Charles C Mann: Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry

Dwarkesh Patel opens by asking how much of the post-1492 New World was baked in: the arrival of Eurasian diseases, the institutional divergence he attributes to Acemoglu's theory, the labor shortages caused by malaria and the turn to African slaves. He also asks whether someone from Italy would simply have made the voyage fifty years later if Columbus had not.

Charles Mann answers that part of it was inevitable. Contact between Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere was bound to happen, and the epidemiological gap between the hemispheres was large. By a quirk of evolutionary history, Eurasia and the Eastern Hemisphere had many more domesticable animals, which almost inevitably produces zoonotic diseases, those that start in animals and cross the species barrier into humans. In his words: "Most of the great killers in human history are zoonotic diseases." Any meeting of the two hemispheres would therefore have carried such diseases.

The manner of the encounter, however, was not fixed. Mann points to Laurent Binet's novel Civilizations, which imagines Vikings spreading diseases deeper into North America so that the epidemiological balance had shifted by Columbus's time. In that story the American societies kill Columbus, take his boats and conquer Europe. Mann calls it far-fetched but useful: the encounter and the diseases would still have happened, but not in the way they did. He also argues that wholesale slavery was not a given. There was a large early debate over whether it was a good idea, and the Catholic monarchy had reservations and asked the Pope whether it was acceptable. His conclusion is that some outcomes were bound to happen, while the specifics depended on chance, contingency and human agency.

Patel asks whether the Aztecs and Incas were unusually weak or decadent when the Spanish arrived. Mann replies that empires are typically more jumbled and fragile than we imagine, with constant fighting at the top. The so-called Aztec empire, which he says is better called the Triple Alliance ("Aztec" being a nineteenth-century invention), had three partners in central Mexico. The largest was the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, and the other two resented them. Cortes exploited that resentment to foment a civil war inside the empire, drawing in enemies and some of its own members to create a new order.

Mann adds that scholarship on this has moved quickly. Mostly Spanish and Mexican scholars have described a "conquest within the conquest": the Spaniards' indigenous allies sent out their own armies and conquered large areas of northern and southern Mexico and Central America. He left this out of 1491 and 1493 because it was too new when he wrote them. He also says the conquest was less complete than commonly believed. Cortes married his lieutenants into indigenous families, creating a hybrid nobility, and the pattern extended to the Incas. Pizarro arrived just after an Inca civil war and a massive epidemic, which Mann says made the empire very vulnerable and made the conquest otherwise impossible. Pizarro then allied with the apparently losing side to build a new rallying point and attacked the winner. His summary is that the Spanish did arrive at weak moments, but empires routinely have such moments because of fratricidal conflict in their leadership.

Patel links this to the East India Company, and Mann agrees, citing the Mughal empire. Some people in Bengal invited Clive and his men in, and Mann recalls reading William Dalrymple's The Anarchy, which describes the same pattern: one side in a Mughal internal struggle thought it could use the foreigners, and that was a big mistake.

Patel then raises the efficiency of imperial bureaucracy. He cites Niall Ferguson's figure of roughly one English civil servant for every three million Indians at the peak, which he says is only possible with elite cooperation. Mann says history does not stress enough how often elites recognize each other and join in arrangements that raise their own power while exploiting those below. He treats the East India Company and Spain as examples. The point, in his telling, is mutual benefit rather than remarkable efficiency. Tlaxcala, now a Mexican state, kept its rights and its integrity without really belonging to the Spanish Empire, and it was not really part of Mexico until around 1857. Bengali elites likewise did very well under British rule.

Patel asks why Haiti was the only successful slave revolt in the New World, given the huge ratios of enslaved people to owners. Mann says the answer depends on how success is defined. If it means building a prosperous, lasting state, Haiti does not qualify, and he attributes its poor condition partly to the blockade other nations imposed on it. By contrast, people at Palmares governed themselves for more than a hundred years.

Mann describes how such communities were eventually absorbed into Brazil, citing Euclides da Cunha's classic Os Sertões, in English Rebellion in the Backlands. Set in the 1880s, it concerns a hybrid state of runaway slaves that had kept informal independence since the colonial period and was fought to the last person when the new Brazilian state tried to take control. He says effectively independent areas, independent in fact if not in law, existed across the Americas for a long time, including maroon communities in the Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina and Mexico, where authorities tacitly agreed not to interfere if they were left alone. Whether that counts as success, he says, he does not know.

Patel objects that these look like temporary successes. Mann answers by asking how long nations generally last, pointing to Genghis Khan's empire, and says these communities faced overwhelming odds. A whole colonial system felt threatened by their existence, which explains why they, like rebellions in South Asia, were suppressed with a force greater than seemed worthwhile.

Patel connects this to James Scott's Against the Grain, in which people flee to forage in the forest and the state tries to bring them back. Mann agrees it is part of the same dynamic, since nobody wants to be a slave and as many people as possible left. Leaving was easier in some places than others, and very easy in Brazil. He says the Brazilian Amazon has about 20 million people, the great bulk of them descended from people who left slavery.