![]() ![]() ![]() Arriving with Columbus, malaria and yellow fever debilitated white settlers throughout America, but Africans had partial resistance, a major factor in encouraging the slave trade. ![]() Silk and porcelain crazes quickly followed. Settled largely by incompetent adventurers eager to duplicate the jackpot of gold that Spaniards found in Mexico and Peru, they failed, dithered and starved to death by the thousands until, after 10 years, the jackpot appeared: tobacco, the first global commodity craze. Most readers will be surprised by the author’s discussion of the history of Jamestown, America’s first permanent English colony. Historians traditionally credit Western superiority in organization and weaponry, but science journalist Mann ( 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2005) argues convincingly that biology, not technology, gave them the critical advantage. People of European ancestry poured across the world after 1500, forming the majority in several continents and dominating everywhere. A fascinating chronicle of the “Columbian Exchange,” which mixed old and new world elements to form today’s integrated global culture, the “homogenocene.” ![]()
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