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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. 1 2 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 McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 1 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 McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 2 especially dense maple, willow, and spruce from the cold decades of 1660-1720 allowed Stradivarius to make his glorious violins. 7 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. 8 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. 9 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. 10 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 McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 3 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. 11 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. 12 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 McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 4 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, McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 5 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. 13 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 McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 6 goats sometimes ran wild too, and reproduced with an abandon that astonished 16th- and 17th-century observers. 14 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. 15 McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 7 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. 16 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 McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 8 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. 17 18 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 McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 9 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. 19 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. 20 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. 21 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, McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 10 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. 22 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. 23 24 McNeill, Ecological Atlantic 11 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. 25 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