing way, for example describing the horrors of guano mining by essentially enslaved Chinese laborers, the boomtowns that it created in Peru, the cartels that controlled it, and the impact it had on European agriculture. In between these levels of familiarity, are detailed descriptions of the trade in tobacco, silver, the potato, rubber, rice, sugarcane, malaria and yellow fever.

In the course of this, the book covers the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the founding of the America's and the rise of Europe. It is also interesting in that it spends as much time on China and Asia, not just as a source of materials for the West but also in describing how the trade in items like silver and the potato transformed Asian economies, societies, and even their physical topographies. The Philippines get a particularly interesting treatment in the book, as the crossroads of the Asia, the New World, and Europe.

I appreciate Mann's balance in writing the book. He is unstinting in his descriptions of the human and ecological horrors brought by the exchange. But he is also clear and forthright about their massive benefits that these exchanges have brought.

[paulagraph · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Follow up to Mann's 1491 and possibly even more fascinating. His approach to globalization, which he situates as having had its beginnings in 1492 at the dawn of the Age of Exploration is truly a fresh take on this subject. Especially interesting is his account of the silver trade that ran from Mexico through Manila & on to Fujian in China. While European explorers were eager to find a sea route to China to more easily trade for spices, silk, etc. the Chinese remained little interested in what the West had to offer in way of trade goods. However, with the advent of silver mining in America, they discovered an insatiable appetite for a precious metal they did not have, silver. Highly recommended history of the Americas, bringing up to date how what started in 1492 continues to play out today.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an interesting follow-up to 1491 by the same author. Somewhat sensationalist, and lacking in striking maps, Mann's book tries to explore the globalization started by the Spanish discovery of the Americas in the 1500's. He shows how, in his estimation, the desire to break into the Chinese market has been the principal economic driver since the 1480's. The information is usually well collected, and his case is often compelling.
Euro-centrists will find the book rather a trial, but their lot is hard work given our modern parallels. I think reading this book is time well spent.

[marshapetry · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

ok book, good narrator. not spectacular and got a bit tedious towards the end. Still, very interesting history.

[publiusdb-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." But what happened next?

More than just the discovery of the new world that we call the Americas, Christopher Columbus set off globalization of ecology, trade, biology, and nationality beyond anything that preceded it, argues Charles Mann in "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created." The discovery of America did more than just uncover lands previously unseen or mapped by Europeans. It set adrift the then current order of the entire world, changed civilizations from the Iberian Peninsula at the edge of Europe to the Ming Dynasty in Asia.

And the changes continue, today, over five hundred years later.

Mann's exploration of the world changed by Columbus' discovery began in "1491: New Revelations of the America's before Columbus," a look at what the Americas were like before the 1492 discovery. In this new book, Mann steps off from the discovery to look at the effects.

Mann follows the trail of silver mined by the Spanish from Peruvian mountains as it travels across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, adding so much silver to the world market that it result in high levels of inflation in Spain and to the opening of trade with silver-starved Ming China (and indeed, may have also contributed to the Ming's fall, too). In fact, more Peruvian silver may have been sent to China than to Spain. Silver would travel to Manila where it was traded for porcelain and silk bound for Spain and Europe. So great was the trade that the English privateer cum knight Sir Francis Drake would make his reputation marauding, mostly without success, Spanish silver caravans en route to the coast of South America for shipment to China and Spain.

In addition to silver, 1493 tells the story of other products that found their introduction the world after Columbus' discovery. Potatoes may have ended the perennial famines that plagued Europe (and contributed to the great potato famine in Ireland) and became a staple, along with manioc, across Europe and China. Rubber became so valuable that it defied usual economic laws of supply and demand as the price rose even when supply increased. Tobacco and sugar cane together brought plantation slavery to the Americas, as well as millions of Africans. Modern day cultures continue to bear the echoes of the assimilation of cultures and traditions amalgamated in the soup of escaped slaves, native American tribes, and Europeans.

If Mann deserves any criticism, it is that the story is just too large, too vast, and too complicated. The reach and the effects of the homogenocene--the period of mixing of insects, germs, plants, and every other biology through man's action over the last 500 years--are perhaps too great for one book. Indeed, one associate complained to me that Mann just goes on and on about each aspect. "I get it already..." In his effort to be thorough, Mann cannot perhaps be sufficiently thorough to cover impact of the mixing of the Old and New Worlds.

Despite the scope of his effort, Mann succeeds in a fascinating tale that deserves a place among histories of the world. As Niall Ferguson might argue, too few histories look at the broad paths of history and ask "why" while too many look at the small pieces and tell what. Mann looks at the why, and he looks at a why that impacts us all. For that reason, I recommend it as important reading for the interested historian in all of us. Our world is not moved only by kings, presidents and generals, but also by the bugs, goods, trade, and cultures that mix as a result of our actions. Our ecology matters, if in ways we might not suspect or guess. After five hundred years, the effects are still felt and still changing. What might we find out tomorrow?

[ljhliesl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not as interesting as 1491, or if as interesting then clouded with my own guilt. Charles Mann doesn't claim the term "Homogenocene" as his own coinage but he certainly explains it for the non-biologist. The American potato's role to Scotland uniting with England; the African malaria virus's prolonging the U.S. Civil War; American silver in the Chinese economy; Asian sugarcane in the Caribbean. It was all very distressing. He writes that earthworms in North America didn't survive the last Ice Age and so all the victims of How to Eat Fried Worms descend from European migrants.

[rnsulentic · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Even better than 1491. Outstanding discussion of the impact of the European colonization of the world.