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The Ecological Atlantic
J.R. McNeill
I. Introduction
This presentation offers a vision of the Atlantic world (c. 1450-1850) in which pigs and
plasmodia share the stage with people. In environmental history, nature is not merely the
backdrop against which human events play out. It provides unconscious participants in
the drama, who, although they left no memoirs or documents, took part in shaping human
history.
Environmental historians have already laid some useful foundations for an ecological
history of the Atlantic world. But whereas historians have already tried to synthesize
environmental histories of some other sizable bodies of water, including the Pacific
Ocean basin, to date no one has attempted this for the Atlantic. The macrohistories of the
Atlantic world ignore ecological considerations.
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II. Approaches
One might approach the goal of a general environmental history of the Atlantic any
numbers of ways. One could divide the whole basin up regionally, in order to recognize
the diversity in ecologies and histories in places as different as Greenland and Guyana.
That would of course weaken any sense of the Atlantic as a whole, as a coherent space in
its own right. Alternatively, one could begin with commodities that have helped to shape
the environmental history of the Atlantic: sugar, silver, codfish, beaver fur, brazil nuts,
cattle hides and so forth. Or one could turn to cultural processes, the transfer of new
ideas about farming, hunting, health, and so forth from one part of the basin to another.
One might, instead, begin with chronology, and suggest an Age of Epidemics, an Age of
Silver, and Age of Migration or an Age of Slavery. All of these have their merits.
I will however not take a consistent approach, but instead shift this way and that, like a
ship tacking into the wind. What follows, then, is an idiosyncratic look at the ecological
Atlantic, 1500 to 1850, emphasizing climate change, an updated version of the
Columbian Exchange, and the creole ecology of the plantation system.
III. Pan-Atlantic Environmental History
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The variety of the Atlantic basin was of course so great that few features, few processes,
can properly speaking be considered pan-Atlantic. However, climate change is one of
those.
Climate
Climate change affected the entire Atlantic world, the islands and the ocean itself, not just
its continental coasts (the circum-Atlantic). The centuries between 800 and 1250 were
comparatively warm and wet in the North Atlantic, encouraging settlement of northern
islands (such as Iceland and Greenland, and thickening settlement in Europe and
especially eastern North America. There the favorable climatic moment coincided with
the arrival of new crops including maize, beans and squash, the three sisters of
Mesoamerican agriculture. They provided a much more abundant and reliable food
supply in landscapes from Georgia to Quebec – as long as the favorable climate lasted.
Those same centuries in West Africa seem to have been dry ones, a situation that in the
Sahel zone permitted horse-breeding, cavalry-based political power, and a temporary
surge of empire building that paralleled what equestrian peoples were then doing in East
Asia, Central Asia, and north India. In West Africa, the rise of ‘horse power’ made
slave-raiding easier, and fed many thousands of unfortunate souls into the trans-Saharan
slave trade to North Africa and Egypt.
This period, 800-1250 helped set the stage for some of the dramatic turbulence of
Atlantic history after 1500, by boosting population and extending settlement widely, and
intensifying West African slave-raiding.
The climate shifted after 1250, perhaps triggered by a gigantic volcanic eruption in 1258
or 1259. Throughout the northern hemisphere, temperatures turned colder and the
weather dryer. The period between 1450 and 1800 included the coldest decades of the
Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age (LIA) lasted from roughly 1300 to 1850, and reduced
average temperatures by about one degree Celsius in the northern hemisphere, and more
in northern Europe (where the data are best). Its coldest decades came in 1590-1610, the
1640s, 1690s, and 1780s, with a long chilly spell, known as the Maunder Minimum,
around 1645-1715. Throughout, it brought expansion of glaciers in the north and in high
mountains, occasionally scraping villages away and covering upland pastures. The Ebro
in Spain froze over in wintertime. The LIA shortened the growing season in high
latitudes, with occasionally disastrous consequences in places such as Sweden, Scotland,
and along the St. Lawrence, where in the best of circumstances climate made grain
farming marginal. The onset of colder conditions may have helped end the Norse
settlement of Greenland around 1450 (although this is disputed). In the 1750s, Iceland’s
harbors disappeared within a ring of ice, fishing became difficult, farming nearly
impossible, and a local population crash (15%) followed. Colder temperatures of only 12 degrees C in the middle latitudes (30-45 degrees North) would reduce grain yields by
10-50%, leading to price spikes, hunger and starvation. On the more cheerful side,
wintry scenes of peasants frolicking on ice enriched Dutch landscape painting, and
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especially dense maple, willow, and spruce from the cold decades of 1660-1720 allowed
Stradivarius to make his glorious violins.
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In warmer latitudes the Little Ice Age was often a big drought age. With less evaporation
due to cooler air, rainfall diminished, and many—not all--of the regions prone to drought
felt it more often and more severely. Central Mexico, for example, was scorched by
drought, which may have set off epidemics in the form of rodent-borne disease and
sharpened conflicts over irrigation. In West Africa the southern fringe of the Sahara
moved southward, reducing densities of both bush and tsetse fly, thereby expanding the
belt in which horses could survive. This in turn opened new scope for equestrian slaveraiding and state-building, once again severely punishing the populations without
protection from cavalry. Correlations between drought and expanded slave raiding seem
to exist in Angola too, where major droughts occurred especially in the 1640s . On a
smaller scale, if the tree rings are to be trusted, Walter Raleigh’s effort to colonize the
(water-scarce) Outer Banks of North Carolina in 1585-6 coincided with the deepest
drought of the past 800 years. Even had all else gone right with the Lost Colony, this
alone might well have sealed its fate. The early settlers at Jamestown had luck almost as
bad, landing in the midst of the driest seven-year spell in the last 770, which contributed
to their many travails.
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The ocean itself felt effects from the LIA. Shallow estuaries reflected the variations more
than did deep water. The average temperature of Chesapeake Bay, for example, fell by as
much as 2 to 4 degrees Celsius in the depths of the LIA, playing havoc with its rich
marine life. It froze over from time to time in the 17th century, which has not happened
for at least 150 years. Reef waters off the Puerto Rican coast likewise seem to have been
2-3 degrees C cooler than today during the cold intervals of 1700-15 and 1780-85.
Codfish, which are exquisitely sensitive to temperature, probably migrated southward
during the LIA, attracting fishermen from Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain to the
more welcoming shores of New England and Nova Scotia during the late 15th and 16th
centuries. It is also likely, although uncertain, that hurricanes were fewer and weaker
during the LIA, making shipping slightly less hazardous.
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The LIA was pan-Atlantic, although its effects and timing varied from place to place. On
balance it seems to have been stronger in the northern hemisphere than in the southern.
That, however, may be an impression left by paucity of information.
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Tumult, Hybridity and Creole Ecology
A second pan-Atlantic feature was tumult. Ecological history, like biological evolution,
proceeds at a variable clip, with periods of stately serenity punctuated by hurricanes of
creative destruction. In the Atlantic world, while of course things changed in the
millennium before 1450, they changed far more and far faster in the few centuries
following. That is because, as Alfred Crosby explained, the traffic after 1492 brought
together biological provinces that had been separated by ocean for 200 million years. In
the blink of an eye, what had long been put asunder (by plate tectonics) was united.
American ecosystems, recently destabilized by the first human occupation beginning
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roughly 14,000 year ago, now felt another shakeup. Squadrons of invasive species were
loosed upon each participating continent, some of which succeeded gloriously in their
new homes. Several native species went extinct. The history of life on earth has few if
any parallels.
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The cultural processes that historians now describe with the word ‘hybridity,’ had
parallels in ecology—hence my appropriation of the term. This is most obvious in the
human realm, where populations of mestizos, métis, and mulattoes resulted from the
encounters among Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans. Genetic reshuffling took place
as well among other species from carp to hawks. Most of this was accidental, but human
intention was involved as well, especially with dogs. Thus several ‘hybrid’ species
emerged in the Atlantic world after 1492, and still more hybrid ecosystems. Even without
genetic intermixing, where species formerly an ocean apart commingled they remade
environments, producing a ‘creole ecology.’ Such recombination, on the genetic and
ecosystemic level, happens all the time, but rarely with the fury that characterized the
Atlantic after 1492.
IV. The Columbian Exchange (Updated and Augmented)
In 1972 Alfred Crosby introduced the concept and phrase ‘The Columbian Exchange.’ It
gradually colonized the lexicon of historians and became a routine expression used to
denote the massive biotic exchange between the two sides of the Atlantic in the centuries
after Columbus. A menagerie of animals, plants, and microbes traveled on the ships of
Columbus and his successors as they criss-crossed the Atlantic. Crosby could not quite do
justice to the African roles in the process, which decades of subsequent Africanist
historiography have illuminated more clearly. Here I will try to include the African
dimensions as well as the American and European ones.
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The Pathogen Exchange
First the microbes. Amerindians in the 15th century did not live especially long or healthy
lives, at least to judge by the skeletal evidence. In South America there was Chagas’
disease and leishmaniasis, carried by insects. In North America, Rocky Mountain spotted
fever and Lyme disease, both tick-borne. Amerindians may have had to deal with
typhoid, syphilis, and almost surely tuberculosis. Those communities that took up maize
in preference to other foods seem to have grown more numerous and less healthy, as
maize is excellent at turning sunshine into calories but poor as a source of vitamins. But
they would soon have reason to look back on the 15th century as a golden age of health.
Amerindians did not have the acute infections sometimes known as the ‘crowd diseases.’
These are almost all derived from pathogens of herd animals of Eurasia and Africa. With
animal domestication, and millennia of living cheek by jowl with pigs, camels, dogs,
ducks and all the rest, humans came to host a welter of highly infectious and often
extremely lethal diseases: smallpox, measles, influenza, whooping cough, mumps and a
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few lesser ones. These all spread from human to human easily, and thus wherever trade,
travel and contact prevailed so did these diseases. They usually appeared as searing
epidemics, but once they had infected all available people, they ‘burned out’ and
disappeared for years, until a new population of susceptibles grew up. Eventually, where
populations were large and dense enough, they became childhood diseases which
everyone encountered in the first few years of life, and the survivors carried resistance or
immunity thereafter, sometimes, as with smallpox, lifetime immunity. By the 15th century
all the densely settled parts of Eurasia and probably most of Africa north of the Kalahari
hosted most of the crowd diseases most of the time. Thus most adults carried a hard-won
portfolio of immunities and resistance. Amerindians were innocent of these infections,
because their ancestors came to America 14,000 years ago, before any animals other than
dogs had been domesticated, and before any of these pathogens had evolved into human
parasites.
Amerindians also did not have a handful of infections confined to Africa. Microbial life
in Africa had millions of years to co-evolve with humans and hominid ancestors, far
longer than anywhere else. Thus Africa presented an especially rich disease environment,
including yellow fever, dengue, filiariasis, hookworm, falciparum malaria among many
others. By contrast, microbial life in the Americas had had only 14,000 years or so to
‘figure out’ how to exploit the niches presented by human bodies, and far fewer had done
so.
Thus calamity struck soon after Columbus crossed the ocean. Despite the difficulties of
getting microbes across the sea, eventually all the crowd diseases and all the
aforementioned African infections made it to the Americas. There no one had any
resistance or immunity to them, and so adults died as easily as children. Fishermen
chasing the cod probably brought some of the crowd diseases to the Amerindians of
northeastern North America (conceivably Vikings had done so earlier too). Columbus
and those trailing in his wake introduced and re-introduced them to the Caribbean. Once
the slave trade from West Africa geared up, by 1550 or so, the African infections began
to add to the Amerindians’ calamity. The importance of falciparum malaria and (though it
may have arrived only in the 1640s) yellow fever is reflected in the far greater
depopulation of lowland regions in Atlantic America as opposed to higher elevations in
Mexico and the Andes where indigenous people (and therefore culture) survived in larger
proportion.
The full effect took roughly 150 years to play out. Population declines of 50-90% over
six or eight human generations were routine. In some places, especially lowlands,
Amerindian peoples went extinct or nearly so. As Crosby and others recognized, this was
not merely a matter of exotic introduced infections. Amerindians suffered from violence,
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enslavement, loss of land and livelihood, and other misfortunes (or crimes), all of which
killed many and weakened the immune response of many more. However, given that
smallpox normally kills about 30% of those (non-immunes) it infects, and often kills
70%, and that yellow fever often claims an even higher toll, the fate of Amerindians
exposed to wave after wave of different infections would have been only slightly less
calamitous even were they well fed and left in peace.
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In the microbial realm, the Columbian Exchange was rather one-sided. It is possible but
uncertain that syphilis came from the Americas to Europe and Africa with returning
mariners. Iberia also was touched, rarely, by yellow fever brought by ships from the West
Indies. No other pathogens of any consequence made the trip. The diseases of the
Americas, comparatively few in any case, often depended on insect, tick or other vectors
that could find no place in the ecosystems of Europe or Africa. It seems, however, that
Africans south of the Gulf of Guinea acquired new strains of tuberculosis, pneumonia,
and smallpox, because the (sparse) sources indicate epidemics, especially of smallpox, in
the 17th century.
The Animal Exchange
When it came to animals, the exchange was one-sided too. The longstanding distribution
of potentially domesticable animals, it just so happened, was anything but random.
Eurasia had the largest share, Africa and the Americas far fewer. Some in the Americas
went extinct long before 1492. Amerindians raised turkeys and other fowl, kept dogs, and
in the Andes also alpacas and llamas—all in all not much to work with. No human
population ever did more with less animal help than Mesoamericans. No American
animals made significant impacts on Europe or Africa, although several made the
Atlantic crossing after 1492.
In the Columbian Exchange the Americas acquired horses, sheep, goats, cattle, and
pigs—a mixed blessing for most human inhabitants of the Americas, and pure misfortune
for many animals. An ark load of immigrants arrived with Columbus’ second voyage in
1493. They found conditions in much of the Americas to their liking, with comparatively
few predators, few diseases, and lots of room to roam. As diseases emptied the lands of
people, animals rushed in. When De Soto landed in Florida in 1539 he brought 13 pigs
with him; in contrast to the humans on this expedition, the pigs flourished, numbering
700 by De Soto’s death in 1542. In Mexico and especially on the South American
pampas, horses and cattle formed feral herds, sometimes with tens of thousands of
animals that might oblige one to wait and watch for a day while a herd passed. Pigs and
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goats sometimes ran wild too, and reproduced with an abandon that astonished 16th- and
17th-century observers.
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It did not take long for people in the Americas—Amerindians, Africans, Europeans--to
take to the new livestock. Horses and cattle provided traction, making plows and wheeled
vehicles practical for the first time in the Americas, which opened up new possibilities in
agriculture and provisioning of cities. All five animals provided hides more readily than
had deer. Sheep and goats gave wool, which outside the alpaca zones of the Andes was a
new and welcome addition. Animal fat rendered tallow for candles, without which the
underground mining of Zacatecas and Potosí would have proved far more challenging.
All but the horse became important food sources throughout Atlantic America, providing
more protein, which previously Amerindians had had to work hard to get. With domestic
herds available, hunting slowly declined in significance, which probably brought
adjustments in the roles of men and women. Chickens, another import, offered new
useful employment for children, as well as an easy source of protein. The emergence of
communities of herders, who could not always control where their charges roamed,
brought social conflict between pastoralists and farmers, a longstanding feature of life in
Africa and Eurasia, but previously almost unknown in the Americas. Sheep and cattle
trampled crops, to the enduring irritation of cultivators. In northeastern North America,
rampant ruminants provoked friction between English and French settlers and the
Alonguin-speaking Amerindians. Lastly, horses allowed equestrian society to emerge in
suitable environments, such as the pampas, where Amerindians and mestizos created a
new way of life broadly analogous to the more familiar one of the ‘Plains Indians’ of
North America: mobile, militarized, and very male-dominated. In all these ways, the new
animals changed social relations.
Cattle, sheep and horses opened up new terrain to human occupation. Dry grasslands, or
the wet llanos of Venezuela, were very hard to put to human use without ruminants to
convert grass into milk and meat for human consumption. Thus the immigrant animals
changed the nature of human society and its spatial extent in Atlantic America (not to
mention the rest of it).
They also revised the rest of creation. They trampled and munched their way through
American ecosystems, displacing deer and peccaries. The grazing habits of horses, cattle,
and sheep repressed the growth of plants other than grasses, keeping deforested
landscapes deforested more efficiently than the native fauna had one. Billions of hooves
wore paths in the land, and regular mass migrations resulted in heightened erosion and
sedimentation.
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The new livestock created new vulnerabilities in the Americas. Wherever people came to
depend substantially on domestic animals, whether for food or traction, they unwittingly
put themselves at risk of disaster in the even of epizootics. In Africa and Eurasia, this
susceptibility had existed for millennia, and people adjusted as best they could,
structuring their herds (lots of young adult females) for quickest recovery in the aftermath
of livestock disease.
Several stowaways crossed the Atlantic too. The black rat, an efficient transmitter of
plague, was an early arrival. Rats overran Bermuda and other oceanic islands that lacked
predators. The aedes aegypti mosquito, the vector of both yellow fever and dengue, sailed
with slavers from West Africa and spread widely in the warm and humid parts of Atlantic
America. Some of the most important animals for history are the smallest, the ones that
serve as vectors of human disease.
Some species found the Americas tough going. Europeans brought camels across the
Atlantic several times, hoping they would prove useful in savanna and desert
environments. But they never prospered. By accident, the world’s most dangerous
animal, the anopheles gambiae, by far the most efficient vector of falciparum malaria,
made it across the ocean from time to time, but never found a good foothold—to the great
good fortune of all who lived in the Americas.
The African contribution to the animal invasion of the Americas seems likely to have
been modest. Most of the founding fathers and mothers of the new herds came from
Iberia and Britain. However in Brazil it is likely that Angolan goats and cattle contributed
strongly to the mix. The zebu cattle breeds, widespread in Brazil, are originally South
Asian, but might have come to Brazil via Africa. So might some of the pigs ancestral to
the Brazilian porcine population.
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Plant Exchange
The exchange of plants was a true exchange. The Americas acquired new cereals such as
wheat, oats, barley and rye. Citrus fruits, grapes, melons, figs and dozens of other food
crops of Eurasian origin also made the crossing. Only a few Eurasian species, generally
those from South or southeast Asia such as citrus and banana, prospered in the Caribbean
and Brazil, the antechambers to colonial Atlantic America. African crops did better in the
American neo-tropics. On the slave ships from Angola and West Africa came millets and
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sorghums, yams and bananas, okra, black-eyes peas, sesame, watermelon, and African
rice. These suited the warm lowlands from Brazil to South Carolina, and became
important foods of the slave populations, and in some case, such as rice, of others as well.
Medicinal and religious plants, kola nut for example, used in Yoruba and Afro-Brazilian
ceremonies, also crossed the Atlantic. So did several African grasses, better suited to the
neo-tropics than most of those from Eurasia.
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Unlike the livestock of Eurasia, most crops could not easily find their niches on their
own, although some succeeded spectacularly as weeds (e.g. clover, peach trees).
Spaniards tried wheat, olives, and grapes everywhere, but with modest success until they
reached lands with mediterranean climate in Chile and California. Wine was
indispensable to religious ritual, but had to be imported for centuries to Spanish America.
In eastern North America, the new food crops from across the Atlantic followed by only a
few centuries the new food complex from Mesoamerica.
It took decades, even centuries, of trial and error before all these crops found their most
suitable locales in the Americas. But as they did, they raised the food-producing
potential, as many of them yielded well where indigenous crops had not. Eventually the
wheat of North America and Argentina, raised mainly on former grasslands where
Amerindian crops had limited potential, became one of the world’s great sources of food.
But before 1800 these immigrant crops paled in significance next to the immigrant
animals—and next to the drug crops of sugar and coffee.
The export of American food crops was another matter. By 1492 the gardens and fields of
the Americas hosted perhaps 100 cultigens, several of which attained world historical
importance in modern times. They included a drug crop, tobacco, which although often
regarded as medicinal in Europe and China, in the fullness of time killed more people
around the world than new diseases did in the Americas. The food crops Amerindian
farmers gave to the world included maize, manioc, potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans (of
several sorts), tomatoes, pumpkins, pineapples, squashes, peanuts and cocoa among many
others.
Potatoes, although originally despised in Europe, spearheaded an agricultural, nutritional,
and demographic revolution in the cool and humid lands from Ireland to Russia. They
produced far more calories per acre than could cereal grains, and enough nutrition so that
together with milk they allowed families to stay alive on a very restricted diet, as millions
of Irish and Scots did. (That of course left them vulnerable to famine should the potato
harvest fail, as it did in the years after 1845). In lands where inheritance custom divided
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farms into ever-smaller parcels, Spanish Galicia for example, the calorie per acre ratio of
potatoes was especially irresistible. Heads of state appreciated potatoes too: both
Frederick the Great in Prussia and Catherine the Great in Russia sponsored potatofarming, perhaps in the belief that more peasants meant more infantry. Like manioc in
Angola [have I explained this yet?], potatoes appealed to peasants (and lords) who
anticipated marauding armies, because they can be left in the ground for weeks or
months, whereas grains must be harvested when ripe and thus made an easy target for
quartermasters. For reasons of climate, potatoes had almost no impact on Africa outside
of upland regions such as the High Atlas in Morocco or the Drakensberg in South
Africa.
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Maize had a broader impact on the eastern Atlantic shores (and around the world). Its
yield both per acre and per laborer recommended it highly. Its stalks could serve as
trellises for beans, food for livestock, or fuel for fires. It got a quick start in Morocco and
Egypt and then southern Europe generally, where spring rains and sunny summers fit its
needs nicely. It flourished anywhere from sea level to mountain valleys, and in the right
conditions could zoom from seed to harvest in six to eight weeks, allowing two crops a
year. Braudel says maize saved southwestern France from the famines that ravaged the
rest of the country in the 17th-18th centuries.
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Maize had an even greater impact on Atlantic Africa. Maize yielded much more per acre
than millets or sorghum. Different varieties fit different local ecologies, especially the
rhythms of wet and dry seasons. Maize stored much better than tubers and root crops, and
made an ideal food for the sustenance of slave caravans and slave ships. Around the big
slave port of Whydah, maize found a place in seasonal crop rotations (after millet and
before yams). Farmers turned to it along long-distance trade routes of all sorts. It
appeared in Kongo soon after 1548. Over the next two centuries, maize became a staple
of Atlantic Africa from Senegambia to Angola. Its portability helped professional armies
from maize regions roam far afield, build states where none had existed before, and
extend the power of forest kingdoms such as Asante northward towards the West African
savanna. Maize became integral to Atlantic African culture, especially for the Yoruba,
who invoked it in personal and political ritual.
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Africans also took up peanuts, sweet potato, cocoa, pumpkins, manioc and other
American crops in a big way. Manioc’s indifference to soils, drought, and pests made it
suitable to many environments of Atlantic Africa from Nigeria to Angola—almost
anything but swamp. As noted earlier, like maize it had a special compatibility with
slave-raiding, but in a different sense: it allowed vulnerable populations to flee and
survive, whereas maize allowed slavers to operate more efficiently. Manioc came with
costs too of course, at least for some Africans. Its most pervasive variant, bitter manioc,
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is spiced with poisonous prussic acid, so to make it edible required skilled and laborious
work, which in Africa fell to women. It arrived in Kongo around 1600, and became a
staple in the equatorial regions in short order, and in the kingdoms of Angola before
1750. In West Africa it spread widely along the coast, but hardly at all inland.
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Thus Amerindian farmers enriched the rest of the Atlantic world, and indeed the whole
world, with the cultigens they had developed over the centuries before 1492. To some
(unquantifiable) extent, the early modern population growth of Atlantic Europe (indeed
all of Europe) may be attributed to potatoes and maize, their higher yields, and their
suitability to otherwise low-value soils. Whether population grew or not in Atlantic
Africa in the early modern period is unknown, but it is safe to say that because of maize,
manioc, and peanuts, among others, it was higher than it otherwise could have been.
V. Plantation Ecology
One of the hallmarks of the early modern Atlantic was the slave plantation system.
Transferred from the Mediterranean and Morocco, it eventually extended from Bahia to
the Chesapeake. In commercial and business terms the plantation system was a genuinely
Atlantic enterprise. So it was in ecological terms as well, as a sketch of its 'metabolism'
shows.
The Crops as Plants
The output of the plantation system consisted chiefly of marketable foods and drugs:
sugar first and foremost (both a food and a drug), rice, coffee, and tobacco, but also
indigo and cotton. Sugar is a grass from New Guinea; the skills and technologies needed
to refine its cane juice into sweet crystals were honed in India, Egypt, the Levant before it
spread to the western Mediterranean and the Americas. Rice grows wild in many parts of
the world, but the plantation rice of the Americas came substantially from West Africa.
Coffee is a small tree native to the understory of Ethiopian forests. Commercial
production of its caffeinated beans began in Yemen, but as a plantation crop its career
began in the Caribbean, Guiana, and Brazil in the eighteenth century. Tobacco is the only
important plantation crop of the Atlantic world native exclusively to the Americas. The
varieties favored on the plantations of the Chesapeake and West Indies came originally
from South America. Indigo is a shrub with leaves that, if fermented properly, provide an
ingredient for a deep blue dye. The plant is found throughout the world’s midsection, and
the species grown on plantations came both from the Americas and the Old World.
Cotton too grew naturally around the world at tropical and subtropical latitudes, and the
skills needed to grow it and weave its fibers into cloth developed in many settings. The
cottons raised on plantations were American varieties with unusually long, strong fibers.
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With the right amounts of sunshine, water, soil nutrients and skilled labor, these plants
could be turned into money.
Soils and Nutrients, Livestock and Trees
Sugar, coffee, rice, and cotton make heavy demands on soil nutrients. Growing them as
monocultures, year in and year out, made near impossible demands on soil nitrogen and
phosphorus. Indigo, or more accurately a bacterium that grows amid its roots, fixes
nitrogen from the air to the soil, and thus actually restores one of plant life’s limiting
nutrients. Indigo aside, these plantation crops could not have loomed large in the history
of the Americas without two conditions only recently fulfilled: an abundance of livestock
and of tall forest.
Livestock, in practice chiefly cattle, provided manure, which replenished soil nitrogen
and phosphorus. On the rice plantations of Surinam and South Carolina, for example, as
in the rice fields of Senegambia and the inland Niger, cattle grazed on stubble after the
harvest in what amounted to a rotation of pasturage and rice. All plantations raised cattle
and other livestock, often encouraged them to browse on scrubland or forest, sometimes
pampered them with their own dedicated pastures. When penned at night, a frequent but
not universal practice, their manure piles served as storehouses of nutrients for
distribution to the fields. Without the big domesticated animals from Eurasia and Africa,
soil nutrient depletion would have limited the scope of plantation agriculture in the
Americas severely.
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Tall forest too helped make the plantation regime possible. When Amerindians were the
‘keystone species’ of the eastern woodlands (from the Chesapeake to Bahia), they
routinely burned vegetation to make room for their gardens and fields, and to open land
to sunshine to make grass for herbivores which they liked to hunt. Instead of raising
domestic livestock, they managed ecosystems with fire so as to maximize the deer and
bison herds for easier hunting. But then the onslaught of the crowd diseases scythed
down the Amerindians (with help from massacre, enslavement, etc.) the burning abated.
Thus tall forest grew up in places it had not existed for many centuries.
By the 17th and 18th century, this looked to Europeans like forest primeval. For those keen
on carving out plantations in Atlantic America, this forest seemed an obstacle but was in
fact a godsend. For a century or two before felling, tree roots had pulled nutrients up from
deep beneath the surface, depths to which neither sugar cane nor cotton roots could ever
reach. These nutrients then remained in trees’ wood and bark. With each passing year,
McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 12
more and more nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium were stored in these giant nutrient
towers. When felled and burned, some of this stockpile was lost but plenty entered the
soil among the ashes. Hence sugar, coffee, and cotton planters liked to seed fields that
had recently been forest, sometimes sowing while the ashes were still warm. If they did
not have plenty of animals for manure, they could raise crops only for a few years before
they needed to deforest new land to unlock more stored nutrients. Even with manure, they
usually found that their yields declined over time, and their plantations grew less
profitable and less competitive against newer ones on the frontiers of deforestation.
26
Water, Energy, and Labor
Thus the various processes of the Columbian Exchange brought together the cultigens
and nutrients that underlay the plantation system. But the system needed water and
energy too. Water usually came from the skies, but when and where it was required in
specific quantities at specific times, as in rice cultivation, irrigation came in to play. The
greatest challenge there was labor, moving millions of tons of earth around and keeping it
in the right places against the forces of gravity and erosion. Energy too came from the
skies, in the indispensable form of sunshine to power photosynthesis, but equally
indispensable was energy in the form of human muscle power, in other words, labor.
The plantations all made enormous demands in terms of labor. Felling trees. Digging
(and maintaining) irrigation ditches. Spreading manure. Planting, transplanting in cases,
weeding, and harvesting. Feeding sugar boilers with cane and firewood. Husking rice.
Suckering tobacco. Herding cattle. Slaves did almost all this work, although in the West
Indies and the Chesapeake in the early phases of plantation agriculture, European
indentured laborers toiled at it as well. Sugar and rice plantations made limited use of
windmills for energy, and most plantations used animal power as well. But almost all of
the work had to be done by human hands. About 11 million of the slaves were born and
raised in Africa, nourished on the foods and nutrients of the regions from Senegambia to
Angola (including, of course, maize, peanuts, and manioc). They and their descendants
provided the mechanical energy that made the plantations run. Their food (that is their
energy) came from gardens, fields, fisheries on and around the plantations for the most
part, although in the West Indies, especially the smaller islands where land was scarce,
refuse cod from the North Atlantic supplemented their diet. As the scale of the plantation
system grew from around 1550 to 1800 (and beyond) billions and trillions of calories of
chemical energy cycled through the slave population, whose bodies transformed it into
mechanical energy, in the service of raising commercial crops, whose owners could
transform that into money. The whole system rested on a wasteful and unsustainable
double exploitation of soils and slaves, but while supplies lasted, it made many a fortune.
McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 13
Three significant ecological aspects of the plantation system are not captured in this
metabolic approach. First, the plantations required knowledge and skill to put all the
plants, nutrients, and water together in just the right ways, to nurture the crops, harvest
them, process them, and pack them on their way to market. In most cases those skills
were acquired mainly through trial and error on plantations themselves. Tobacco
knowledge, however, came substantially from Amerindians, whose ancestors had raised
tobacco for fifteen centuries before Columbus. Rice knowledge in large measure came
from West African slaves. Many planters adopted a scientific approach to their business,
and sought what knowledge they could find from around the world, adopting Chinese
technology for pressing cane juice from sugar cane, or imitating Egyptian and Indian
cotton irrigation practices.
Second, procuring slaves had its ecological effects. In Africa, as we have seen, slaving
extended the domains of maize and manioc, and maize helped extend the domain of
slaving. In general, the heightened security risks people faced in an era of pervasive
slaving put a premium on mobility. Pastoralism increasingly made more sense than
sedentary farming; clearing new land more rarely justified the effort. Perhaps population
declined in some regions, allowing resurgent forest to grow up. Probably the
transportation of slaves from one zone to another and the flight of peoples from slave
raiders brought people into contact with unfamiliar infections with predictable results.
This likely increased the toll from yellow fever and malaria, among other diseases. One
can generate many hypotheses but few firm conclusions about the ecological effects of
slaving in Africa. Slaving in the Americas, which took place on a far smaller scale,
apparently hastened the spread of smallpox and other diseases among Amerindians.
27
Third, the Atlantic slave trade brought malaria and yellow fever (and yellow fever’s
mosquito vector) to the plantation zone. Malaria probably became established in the 16th
century; yellow fever not until the mid- and late 17th. Their arrival proved important in
several respects. Gradually, these diseases spread widely, becoming endemic where
conditions were right. They had been long endemic, one can say hyper-endemic, in West
Africa, and were probably spread to every suitable zone by the migrations of slaves and
refugees in the 15th-18th centuries. So almost all those who survived childhood there
were fully immune to yellow fever and resistant to malaria. Many West Africans were
indeed genuinely immune to falciparum malaria by virtue of carrying the sickle-cell trait,
a genetic adaptation to the world’s most highly malarial environment. Thus West
Africans in particular, and Angolans to some degree, suffered less acutely from these
lethal infections than did other populations in the plantation zone. Atlantic Europeans, for
example, if born and raised in temperate climes, proved highly susceptible to both yellow
fever and malaria. Europeans born in the West Indies (after the 1690s at least), on the
other hand, if they survived childhood were also likely immune to yellow fever, and
McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 14
resistant, although not as much so as West Africans, to malaria. Amerindians proved as
vulnerable as anyone.
28
These differentials in resistance to malaria and yellow fever helped make African slavery
more economic in the plantation zone than any other labor regime. They also made it
extremely difficult for Europeans to establish settler colonies in the Caribbean or
Guyanas, and scuttled several attempts. A Scottish effort to colonize Darien, in Panama
(1697-98), came to grief amid gruesome epidemics, as did a French one at Kourou in
Guyana (1763-64). Moreover, military expeditions intended to take territory from Spain
routinely fell afoul of yellow fever and malaria, keeping Spanish America Spanish after
1655 despite determined predation.
29
VI. Europe’s Atlantic Ecological Footprint
Among the world historical consequences of the ecological history of the Atlantic may be
the rise of modern Europe—or at least its remarkable failure to settle into Malthusian
stagnation. Long ago scholars suggested that money made in the slave trade and on the
plantations of the Americas helped finance the Industrial Revolution in Britain. A newer
argument puts the matter in ecological terms: Atlantic American ecosystems subsidized
the overstrained ones of Atlantic Europe after 1600, allowing an escape from stagnation
and eventually a sustained economic growth that made the tiny societies of northwestern
Europe the most dynamic and soon the most powerful in the world. The argument runs as
follows.
In the 16th and 17th centuries Atlantic European societies recovered from the population
decline begun with the Black Death and once more began to press, in Malthusian fashion,
upon available resources. Shortages of food and fuel came more frequently and severely
(abetted by the Little Ice Age). Forests in particular were shrinking and depleted, from
Scotland to Spain. Peat in places such as the Netherlands helped with fuel, and imports
from the Baltic helped with food. But long-term stagnation punctuated by periodic crises
loomed because, ultimately, there was not enough land for forests and fields to supply
fuel and food. The energy system of Atlantic Europe had approached its limits.
30
This bleak scenario was averted due to the enlistment of Atlantic ecosystems. The fish,
grain, and timber from the Americas, and to a lesser extent the calories in sugar as well,
permitted escape from the growth constraints in Atlantic Europe in ways that were
McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 15
available nowhere else on the planet. In today’s vocabulary, Atlantic Europeans
expanded their ecological footprint. In the language of Eric Jones, they took advantage of
‘ghost acreage.’ In terms of energetics, they expanded their catchment of solar energy
and photosynthesis. And thus Atlantic Europe sidestepped the constraints of the
preindustrial organic energy regime until the subterranean forest, coal, helped to shatter
them. What began as an energy subsidy from another place, America, led to an energy
subsidy from anther time, the Carboniferous. If this argument is only partly true, and the
rise of modern Europe required subsidies of transAtlantic food and fuel, it is easily the
most important side of the story of Atlantic Europe’s involvement with the ecosystems on
other shores of the ocean.
31
32
Use Jeff Bolster’s new book here to make the case with respect to fish
VII. Conclusion
The centuries from 1450 to 1850 in the Atlantic world witnessed one of the great
ecological tempests in world history. Climatic turbulence forced modest adjustments in
ecosystems and brought major calamities to societies. A surge of biological globalization
recast ecosystems in Atlantic Europe, Africa, and especially America. The migration of
people, pathogens (and mosquitoes) fundamentally reshuffled the demography of the
Atlantic world, especially on its oceanic islands and in America, but in Atlantic Africa
and Europe as well. The exchanges of animals and plants revised agro-ecosystems,
improving nutrition here and there, but also bringing new sources of social conflict.
Perhaps the most sudden and thorough ecological revolutions took place in the plantation
zone of the Americas, where African and Eurasian people, plants, livestock, and diseases
combined with American soil and sunshine to create a creole ecology, and the most
distinctive and characteristic ecosystems and social institutions of the Atlantic world.
That creole ecology supported one of the unhappiest, most wasteful, and unsustainable
regimes in world history. At the same time, American resources, mobilized by European
entrepreneurship and often by African labor, helped Atlantic Europe bend and then break
the constraints of an ecological Old Regime.
McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 16
1 E.g. Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1972); William Cronon, Changes in the Land (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984);
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of
Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
2 E.g. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 2005); Paul Butel, The Atlantic (London: Routledge, 1999).
3Maize requires water early on but maturing crops handle drought well.
4 Jan Vansina, “Histoire du manioc en Afrique centrale avant 1850,” Paideuma 43(1997), 255-79.
5 James J. Parsons, The Green Turtle and Man (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1962); J.B.C.
Jackson, “Reefs since Columbus,” Coral Reefs 16, suppl. (1997), S23-S32.
6 The most careful efforts to confront this problem are those of Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 17
7 Jean Grove, The Little Ice Age (London: Rouotledge, 1988).Wolfgang Behringer, Hartmut Lehmann
and Christian Pfister, eds., Kulturelle Konsequenzen der "Kleinen Eiszeit" (Goettingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005) A more popular take is Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age (New York:
Basic Books, 2000).
8 Endfield on Mexico; Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); James
Webb, Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600-1850
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); George Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology,
Society and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630 (Boulder: Westview, 1993); Joseph Miller, The Way of
Death (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); David Stahle et al, “The Lost Colony and
Jamestown Droughts,” Science 280(1998), 564-7.
9 On sea temperatures, T.M Cronin et al (2004), “Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age, and 20 th Century
Temperature Variability from Chesapeake Bay,” USGS webpage:
www.geology.er.usgs/gov/eespteam/Atlantic/GPCabs.htm (visited 25 August 2008); Watanabe, T., A.
Winter, and T. Oba 2001. “Seasonal Changes in Sea Surface Temperature and Salinity during the Little
Ice Age in the Caribbean Sea Deduced from Mg/Ca and 18O/16O Ratios in Corals,” Marine Geology
173:21-35.; Winter, Amos, Hiroshi Ishioroshi, Tsuyoshi Watanabe, Tadamichi Oba, and John Christy
2000. “Caribbean Sea Surface Temperatures: Two-to-three Degrees Cooler than Present during the
Little Ice Age,” Geophysical Research Letters 27(20), 3365-3368.
10 J.M. Grove, “The Initiation of the ‘Little Ice Age’ in Regions Round the North Atlantic,” Climatic
Change 48(2001), 53-82.
11 Australia after 1788 perhaps comes closest. The trans-Pacific traffic after Magellan, or the circumIndian Ocean traffic had smaller biological effects, as did the trans-Saharan crossings. The opening of
the Suez Canal in 1869 is another parallel: it instantly united the Indian Ocean and Red Sea aquatic
biota with that of the Mediterranean.
12What follows draws heavily from Crosby, The Columbian Exchange and less so from his Ecological
Imperialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
13 For a recent argument to the contrary, see Paul Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological
Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Kelton
sees the English slave trade (of Amerindians) as a necessary pre-condition for the disease disaster. See
also Massimo Livi-Bacci book
14R.A. Donkin, The Peccary—with Observations on the Introduction of Pigs to the New World
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society Transactions, vol. 75, 1985), 40-5.
15 The animal exchange: Crosby, The Columbian Exchange; Elinor Melville, A Plague of Sheep (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How
Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); R.A.
Donkin, The Peccary—with Observations on the Introduction of Pigs to the New World (Philadelphia:
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, no. 75, 1985).
16Donkin, The Peccary, 45-7.
17 Bananas are of southeast Asian origin, arrived in southeastern Africa perhaps 2,000 years ago, and from
Africa came to the Americas.
McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 18
18 Torciso de Souza Filgueiras, “Afrcianas no Brasil: Gramineas introduizadas da Africa,” Cadernas de
Geociências 5(1990), 57-63; Judith Carney, Black Rice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001);
Carney, “African Plants in the Columbian Exchange,” Journal of African History 42(2001), 377-96; J.J.
Parsons, “The ‘Africanization’ of New World Tropical Grasslands,” Tübingen Geographische Studien
34(1970), 141-53. Peter Wood in Black Majority (New York: Knopf, 1974) emphasized the African
origins of South Carolina rice.
19John Reader, Propitious Esculent: The Potato in World History (New York: Heinemann, 2008) for an
engaging version of potato history.
20 Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France: Volume II; People and Production (New York: HarperCollins,
1991), 269.
21 Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books,
2002), 159; John Iliffe, Africans: The History of A Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 138; James McCann, Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with A New World Crop, 1500-2000
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 19-55; Nicou Ldjou Gayibor, “Ecologie et histoire:
Les origins de la savane du Benin,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 26(1986), 13-41.
22 Iliffe, Africans, 138; Joseph Miller [is it in Way of Death?]
23Among the first to emphasize drugs as plantation crops was the Jesuit Andre Joao Antonil in his aptly
titled, Cultura e opulencia do Brasil por suas drogas e minas (Lisbon, 1711), half of which is devoted
to sugar and tobacco.
24 The genus has representatives elsewhere but these never served as the basis for commercial production.
[maybe cite Paul Berthier, Les anciens sucreries du Maroc on sugar in west Mediterranean]
25 Judith Carney, Black Rice, mentions livestock’s role in rice cultivation in Africa and the Americas.
26 The importance of forest soils is emphasized in Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand; Charles
Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005), 243-326 on
Amerindian forest burning. Sugar planters also need forest for fuelwood to fire sugar boilers.
27 See Paul Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 14921715 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Kelton argues that the slave trade of 1660-1715 to
South Carolina and Virginia, which involved a few tens of thousands of captives, was decisive in
spreading smallpox. While this is uncertain it is suggestive, and might well apply to the bandeirante
slaving in Brazil as well.
28 See Kenneth Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1984). Kiple may overstate the resistance of Africans somewhat, and loosely use the term
‘blacks’ where he means ‘people born and raised in the endemic malaria and yellow fever zones of
Atlantic Africa.’ Disease resistance and vulnerability are not correlated with race or skin color, despite
impressions to the contrary among people, black and white, living in the plantation zone, and among
some scholars as well.
29 J.R. McNeill, Epidemics and Geopolitics in the Greater Caribbean (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2010). See also James Webb, Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2009). The English seizure of Jamaica in 1655 marked the last large loss
of territory in Spanish America until independence.
McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 19
30 For the Dutch situation with respect to fuel, Jaap Buis, “Historia forestis: Nederlandse
Bosgeschiedenis,” A.A.G. Bijdragen 26(1985), 1-472 and 27(1985), 473-1058; M.A.W. Gerding, Vier
Euew Turfwinning: De Verveningen in Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe, en Overijssel tussen 1550 en
1950 (Wageningen: Landbouwuniversiteit, 1995).
31 Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). An underappreciated
variant of this ecological footprint expansion is the Dutch use of solar salt from the Caribbean, which
made it possible to preserve and eat more North Atlantic herring. There were many pathways by which
Atlantic nature provided subsidies.
32 See Rolf-Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest (Cambridge UK: White Horse Press, 2001) and
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 20