Brilliantly assembling colorful details into big-picture insights, Mann's fresh, challenge to Eurocentric histories puts interdependence at the origin of modernity. The author interweaves research on everything from epidemiology to economics into a lucid historical panorama that's studded with entertaining studies of Chinese pirate fleets, courtly tobacco rituals, and the bloody feud between Jamestown colonists and the Indians who fed and fought them, to name a few.
Mann traces the subtle, epochal influences of the intercontinental "Columbian Exchange" of flora, fauna, commodities, and peoples, showing how European honeybees and earthworms remade New World landscapes how New World corn, potatoes, and fertilizer ignited Eurasian population booms how Old World diseases prompted an eruption of slavery in the Western Hemisphere (the influx of Africans, not Europeans, to the Americas, Mann notes, was the main demographic result of the Contact) how Latin American silver undermined China's Ming Dynasty and how the decimation of Indian peoples changed the world's climate. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Vintage, 2006) and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Knopf. Mann explores the widespread influence of the Columbian Exchange and how it altered the course of history by ushering in a new era known as the Homogenocene. Mann is the author of 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, a New York Times bestseller, and 1491: New Revelations of the Americas.
Having resurrected the isolated splendors of the pre-Columbian Americas in his bestselling 1491, Mann explores the global convergences%E2%80%94and upheavals%E2%80%94inaugurated by their discovery in this fascinating survey of the "Homogenocene" era. info 14.
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