How Columbus Remade the World
                               by
                       William H. McNeill
 
           From "NEH Humanities" Vol 1, No. 6, 12/1985
 
   As everyone knows, Columbus discovered America; and as almost
everyone also knows, he was not the first to do so.  Norsemen had
been there a few hundred years before him; and indirect evidence
suggests that Polynesians and seafarers from Asia had visited
America's other coast several centuries before the Norse reached
what we call Newfoundland and New England.  And still earlier--
thousands of years earlier--the real discoverers of America were
the people we call Indians.  They pioneered human life in the New
World, coming from Asia across what is now the Bering Straits at
a time when the ice age made overland passage possible.  They
came as hunters and gatherers, but eventually they learned how to
domesticate American plants--different from the crops of the Old
World--and then built a series of civilizations on the basis of
their own distinctive style of agriculture.
   In 1992 we will celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of
Columbus's voyage, and rightly so, for that voyage made the world
a different place.  But we ought not to celebrate the discovery
of America in 1492--that had been done long before.  What Colum-
bus did was to change the world in which he lived and the world
in which the American Indians lived by connecting the two in a
way that has lasted for half a millennium.
   Before Columbus's time, the globe was divided by barren ocean
spaces into a large number of separate human, plant, and animal
communities, each an island unto itself with only sporadic and
accidental connections with anything outside.  The largest of
these ecological islands was what we call the Old World--Asia,
Africa, and Europe, together with some offshore islands like
japan and Great Britain that were close enough to the mainland to
be reached by easy voyages.  Within the Old World four major and
an indefinite number of offshoot civilizations had arisen, each
differing from the others in ideas and institutions, but all at
least loosely in touch with the surrounding variety of human and
ecological systems.  Interactions among so many different human
societies provoked the constant flux which we call history; and
because the range and scale of interaction in the Old World was
greater than anywhere else, human knowledge, skills, and institu-
tions, and the ecological systems within which human beings
lived, had to be tougher there than was necessary in more isola-
ted, less variegated human, plant, and animal communities.    The
Americas were the next largest of the world's islands.  The
inhabitants of the New World had developed their civilizations to
a level that resembled what Old World civilizations had been like
about 1500 B.C., a full three thousand years before Columbus
crossed the Atlantic.  All the things that dwellers in the Old
World island had learned in the time since Hammurabi, therefore,
stood to their advantage in the new contacts that Columbus
inaugurated; and the Indians were correspondingly disadvantaged.
Even more important was the fact that Columbus and his men were
accustomed to living in the presence of a range of Old World
diseases, which were quite unknown among the Indians.  Once these
diseases crossed the ocean, they started to ravage the native
peoples, who lacked inherited resistance and, to begin with, did
not know how to treat the afflicted.  The catastrophe that came
to the civilizations of Mexico and Peru after Spaniards reached
the mainland was largely due to the vulnerability of the local
populations to disease.  The total destruction of smaller com-
munities in the Caribbean islands, were Europeans first estab-
lished themselves, was due to the sam lopsidedness in the early
epidemiological exchanges between the Old World and the New.
   Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other islanded ecological
systems existed when Columbus set sail.  Australia was the third
largest, but it lagged far behind the Americas in its level of
development.  Smaller isolated ecosystems abounded, especially in
the Pacific, descending to the scale of a single atoll.  Some
lacked human inhabitants entirely; a few, like Easter Island, off
the coast of Chile, had once been populated by humans and then
abandoned.  But in all these tiny ecological systems, with or
without human beings, the native plants and animals were a severe
disadvantage when compelled to compete with imported forms of
life, coming by sea from the more developed ecological system of
the Old World.  It took about three hundred years before every
last one of them was explored and exposed to contacts with the
rest of the world.  But European navigation was such that what
Columbus started in 1492 was carried forward by others unrelent-
ingly, until the entire globe became a single interacting whole.
     The unification of the globe inaugurated by Columbus,
therefore, damaged and sometimes destroyed many local forms of
life--human as well as nonhuman.  No one planned it that way.  No
one intended it to happen.  But the different levels of eco-
logical and cultural development in the separate world islands of
preceding ages made such an upshot inevitable once communication
and contact across the ocean barriers began.
     It is important to recognize that Old World expansion,
spearheaded by European seaman and settlers, was ecological as
well as political.  Germs, weeds, and pests, transported by
accident, together with plants and animals brought in deliber-
ately, invaded new lands and soon created sharp ecological crises
for themselves and for the older life forms.  Human societies
likewise suffered sudden catastrophe, over and over again; and
many small communities disappeared entirely.  Indeed, the eco-
logical vanguard of European expansion regularly prepared the way
for, and often made possible, political conquest and settlement.
The conquest of Mexico by Cortes depended on a devastating
smallpox epidemic that broke out among the Aztecs, for example;
and both the Pilgrim settlement in New England and Pizarro's
conquest of Peru were preceded by similarly devastating epi-
demics, perhaps also of smallpox, that made resistance to the
intruders ineffective or impossible.
     The side of the story is relatively well known.  The triumph
of Old World life forms and of human immigrants coming from
Europe and Africa is the substance of our national history after
all; and although we like to emphasize the differences that arose
between the Old World and the New, thanks to the frontier and to
other unique developments on American soil, still no one really
doubts that the United States derives the main lines of its
cultural heritage and institutions from the Old World.  The same
is true of Canada and of Caribbean and Latin American countries,
although the role of African and of American Indian heritages in
some of those lands is far greater than in the United States.
     The opposite flow of influences from the New World to the
Old is less familiar, partly because it affected others more than
it affected us and partly because the nations and peoples of the
Old World, just like us, prefer to emphasize the things that make
them different and separate from everyone else, and tend to take
for granted what unites them to the rest of the world.  But the
anniversary of Columbus's voyages, and of the new pattern of
world relationships that they inaugurated, offers us an occasion
to recognize the influences of New World on Old and to think
globally, for it was the global impact of those voyages that
makes them worth celebrating in the first place.
     Three kinds of consequences may be identified:  1) new
ideas, 2) new resources, and 3) new models of political and
social life, all of which flowed into the Old World from the New
in the centuries after the Columbian exchange got under way.
     Generally speaking, it took longer for American influences
to penetrate Old World societies than it took for the pressure of
the Old World to disrupt pre-Columbian society and ecology in the
New; but that was due to the difference in complexity and tough-
ness of the two ecological and cultural systems when they first
encountered each other.  Novelties from the Americas had, so to
speak, to swim against the stream before they could penetrate an
already highly developed cultural and ecological system and begin
to make a real difference in the lands of the Old World.  Hence
it is not surprising that the major impact of America on Europe,
Asia, and Africa was delayed until after the 1570s, although news
of the discoveries, together with handsome windfalls of silver
and gold, came back with the earliest conquistadors and titil-
lated without transforming European outlooks.  Other Old World
peoples reacted more slowly, but by 1600, Asians and Africans as
well as Europeans had begun to react to new things coming from
America in ways that mattered for everyday life and that changed
their experience of the world.
     Let me begin with ideas.  The intensified communication and
regular contact across the oceans of the earth, which started
with Columbus's voyaging, meant that more and more persons became
more and more aware of the actual variety of human cultures.  The
American Indians and their way of life were a total surprise for
their Old World discoverers.  Nothing in the Bible or in clas-
sical writings prepared Europeans for what they found; and for
that reason Columbus resisted to the day of his death admitting
that he had not reached the "Indies," that is, islands and
coastlands somewhere between India and China, whence came the
precious spices that European merchants had imported through
Moslem middlemen for centuries.
     Europeans reacted to what explorers and early settlers had
to tell them about the inhabitants of the New World with a
mixture of opposites.  A frisson of horror at stories of
cannibalism and idolatry was matched almost from the beginning by
a contrary image of the noble savage, immune from the corruptions
of civilization.  At first, the task seemed simple:  to convert
the heathen and save their souls by making them Christians;
thereby, the inherent nobility of American Indians would be
perfected and their evil habits corrected.  In fact, early mis-
sionaries did win thousands of converts, and the readiness of the
peoples of the New World to accept baptism confirmed the faith
Europeans already had in the truth of their religion.
     Yet after about 1650 a counter current manifested itself.
The variety of religions and ways of life that clearly existed
and continued to exist in Asia and Africa as well as in America
suggested to some that perhaps the Christian faith and the
customs familiar in Europe were not uniquely and universally
true, but were only one set of ideas and practices among others,
none of which could claim to be really valid because they were
not based on reason or any other genuinely universal foundation.
But the light of reason, such thinkers hoped, might yet prevail,
and we are accustomed to agree with them by calling their assault
on Europe's established ideas and institutions "the
Enlightenment."
     Other developments within Europe fed into the Enlightenment,
of course, but knowledge about the New World, and realization of
how awkwardly it fitted into the biblical record, gave powerful
impetus to the propagation of Enlightenment ideas.  Thus, instead
of reinforcing commitment to and confidence in their cultural
heritage, as the first European encounter with American reality
generally had done, by the eighteenth century an influential
group of European thinkers began to question their inherited
ideas, especially religious ideas; and they set out instead to
construct a new set of enlightened beliefs and of institutions to
match.  Without the New World, the European Enlightenment could
scarcely have occurred.  It certainly would not have taken the
path it actually did, particularly after the American Revolution
provided an example of a people rationally and deliberately
creating a government to suit themselves.
     So much for the double-edged impact of the New World on the
Old in the realm of ideas.  New resources, originating in the New
World, also had double-edged effects, inasmuch as Spain, the
country that profited most immediately from the flood of silver
that started to come from American mines in the 1570s, soon
showed signs of a debilitating impoverishment.  Disruptive
inflation, resulting from the massive quantities of silver that
started to arrive after 1570, certainly played a part in Spain's
rise and fall, though historians still argue over why inflation
was bad for Spain but somehow helped to stimulate the Dutch and
English economies.
     Silver exports from the New World went direct to China
across the Pacific as well as to Spain, and tied that country
into the world economy more tightly that ever before inasmuch as
China's currency came to depend on supplies of American silver.
Interruptions could and did induce serious crises, as happened,
for instance, in the 1640s when the collapse of the Ming dynasty
was accelerated, if not caused, by the government's inability to
pay its troops because the whole exchange economy of the country
had been paralyzed by shortages of silver.
     The government of the Ottoman empire also suffered sys-
tematic enfeeblement when price inflation rendered its tax income
inadequate.  Similar difficulties afflicted all the other govern-
ments of Europe and the world, though some of them were able to
increase their revenue to keep up with inflation.  Regardless of
whether governments prospered or went bankrupt, wherever coined
money had become the principal medium of exchange, everyday life
was affected, and often dislocated, by the sharp increase in
world supplies of silver that resulted from the application of
the best European mining techniques to the silver lodes of
Bolivia and Mexico in the decades after 1570.  Thus America
impinged on millions of Asians and Europeans through their
pocketbooks, even though, at the time, no one understood what was
happening, or why.
     Africans, too, began to feel the force of America's par-
ticipation in the world at about the same time.  The slave trade,
which carried millions of Africans from their native villages to
America, started in the 1560s but took more than a century to get
into high gear, peaking only in the eighteenth century.  Needless
to say, the effect on African society was profound.  In addition,
two important newcomers from America, maize and peanuts, spread
widely--partly, no doubt, as a by-product of the slave trade--
and provided African farmers with a new and far more productive
source of food than had been available to them before.
     Without the new American food crops, and the larger popula-
tion they could support, Africa could perhaps not have supplied
so many slaves for American plantations, although, in truth, no
one knows for sure how the interplay of new food supplies, new
disease exposures, and an ever deeper penetration of the African
interior by slave raiders affected population growth and decay.
Cultural and social changes resulting from Africa's increasingly
intimate involvement with the outside world that the slave trade
brought to remote villages and millions of innocent victims were
also enormous, but only imperfectly known because written records
are few and not always reliable.
     American food crops were important in the rest of the Old
World as well.  Potatoes in northern Europe and maize in Mediter-
ranean lands could produce far more calories per acre than wheat
or any other grain familiar before.  In the course of the
eighteenth century, this persuaded millions of European cul-
tivators to begin raising the new crops, even though they
required more labor for cultivation than did the older staples.
Europe's modern population growth, which began in the second half
of the eighteenth century, could not have taken place without
this change.  Indeed the industrial revolution could not have
taken place in the way it did without the extra food that
American crops made available to support the teeming millions of
the new industrial towns.
     In China, too, sweet potatoes and maize played a very
important role in increasing food supplies and allowing the
population to rise far above earlier ceilings.  No industrial
revolution ensued, but modern China took its shape, just as
modern Europe and Africa did, only with massive reliance on
American food crops.  In India and the Middle East their impor-
tance was less, but even there such vegetables as tomatoes added
a precious supplement to the vitamin intake.  The same was also
true in Europe.
     To realize the impact of American crops on the rest of the
world one need only think about what comes to our tables.
Without maize-fed cattle and hogs, we would have no meat--or far
less of it; and without maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts,
tomatoes, and some kinds of beans and squashes--where would we
be?  This indeed, remains by far the most enduring and important
contribution the New World made to the peoples of the Old.
     Finally, the Americas also provided the Old World with new
models for social and political life.  Frontier society presented
the spectacle of polar extremes.  Either social hierarchy was
strenuously reinforced by dint of slavery and indentured labor,
or the social pyramid familiar in the Old World dissolved into a
rude frontier form of equality and freedom.  The latter of these
extremes was the influential one, for it appealed to restless
human beings everywhere--and still does:  Witness the world
popularity of cowboys and Indians in movies and television
programs.
     By the eighteenth century, a more sophisticated version of
American liberty was ready for export:  the ideal enshrined in
the U.S. Constitution.  The document had an enormous impact,
symbolized by the fact that the day on which the Constitution was
formally put into effect was also the day on which the Estates
General met in France and began the French Revolution.  The
French revolutionaries looked back to the Roman republic but
looked also across the Atlantic for inspiration; and from their
success and failure most of the political discourse and practice
of the contemporary world descends.
     In a second way, too, the Americas may begin to offer a
social and political model for the Old World, one that is less
often noticed.  For from the time Europeans set foot in the
America, they lived in a polyethnic society, where white and red
and soon also black people found themselves side by side.
Interracial relations were often harsh and brutal; but in time
the American ideal of liberty and equality was extended to
everyone, although often grudgingly and only partially.  Euro-
pean nations, by contrast, were, or pretended to be, one people,
living by themselves within their own boundaries.  But since
World War II, thousands of immigrants of alien racial and
cultural background have arrived in Britain, France and Germany,
and the intermingling of separate European nationalities in all
the principal cities has begun to erode the older geographical
segregation.  Consequently, the difficulties and rewards of
living in a polyethnic society, where people of different back-
grounds meet and mingle, is being felt in western Europe more
acutely today than ever before.  The long standing polyethnicity
of the United States and of the other American countries may
therefore become a model for Europeans in the twenty-first
century in something like the same way that the American version
of liberty and equality was a model in the eighteenth.  It is
still too soon to be sure.
     Polyethnicity is not so new to most of Asia and Africa,
where different peoples have intermingled for centuries.  The
combination of polyethnicity and equality--or the ideal of
equality--is, however, as new in Asia and Africa as it is in
western Europe, for the traditional relation between different
peoples, living together, was for one to be subordinated to the
other, confined to particular occupations, dignities, and ranks.
Whether American models of how to get along across racial and
cultural lines will have much effect in Asia and Africa remains
to be seen.  A possibility is there:  no more.
     Whatever lies ahead in the next five hundred years, one
still can say for sure that Columbus's voyages triggered the
modern world, by initiating interaction across the oceans as
never before.  That makes our world different from what preceded
it.  Columbus's voyages mark a turning point in history and in
the world's ecological system that can never be undone--a turning
point comparable only to the rise of civilization itself or to
the inauguration of the industrial revolution with its wholesale
use of inanimate power for human purposes.  That is what we
celebrate:  the unification of the globe; the inauguration of
worldwide interaction among humans, among animals and plants, and
among every other form of life down to the smallest virus.
 
Permission to use article in CIRS given by author.
 
                                                     MCNEILL1.ART