A common humanity (2006)

Book Review from the May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Ancient Americans: Rewriting the History of the New World’. By Charles C. Mann. (London, Granta Books, 2005)

This book has three central claims, put forward with all the skill and understanding of a working popular science journalist. That pre-Columbus the Americas were more populous than many have previously supposed; that humans have been in the Americas longer than supposed; and that the people there had shaped their own environments to a terrific extent – far from being the unspoilt wilderness of colonial lore.

In most of this Mann is merely communicating an emerging academic consensus that still has not filtered out into the popular domain. He highlights how children’s schoolbooks still repeat stories about Indian life, culture and history that have subsequently been disproven. He also highlights how various vested interests have used the ideological constructions based on the previous histories for opposite ends, both aggressive industrialists and ecologists promoting various simplifying myths of naive Indians living in harmony with untamed nature.

Essentially, whilst without giving any definite backing to any particular population estimate, the book avers that the ‘high counters’ are now the dominant strand of demographic historiography. That most of the Americas were covered by human civilisations that would have been a match for most of the colonialist forces, if they had not succumbed to disease – disease that spread in advance of the European’s arrival (indicating intercourse between the Indian civilisations) – disease that possibly wiped out about a fifth of the human race at that time.

Mann demonstrates how much of the habitat inhabited by Indians was inhospitable, but that they had, to use his metaphor, terraformed their environment. He uses the example of the Maya collapse – hundred of years prior to the arrival of the Europeans – to show how the environment humans had created could fall apart when neglected (as in this case) by civil war.

In this context, he demonstrates that the Americas had an independent discovery of agriculture, to the point of suggesting that Amazonian Indians effectively planted orchards to make good use of the forests difficult soil. He suggests that there were civilisations as venerable in their size and antiquity to equal the more famous supposed homes of civilisation in China and Sumeria (present day Iraq).

He uses one case, the domestication of maize, to show what American civilisation has contributed to the sum of human achievement, and highlights the crushing irony that it was the importation of maize to Africa, which allowed the population growth that made the slave trade possibly (the slaves were, it should be remembered, needed in part because the indigenous population of the Americas had died out).

Mann suggests that the image of the pristine wilderness was created by the fact that humans had ceased to manage these environments, that the so called savagery found in part of the Americas was not stone age tribes living lives without time or change, but the products of collapse and devastation.

This is hopeful stuff for socialists. If true, it confirms a common humanity shared by all the humans on the planet, and offers the prospect of adding rich unbroadcast stories of human achievement.

Pik Smeet

1492 and all that (1991)

Book Review from the November 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth. By Hans Koning. Latin American Bureau, 1991.

The romance of Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492, and the inevitable celebrations to mark the anniversary in 1992, are the subjects of this study which attempts to reassess Columbus and put the record straight on his character and place in history. It also confronts the issue of "civilisation" versus "savagery" and the ideology which sees the West as culturally superior and as the ideal to which all people should aspire.

For Koning 1492, the year in which Columbus supposedly "discovered" a new world already widely inhabited, "opened an era of genocide, cruelty, and slavery". The motivation for exploration lay not so much in discovery but in the extension and consolidation of the trading rights of rival European powers and in the desire to finance expansionism and acquire spheres of economic influence and political domination.

That the world was round was commonly acknowledged. Columbus's belief that Asia could be reached by a westerly route was based upon a lamentable and stubborn ignorance as to the size of the world. In his public statements Columbus claimed to be motivated by a desire to convert the "heathen", although this seems to have quickly given way to a policy of genocide or enslavement. In fact, the peaceful, generous and friendly innocence displayed by the original inhabitants of the "new" world, and recorded by contemporary observers, was to place them in a perilous position. Decisions as to their fate were being made elsewhere. The desire for gold at whatever cost, and the necessity of economic domination, led to a global arbitration by Pope Alexander VI, who divided the new world between Spain and Portugal, although somewhat to the chagrin of France and Holland.

Unaware of this decision, the inhabitants of the so-called new world were not long in feeling the consequences. The later activites of Pizarro and Cortes have been widely documented yet the systematic brutality of the original conquerors should not be underestimated. The rapid annihilation of the Arawaks, for instance, would necessitate the importation of black slaves from Africa to replace them by 1550. As Koning argues, the brutality of the Spanish and, for that matter the Portuguese on the Guinea coast of Africa, persisted until chattel slavery became uneconomic: "men became humane at the very moment inhumanity lost its business advantage".

As to Columbus, in contrast to his ambitions, the rewards he received were small and mostly honorific, for at this point in the conquest the anticipated gold was not sufficiently forthcoming. In a sense Columbus was as much a product of his time as we are of ours. What we should not do, however, is to hide reality beneath a mythology of the heroic discoverer and the coming of civilisation. But neither should we become complacent in our reading of history. The economic momentum that motivated and legitimized the Spanish conquest of America 500 years ago is the same to which we are victims today.

Philip Bentley