- Email: [email protected]
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012) 471e483
Richard Powell University of Oxford, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.08.006
Matthew McKenzie, Clearing the Coastline: The Nineteenth-Century Ecological and Cultural Transformation of Cape Cod. Hanover, University Press of New England, 2010, xviii þ 227 pages, US$35 paperback. In this book about the nineteenth-century social and ecological transformation of coastal New England, historian Matthew McKenzie seeks to explain how Cape Cod ‘went from a place where communities managed their local resources for long-term survival to one where those resources and traditions came to be all but forgotten’ (p. 2). For hundreds of years newcomers to Cape Cod fished inshore ocean waters and riverine environments to supply local markets and subsistence needs. By the early twentieth century however, small-scale fisheries had disappeared. Moreover, the men and women who prosecuted them had largely been lost to collective memory. As McKenzie observes, what was once a socially complex ‘workspace’ had by the early twentieth century become ‘an iconic wilderness used by urban people e ignorant of the cascading social and economic dislocations that preceded e for restorative recreation’ (p.175). Far from being an unsullied environment devoid of all human influence, the coastal wilderness of Cape Cod was created in the wake of ruined inshore fisheries and largely forgotten workspaces. At the core of McKenzie’s analysis is the nineteenth-century collapse of inshore fisheries for herring and other small fish species used for food, bait, and fertilizer. ‘On the surface,’ observes McKenzie, the collapse of these fisheries ‘could be explained away simply by claiming fishermen took too many fish’ (p.2). But closer examination reveals otherwise. For one thing, the inshore fishery was not entirely unregulated. According to McKenzie, ‘Europeans learned quickly that marine fish represented the key to anything more than a marginal existence’ in the region (p. 27). Inshore fishers using simple but exceedingly effective hook-and-line technology thus established informal management regimes and seasonal fishing strategies that, while imperfect in some ways, served nevertheless to create durable e indeed, sustainable e inshore fishing economies that served local people and markets for well over two centuries. But then the weir fishers arrived. Unlike their hook-and-line counterparts, weir fishers were politically connected, well capitalized, and ‘looked more to distant markets that could absorb the larger volume of fish they took and shipped by rail to Boston, New York, New Bedford, or Gloucester’ (p. 4). Not surprisingly in this context, the hook-and-line fishery was quickly eclipsed. By 1890 weirs had replaced hooks; state regulation by scientific experts had replaced local management of resources; and the resources themselves had largely been depleted. Already in 1900 Cape Cod ‘hosted more tourist resorts than fishing communities’ (p. 177). Once a place work, Cape Cod by the early twentieth century had become a place of recreation where relatively affluent urbanites could ‘reconnect with a pristine and powerful nature’ (p. 138). But this was a pristine and powerful nature that first had to be invented. Even as the bait fishery collapsed, urban artists and writers began to represent Cape Cod in ways that ignored and ultimately forgot its fraught fishing past. They also reinvented the coastal landscape physically by removing fishing weirs and any other evidence suggesting that Cape Cod was once
481
a place where people worked. Urban newcomers to the Cape not only ignored but also actively erased the negative social and ecological effects of weir fishing in order to promote their own interests and claims to the coast. But this was little more than willful ignorance, argues McKenzie: ‘[i]n ignoring the consequences, and indeed consciously overlooking them to sell a distinctly different image, writers, artists and tourists played as active a role in the decline of Cape Cod’s inshore fisheries as did the weirs and weir men they ignored’ (p. 173). According to McKenzie’s compelling account, the nineteenth-century transformation of Cape Cod, far from being a simple tale of too many fishers chasing too few fish, resulted from a ‘complex intersection of changing labor regimes, economic orientations, and cultural representations’ (p. 4). Clearing the Coastline makes an important contribution to north American environmental historiography. The strength of this book is the way it combines careful archival analysis on the one hand, with insights from marine ecology on the other, to arrive at a contextual understanding of regional social history. Readers familiar with environmental and colonial historiography will perhaps wonder about the changing position of indigenous people in the region as newcomers to the Cape claimed land and marine resources for themselves. But, in fairness, this may be another study. As it stands, Clearing the Coastline is still a substantial piece of historical scholarship that ought it to be of considerable interest not just to environmental historians and historical geographers, but also to people interested in resource management problems in contemporary coastal landscapes. John Thistle Memorial University, Canada E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.08.004
Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, xix þ 535 pages, US$16.95 paperback. Charles Mann, a talented writer and well-known journalist, has produced a number of prize-winning works on science in general, with important forays into the history of medicine, physics, and the ecological challenges of the global age. The present book can be considered a sequel to his 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (Knopf, 2005) that was on the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks. Both works cry out for comparison with each other and with Alfred Crosby’s path-breaking Columbian Exchange (Greenwood, 1972), and Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1992). Crosby’s texts have for decades stimulated interest in the ecological impact of the global age ushered in during the ‘Age of reconnaissance.’ Mann’s earlier 1491 is a credible survey of up-to date findings on the evolution and nature of various New World societies on the eve of Columbus’s arrival. In it he synthesized recent scholarship on the impact of the initial ecological exchange for both the public and students. His newest book carries the story to the present. Mann sets the stage in the book’s introduction, subtitled ‘In the Homogenocene’. He defines homogenizing as ‘mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend’ (p. 17). Mann places himself at the center of the narrative, as he travels from one continent to another, tracing and analysing the transfers of people and
482
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012) 471e483
the things they carried with them. Chronology is secondary to the subject in this volume. Tobacco, the salvation and the curse of the English settlement of Virginia, sets the foundation for one transfer. Many scholars have traced the flow and consumption of tobacco and its cultivation to Europe: Mann places it in China. For the creation of the first global age it is silver and silk that link the Pacific basin with the rest of the world, in a trade network that accelerates the process of globalization. The transfer of American domesticated plants now flows east and west, with substantial positive and negative consequences. Peanuts, chili peppers, and corn add to the list of American domesticates that reach southeast Asia and China. Mann ignores neither the impact of African peoples on the settlement of the Americas nor the transfer and impact of American domesticates on Africa. A chapter on the ‘Agro-industrial complex’ highlights the potato. Domesticated in the Andes long before the arrival of the Europeans, it existed in hundreds of varieties. Although introduced into Europe soon after conquest of the Inca empire, it took several generations to become widespread. Its productivity per unit of land has long been recognized, and its impact on Europe’s population growth is known. The problem is that with overproduction of potatoes the soil becomes depleted, and here is where guano enters the story. Guano from islands off the southern coast of Peru was exploited as a fertilizer by Andean peoples before the Europeans arrived. By the late 1830s shipments of guano were carried to ports in northern Europe. The demand was so great that thousands of Chinese were taken to Peru to export the rich natural fertilizer. What was not recognized was that the agents that cause the potato blight were carried to northern Europe on the guano ships. Once introduced, the blight quickly attacked the potato in Europe, causing hunger, starvation, and deaths. Hundreds of thousands emigrated from Europe in a course of a disaster attributable in part to the lack of genetic diversity in Europe’s potato population. Coming to the Americas on ships were Old World diseases whose spread and impact Mann considers. He spends more time on malaria and yellow fever than on smallpox and measles that were the most devastating initial killers of Amerindians. He suggests that the impact of differential morbidity and mortality from mosquito borne diseases directly affected human settlement patterns. The explosion of the slave trade was one consequence of this factor. Mann’s story is likely to dissatisfy many. It may depress some readers as they discover the true costs of the homogenocene that seems inevitable in spite of valiant efforts to maintain diversity. Students without a solid framework can be lost by his episodic chronological and spatial shifts. But one can learn much, even if many scholars will find fault with Mann’s take, and his lack of attention to the facts. In his effort to tell a good story he often stretches reality beyond recognition. Had there really been an ‘Indian empire’ in Virginia when the English arrived (p. 73)? Was São Paulo a Brazilian ‘port’ (p. 106)? Did Mann forget that the Spanish were interested in sugar production too, and were exporting it to the Old World as early as 1519, rather than being ‘much too preoccupied by silver to pay attention’ to sugar (p. 108)? Of the two works, the first is more satisfying. Do Mann’s volumes replace Crosby’s now classic books? No, but they update his work and their bibliographies are useful, and should stimulate further research that may require a new synthesis. Noble David Cook Florida International University, USA E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.08.003
Haim Goren, Dead Sea Level: Science, Exploration, and Imperial Interests in the Near East. I.B. Tauris, 2011, 352 pages, £59.50 hardcover. The Dead Sea was long regarded as a ‘dark, mysterious, gloomy’ place situated in ‘desolate mountainous surroundings’ and which ‘evoked the close connection that was felt to the deeds of the Creator (p. 152)’, but in the nineteenth century it inspired attempts to determine its scientific attributes. These attempts are the subject of a well written and interesting examination of the role of European explorers in the Near East between 1800 and 1850. Haim Goren, a historical geographer at Tel-Hai College in Israel, has broken new ground in recent years with studies of scientific organizations and exploration in the Middle East. His latest study seeks to demonstrate ‘the connection between exploration, cartography and imperial interests in the study’ of the Levant (p. 272). The author sees the connections as having been forged primarily by ‘individual investigators trained in science and geodesy as well as by travelers and adventurers who entered the field as amateurs, sometimes by sheer coincidence’ (p. 268). He thus rejects the argument that the exploration of the Near East can be ‘explained almost solely by citing geo-political interests of European powers’ (p. xviii). In setting out this argument and backing it up in the text this book provides an important corrective to the overly simplistic view that sees the hand of colonialism behind all these types of endeavour. The first section of the monograph sets the stage by examining changes in the Middle East after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Palestine in 1799 and Mehemet Ali’s conquest of Syria in 1832. At this time European powers played a complicated game that pitted the British against the French and Russians for influence over the ailing Ottoman empire. One of the results for penetration of the area by European military men, missionaries, and scientists was the production of knowledge, such as the surveying of the Eastern Mediterranean shores during the period. The first section of the book is dominated by the story of Francis Rawdon Chesney, ‘is one of the most prominent figures in Britain’s efforts to improve its connections with the most important colony in the Empire’, namely India (p. 34). The search for an overland route as opposed to the traditional and much longer sea route round southern Africa preoccupied many Britons in this period, and in the first half of the nineteenth century Chesney concluded that ‘a canal was feasible’ (p. 44) on the route now taken by the Suez canal. Unlike subsequent surveys of the Dead Sea ‘the military nature of Chesney’s mission is easily demonstrated through many of the reports (p. 46)’. Chesney also led the massively expensive expedition to navigate the Euphrates by steamship. Goren notes that ‘we are concerned with the various, sometimes hidden, links between the Euphrates Expedition and the study of the Jordan Rift Valley’ (p. 64), but it is not entirely clear what the connection was, aside from the fact that ‘the British were busy gathering data in the countries bordering the Mediterranean to the east (p. 85)’. The section on the Euphrates is encumbered by a series of short biographies of British men who served in the ‘East’, but whose importance to the argument is not clear (e.g. pp. 73e77). The subsequent discussion of the British intervention in the battle of Acre in 1840 is not clearly connected to the Euphrates expedition. One connection to Dead Sea exploration is that the British officers who were asked to make surveys of fortifications in the region in 1841 ended up sketching all sorts of ruins, ‘maps which could have only scientific value’ (p. 109). Part two is devoted to explorers who studied the Dead Sea and culminates in the ‘chase after the level’ in 1838. Goren argues that ‘the special characteristics of the Dead Sea in fact determined the
Richard Powell University of Oxford, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.08.006
Matthew McKenzie, Clearing the Coastline: The Nineteenth-Century Ecological and Cultural Transformation of Cape Cod. Hanover, University Press of New England, 2010, xviii þ 227 pages, US$35 paperback. In this book about the nineteenth-century social and ecological transformation of coastal New England, historian Matthew McKenzie seeks to explain how Cape Cod ‘went from a place where communities managed their local resources for long-term survival to one where those resources and traditions came to be all but forgotten’ (p. 2). For hundreds of years newcomers to Cape Cod fished inshore ocean waters and riverine environments to supply local markets and subsistence needs. By the early twentieth century however, small-scale fisheries had disappeared. Moreover, the men and women who prosecuted them had largely been lost to collective memory. As McKenzie observes, what was once a socially complex ‘workspace’ had by the early twentieth century become ‘an iconic wilderness used by urban people e ignorant of the cascading social and economic dislocations that preceded e for restorative recreation’ (p.175). Far from being an unsullied environment devoid of all human influence, the coastal wilderness of Cape Cod was created in the wake of ruined inshore fisheries and largely forgotten workspaces. At the core of McKenzie’s analysis is the nineteenth-century collapse of inshore fisheries for herring and other small fish species used for food, bait, and fertilizer. ‘On the surface,’ observes McKenzie, the collapse of these fisheries ‘could be explained away simply by claiming fishermen took too many fish’ (p.2). But closer examination reveals otherwise. For one thing, the inshore fishery was not entirely unregulated. According to McKenzie, ‘Europeans learned quickly that marine fish represented the key to anything more than a marginal existence’ in the region (p. 27). Inshore fishers using simple but exceedingly effective hook-and-line technology thus established informal management regimes and seasonal fishing strategies that, while imperfect in some ways, served nevertheless to create durable e indeed, sustainable e inshore fishing economies that served local people and markets for well over two centuries. But then the weir fishers arrived. Unlike their hook-and-line counterparts, weir fishers were politically connected, well capitalized, and ‘looked more to distant markets that could absorb the larger volume of fish they took and shipped by rail to Boston, New York, New Bedford, or Gloucester’ (p. 4). Not surprisingly in this context, the hook-and-line fishery was quickly eclipsed. By 1890 weirs had replaced hooks; state regulation by scientific experts had replaced local management of resources; and the resources themselves had largely been depleted. Already in 1900 Cape Cod ‘hosted more tourist resorts than fishing communities’ (p. 177). Once a place work, Cape Cod by the early twentieth century had become a place of recreation where relatively affluent urbanites could ‘reconnect with a pristine and powerful nature’ (p. 138). But this was a pristine and powerful nature that first had to be invented. Even as the bait fishery collapsed, urban artists and writers began to represent Cape Cod in ways that ignored and ultimately forgot its fraught fishing past. They also reinvented the coastal landscape physically by removing fishing weirs and any other evidence suggesting that Cape Cod was once
481
a place where people worked. Urban newcomers to the Cape not only ignored but also actively erased the negative social and ecological effects of weir fishing in order to promote their own interests and claims to the coast. But this was little more than willful ignorance, argues McKenzie: ‘[i]n ignoring the consequences, and indeed consciously overlooking them to sell a distinctly different image, writers, artists and tourists played as active a role in the decline of Cape Cod’s inshore fisheries as did the weirs and weir men they ignored’ (p. 173). According to McKenzie’s compelling account, the nineteenth-century transformation of Cape Cod, far from being a simple tale of too many fishers chasing too few fish, resulted from a ‘complex intersection of changing labor regimes, economic orientations, and cultural representations’ (p. 4). Clearing the Coastline makes an important contribution to north American environmental historiography. The strength of this book is the way it combines careful archival analysis on the one hand, with insights from marine ecology on the other, to arrive at a contextual understanding of regional social history. Readers familiar with environmental and colonial historiography will perhaps wonder about the changing position of indigenous people in the region as newcomers to the Cape claimed land and marine resources for themselves. But, in fairness, this may be another study. As it stands, Clearing the Coastline is still a substantial piece of historical scholarship that ought it to be of considerable interest not just to environmental historians and historical geographers, but also to people interested in resource management problems in contemporary coastal landscapes. John Thistle Memorial University, Canada E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.08.004
Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, xix þ 535 pages, US$16.95 paperback. Charles Mann, a talented writer and well-known journalist, has produced a number of prize-winning works on science in general, with important forays into the history of medicine, physics, and the ecological challenges of the global age. The present book can be considered a sequel to his 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (Knopf, 2005) that was on the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks. Both works cry out for comparison with each other and with Alfred Crosby’s path-breaking Columbian Exchange (Greenwood, 1972), and Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1992). Crosby’s texts have for decades stimulated interest in the ecological impact of the global age ushered in during the ‘Age of reconnaissance.’ Mann’s earlier 1491 is a credible survey of up-to date findings on the evolution and nature of various New World societies on the eve of Columbus’s arrival. In it he synthesized recent scholarship on the impact of the initial ecological exchange for both the public and students. His newest book carries the story to the present. Mann sets the stage in the book’s introduction, subtitled ‘In the Homogenocene’. He defines homogenizing as ‘mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend’ (p. 17). Mann places himself at the center of the narrative, as he travels from one continent to another, tracing and analysing the transfers of people and
482
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012) 471e483
the things they carried with them. Chronology is secondary to the subject in this volume. Tobacco, the salvation and the curse of the English settlement of Virginia, sets the foundation for one transfer. Many scholars have traced the flow and consumption of tobacco and its cultivation to Europe: Mann places it in China. For the creation of the first global age it is silver and silk that link the Pacific basin with the rest of the world, in a trade network that accelerates the process of globalization. The transfer of American domesticated plants now flows east and west, with substantial positive and negative consequences. Peanuts, chili peppers, and corn add to the list of American domesticates that reach southeast Asia and China. Mann ignores neither the impact of African peoples on the settlement of the Americas nor the transfer and impact of American domesticates on Africa. A chapter on the ‘Agro-industrial complex’ highlights the potato. Domesticated in the Andes long before the arrival of the Europeans, it existed in hundreds of varieties. Although introduced into Europe soon after conquest of the Inca empire, it took several generations to become widespread. Its productivity per unit of land has long been recognized, and its impact on Europe’s population growth is known. The problem is that with overproduction of potatoes the soil becomes depleted, and here is where guano enters the story. Guano from islands off the southern coast of Peru was exploited as a fertilizer by Andean peoples before the Europeans arrived. By the late 1830s shipments of guano were carried to ports in northern Europe. The demand was so great that thousands of Chinese were taken to Peru to export the rich natural fertilizer. What was not recognized was that the agents that cause the potato blight were carried to northern Europe on the guano ships. Once introduced, the blight quickly attacked the potato in Europe, causing hunger, starvation, and deaths. Hundreds of thousands emigrated from Europe in a course of a disaster attributable in part to the lack of genetic diversity in Europe’s potato population. Coming to the Americas on ships were Old World diseases whose spread and impact Mann considers. He spends more time on malaria and yellow fever than on smallpox and measles that were the most devastating initial killers of Amerindians. He suggests that the impact of differential morbidity and mortality from mosquito borne diseases directly affected human settlement patterns. The explosion of the slave trade was one consequence of this factor. Mann’s story is likely to dissatisfy many. It may depress some readers as they discover the true costs of the homogenocene that seems inevitable in spite of valiant efforts to maintain diversity. Students without a solid framework can be lost by his episodic chronological and spatial shifts. But one can learn much, even if many scholars will find fault with Mann’s take, and his lack of attention to the facts. In his effort to tell a good story he often stretches reality beyond recognition. Had there really been an ‘Indian empire’ in Virginia when the English arrived (p. 73)? Was São Paulo a Brazilian ‘port’ (p. 106)? Did Mann forget that the Spanish were interested in sugar production too, and were exporting it to the Old World as early as 1519, rather than being ‘much too preoccupied by silver to pay attention’ to sugar (p. 108)? Of the two works, the first is more satisfying. Do Mann’s volumes replace Crosby’s now classic books? No, but they update his work and their bibliographies are useful, and should stimulate further research that may require a new synthesis. Noble David Cook Florida International University, USA E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.08.003
Haim Goren, Dead Sea Level: Science, Exploration, and Imperial Interests in the Near East. I.B. Tauris, 2011, 352 pages, £59.50 hardcover. The Dead Sea was long regarded as a ‘dark, mysterious, gloomy’ place situated in ‘desolate mountainous surroundings’ and which ‘evoked the close connection that was felt to the deeds of the Creator (p. 152)’, but in the nineteenth century it inspired attempts to determine its scientific attributes. These attempts are the subject of a well written and interesting examination of the role of European explorers in the Near East between 1800 and 1850. Haim Goren, a historical geographer at Tel-Hai College in Israel, has broken new ground in recent years with studies of scientific organizations and exploration in the Middle East. His latest study seeks to demonstrate ‘the connection between exploration, cartography and imperial interests in the study’ of the Levant (p. 272). The author sees the connections as having been forged primarily by ‘individual investigators trained in science and geodesy as well as by travelers and adventurers who entered the field as amateurs, sometimes by sheer coincidence’ (p. 268). He thus rejects the argument that the exploration of the Near East can be ‘explained almost solely by citing geo-political interests of European powers’ (p. xviii). In setting out this argument and backing it up in the text this book provides an important corrective to the overly simplistic view that sees the hand of colonialism behind all these types of endeavour. The first section of the monograph sets the stage by examining changes in the Middle East after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Palestine in 1799 and Mehemet Ali’s conquest of Syria in 1832. At this time European powers played a complicated game that pitted the British against the French and Russians for influence over the ailing Ottoman empire. One of the results for penetration of the area by European military men, missionaries, and scientists was the production of knowledge, such as the surveying of the Eastern Mediterranean shores during the period. The first section of the book is dominated by the story of Francis Rawdon Chesney, ‘is one of the most prominent figures in Britain’s efforts to improve its connections with the most important colony in the Empire’, namely India (p. 34). The search for an overland route as opposed to the traditional and much longer sea route round southern Africa preoccupied many Britons in this period, and in the first half of the nineteenth century Chesney concluded that ‘a canal was feasible’ (p. 44) on the route now taken by the Suez canal. Unlike subsequent surveys of the Dead Sea ‘the military nature of Chesney’s mission is easily demonstrated through many of the reports (p. 46)’. Chesney also led the massively expensive expedition to navigate the Euphrates by steamship. Goren notes that ‘we are concerned with the various, sometimes hidden, links between the Euphrates Expedition and the study of the Jordan Rift Valley’ (p. 64), but it is not entirely clear what the connection was, aside from the fact that ‘the British were busy gathering data in the countries bordering the Mediterranean to the east (p. 85)’. The section on the Euphrates is encumbered by a series of short biographies of British men who served in the ‘East’, but whose importance to the argument is not clear (e.g. pp. 73e77). The subsequent discussion of the British intervention in the battle of Acre in 1840 is not clearly connected to the Euphrates expedition. One connection to Dead Sea exploration is that the British officers who were asked to make surveys of fortifications in the region in 1841 ended up sketching all sorts of ruins, ‘maps which could have only scientific value’ (p. 109). Part two is devoted to explorers who studied the Dead Sea and culminates in the ‘chase after the level’ in 1838. Goren argues that ‘the special characteristics of the Dead Sea in fact determined the