Rich and Strange Aeons

People have talked this being the Anthropocene, a geological era shaped by humanity; Mann also uses the term Homogenocene, for the homogenizing effect.

So, rubber. We don't think about it much, but it's said to be a key Industrial Revolution material, along with steel and fossil fuels. Need it for car and bicycle tires; more essentially, you need it for seals unless your parts are very well made. It's also used in machine belts. And where does rubber come from? The Americas, mostly Brazil. Something to think about the next time putative Revolutions in Rome or China get talked about.

And we're still dependent on the plant; we have synthetic rubber, but it's not as good as natural. The market share of natural has been growing, even, as supply increases due to tropical Asian plantations. Nice, clonal, plantations, just waiting for a fungus to come over from Brazil and kill them all.

In 1526 Spain was still debating what to do with the newly conquered Mexicans. Some said "enslave as inferior!" other said "convert to Christianity and make full citizens!" The anti-slavery faction brought some to Seville to show off, and they played a ball game, which introduced watchers to the new concept of rubber. Supposedly Spanish didn't even have a word for bouncing at the time, as Europe had never seen an elastomer before.

Big craze for rubberized garments, which then crashed as untreated rubber is temperature fragile, rigid in the cold or melting in the warmth. You need vulcanization with sulfur to make it really useful.

Southwest Brazil, in the deep Amazon, on the Madeira river, might have been one of the world's agricultural heartlands, with domestication of peanut, broad beans, chili pepper, tobacco, chocolate, peach palm, and manioc/cassava/yuca. Also, strychnine, a tree poison used by the Indians for fishing.

Tapping scattered trees in the jungle for rubber naturally led to labor shortages, and effective slavery of the local Indians. Chief in this was Julio Cesar Arana. In 1907 some Americans stumbled into how bad it was, and managed to escape and report, especially Walter Hardenburg. Arana was incorporated in London, so accusations of British slavery stung. Roger Casement, an Irish born diplomat who'd exposed Leopold's atrocities in the Congo, documented the abuses; Arana died penniless in 1952. Casement was knighted.

Then he devoted himself to Irish independence, and was found to be indiscreetly gay, and hanged in 1916. Arms smuggling got him the death penalty for treason, being gay denied him any chance of clemency.

Henry Alexander Wickham brought rubber seeds to London, to become seedlings in the Kew Gardens, and thence transported to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia. For breaking its rubber monopoly, Brazil denounces Wickham as a bio-pirate, despite there being no law against it, or secrecy on his part. For its part, Brazil's exports have long rested on coffee and sugar, and later soybeans and beef, none native to the country, and coffee was smuggled from French Guiana against colonial law...

Clements Markham did smuggle cinchona out of the monopoly region guarded by Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Cinchona bark was the sole source of quinine, the only effective anti-malaria drug at the time. Biopiracy, or saving more lives than that region could physically produce the quinine for, especially since they were killing the trees in overharvesting?

Xishuangbanna is China's most tropical place. 0.2% of the land, 25% of the higher plant species, 36% of birds, 22% of its mammals. Not sure if those numbers are before or after tropical montane forest shrank from 51% of the prefecture to 10%, being replaced by rubber plantations, which have since spread into Laos.

"Back in the 1990s there was still fog at lunchtime. Now it's gone by eleven." Rubber trees shed their leaves, leaving fewer surfaces to retain dew, the main source of water outside the rainy season. Runoff is up, the trees are sucking water out of the ground to replace that lost in tapped latex, villages are running out of drinking water, and soil erosion is up by 45 times. And all one pest away from disaster.

In 1593 Manila governor Gomes Perez Dasmariñas decided to try conquering the Maluku Islands. Lacking enough troops, he conscripted many Fujianese merchants as galley slaves. The locals protested, then caved in, for a promise that the conscripts would be treated well. That cashed out as chaining them to their benches, whipping them, and cutting off their elaborately braided hair. The flagship Chinese managed to mutiny, kill him and his crew, and row for Fujian. The Spanish concluded from this that Chinese were untrustworthy and dangerous. Various evictions, then massacres, ensued, in what would be a recurring cycle, but never enough to choke off the lure of wealth. Mann notes that trade can be about actual economic exchange and about projecting political power, and that here these conflicted. As a trading enterprise Manila should have as few vulnerable Europeans as possible and spend silver on silk; as an imperial outpost all civic functions would be in Spanish hands and silver should mostly go to Spain to fund wars in Europe. From the Ming point of view, all the silver meant a functioning money supply and economic booms, but also inflation and the threat of being dependent on an external supply, while the Fujianese outside Manila had a Chinese city outside imperial control.

I mentioned a backfire earlier. The Ming had specified taxes in weights of silver. As the American mines vomited forth silver, eventually even China was flooded, with the value of silver declining by 1640 to that in the rest of the world; inflation. Those taxes didn't go as far, and couldn't pay for defense, which was bad because the Manchus were attacking.

We can also note that the Chinese directed a large fraction of their productive base to obtaining silver mostly to be used as money, silver itself obtained at rather high cost in labor and lives. And silver isn't permanent; coins could wear away, or get buried in hoards. Lots of effort avoidable if one had a properly managed paper money supply...

Lovesick Grass

Locally made tobacco pipes in souther China have been unearthed dating to 1549. Columbus was in 1492, remember. Portuguese probably brought the tobacco; this is before Legazpi, and only a bit after Magellan. Smoking was a big hit among the Ming and Qing, and in Europe, with elaborate elite tools and rituals.

Jade Rice

China had 1/4 of the world's people and 1/12 of the arable land. Rice and wheat production was always tight, and China took to American crops in a big way. Sweet potatoes, maize, peanuts, chili peppers, pineapple, cashew, manioc/cassava. "Quoting Crosby, "While men who stormed Tenochtitlan with Cortes still lived..." peanuts, maize ("jade rice"), and sweet potato were becoming staples. Today it produces 3/4s of the global sweet potato harvest and is the second biggest maize producer. Sweet potatoes were particularly timely, providing food that would grow in the peak of the Little Ice Age, despite cold rains. Near Yuegan, 80% of locals were living on them.

The Qing started out particularly nasty. The Ming had retreated to Fujian and allied with the wokou. In response the Qing simply evacuated a 2500 mile stretch of coastline inland, killing anyone who remained. For 30 years the coast was empty, 50 miles deep. Of course, this froze trade, including the money supply. As mentioned, silver gets wasted, lost or buried; deflation set in. Meanwhile refugees poured into and that already had Hakka settlements, who were then displaced themselves into hills elsewhere. Saved by maize and sweet potatoes that could grow in bad land. Qing bureaucrats tended to avoid a proper census, in an ostrich effect, but one stickler found in Ganxian County 58,340 settled inhabitants, and 274,280 "shack people". More than a million people slashing and burning across Jianxi, one medium-sized province.

Sichuan (or Szechuan) was bigger than California and had "only" 9 million people. (Pretty good, for 1795.) 2300 square miles, half the size of LA County, were considered arable; this is a province next to Tibet. 20 years later American crops had increased farmland to 3700 square miles, and the population to 25 million. The Qing encouraged Han migration into the "empty" (non-Han) parts of China, and American crops let them do so, possibly doubling the population.

Public policy helped as well. The Qing enacted national smallpox inoculation, anti-famine granaries and campaigns against female infanticide. The Little Ice Age was ending, too.

Sweet potato spread elsewhere too; archaeologists speak of an "Ipomoean revolution" in New Guinea.

The Malthusian trap

Hong Liangji had Malthus's insight, of population growing faster than farmland and food production, five years before Malthus did, inspired by the transformation of southwest China. Malthus developed his thoughts more, though; Hong was busy criticizing corrupt officials. But Hong seems to have had an additional insight: "the continual need to increase yields, Hong presciently suggested, would lead to an ecological catastrophe, which would cause social dysfunction -- and with it massive human suffering."

Between the 1680s and 1780s, the price of rice in Suzhou more than quadrupled. Incomes did not keep up. Part inflation, part population boom, part granary purchases, part a fall in rice growing. Qing roads and canals were meant to aid the shipment of rice where needed; farmers discovered they could make ore money with sugarcane, peanuts, mulberry, and tobacco. Even though tobacco took 4-6 times as much fertilizer and twice as much labor. Tobacco needs rich land and drains it of vitality, remember... rice paddies turned to tobacco farms turned to wasteland. The sequence -- not really a cycle -- is still happening today in the hills of Fujian. Forest turns to cropland for maize and sweet potato, leading to erosion, until even the hills are wasteland. (Of course, more people also meant deforestation for fuel and building material.) Maize is planted more openly than other crops, leaving more soil exposed to rain and nutrient loss. Shack people renters had little incentive to even attempt permanent improvement of the land. Vegetation changes also meant sharper floods, rather than slow release of water, and disaster for the rice paddies below.

The Song saw major floods at a rate of 3 every 2 years. The Ming, with illegal Hakka migration into the hills, say 2 per year. Qing encouragement of mountain forest settling led ot 6 floods a year, targeting the agricultural centers. Between 1841 and 1911, 13 major floods a year -- "a Katrina every month, in the most populous parts of the realm."

Economic policy: rental income was tax free, farm income wasn't. The Qing started ordering the shack people out and banning maize in the hills, after figuring out the ecological problems, but landowners had no incentive to cooperate.

Damn, I read 30 more pages and now I have to stop and take notes.

Tobacco: "the first time people in every continent simultaneously became enraptured by a novelty." By 1607, when Jamestown was founded, tobacco was in Delhi (first smoker: the Mughal emperor), Nagasaki, Istanbul, and Sierra Leone. In 1635 khan Hongtaiji's soldiers were selling their weapons to buy tobacco.

We hear a lot about smallpox and measles in the Americas, but Europeans (and Africans) brought malaria and yellow fever too, endemic instead of epidemic, which overturned the population distribution, turning centers like lowland Mesoamerica and SE North America into killing zones. The effects might have been more subtle too, as below.

Two main varieties of note: Plasmodium vivax and P. falciparum. Vivax is tougher, needing a temperature above 59 F, less deadly in its own right (though it'll still weaken you; lazy Jamestown colonists being sick?), and totally blocked by being negative for Duffy red blood cell antigen. Falciparum needs 66 F, is able to kill you itself through organ failure caused by blocked blood vessels, and partially stopped by sickle cell anemia. European malaria is mostly vivax, especially in the north. It took off in England in the late 16th century when Elizabeth encouraged landlords to drain wetlands. Those had been flooded by the North Sea tides, washing away larvae; drainage (until superior Victorian techniques) left lots of pockets of water, while farms provided warm refuges through the winter. Suddenly, SE England was full of "bad air", with babies seldom living to be 21. In the 1570s baptisms exceeded burials by 20%; 20 years later, burials outnumbered baptism 2 to 1. A man could go through five wives, or fifteen, by importing new ones from inland. That's the *less* deadly version. (Also recall that possible Little Ice Age effect, of cooler temps meaning longer lasting pools.)

And the Jamestown settlers were from this region, or passed through it to board the ships.

Why slavery? While it wasn't illegal as such yet, England was one of the most hostile European societies to it, partly due to Barbary raiding of coastal villages. Indentured servants should be cheaper, because more voluntary, as Adam Smith would later rant, and classical slavery, while not so formal, often offered paths to freedom. So why chattel slavery? In fact England turned to servants first, but, well, they died of malaria. And post 1640 conflict reduced England's population, making laborers more expensive to contract.

(Scotland's Darien failure gets mentioned, as demonstrating how deadly disease could be.)

Slavery and the Indians: Jamestown started on the edge of a single Algonquian-speaking empire. The Carolina colony was in a whole bunch of Muskogean native groups, Creek and Cherokee et al., the remains of what had been "Mississippian" civilization. Most native societies had slavery, but the type varied; among the Algonquians like the Powhatan and in New England, the Iroquois, it was usually temporary, POWs serving as servants until killed, ransomed back, or inducted. But in the Mississippian zone, it was longer lasting, including field work, being given as gifts, or used sexually. (Those stories about an Indian "offering his wife" to a visitor? Not a wife. Slave.)

They were happy to sell slaves for European tools, especially the new flintlocks. In a prelude to what would happen in Africa later, tribes would sell slaves for guns to use to raid other tribes for more slaves, and of course defend themselves from other tribes raiding them to get slaves to sell for guns to... And these slaves were half the price of an indentured servant from Britain. For 40 years Carolina was an *exporter* of slaves, Indian slaves, to other colonies. Did differences in native slave attitudes help determine later American differences?

(Caveat: I just hope Mann's sources know what they were doing, and didn't let *later* Indian attitudes, picked up from the colonists, get read back into their earlier history. Because it almost seems too pat a coincidence as is.)

Of course, Indians died of malaria just as well as Europeans, and groups of Indian slaves had rebellious and runaway power individuals might not, what with knowing the land and sharing languages and such. Enter Africans! 97% of west Africans are Duffy negative and are thus immune to vivax, and many have falciparum resistance from sickle cell, or else from having survived it in childhood. Of course bringing many Africans together introduced them to strains they hadn't had before, but still they had a big advantage. Genetic superiority... just gets you enslaved as useful labor.

Not to blame everything on malaria: Massachusetts was the first US colony to explicitly legalize slavery, and had a fair bit, as did Argentina. Still, the places where African slavery really took off long term was the falciparum zone, from DC down through most of Brazil. The Mason-Dixon line is roughly the falciparum border.

"Argentina was a society with slaves; Brazil was culturally and economically defined by slavery." One could say the same of the US North/South division.

Villa Plasmodia

And some other effects in the South: when your workers have a better than 10% chance of dying, small farms bear a high risk. Big plantations are somewhat self-insured just from size. Rich planters had the money to escape to resorts in the deadliest season. The idealized Southern plantation home is well-designed to avoid Anopheles mosquitoes: high on a treeless hill, surrounded by lawns with open breezy windows... vs. mosquitoes that like low wet shady ground and still air. So malaria might have pushed not just toward African labor but toward large plantations, economic polarization, and the architectural styles.

There's also speculation about high death rates leading to a insouciant culture putting a low value on life, though Mann just passes that on briefly without pushing it himself. Certainly the source populations of the Scots-Irish weren't known for their pacific natures.

Of course, none of this explains why colonists resorted to extreme chattel slavery, rather than trying to extend indentured servitude to Africans. Though I suppose the difficulty of convincing people in a stable society to go to an unknown land with strange people speaking unknown tongues speaks for itself, especially if you had to return early risk-takers to prove that it was safe. Easier to grab and run and whip.