I've been reading Charles C. Mann's 1491 and I've found it to be a fascinating book so far. I've just finished with the first of three discrete sections and had some questions about the material. Specifically, the author makes two general claims that I was hoping to place in the current academic context.
First, he claims that pre-Columbian American populations were much larger than we generally understand, possibly even much larger than contemporary European populations. The arguments he makes are compelling, but since he's working from the position of a journalist rather than a historian I was hoping to understand if this position is as well regarded and supported as he lets on. The focus of his discussion about the opposition is a book called Numbers From Nowhere and a statistical critique by Rudolph Zambardino. The claims made by these authors, according to Mann, is that the revisionist account relies on unlikely events (larger "virgin soil" death rates than typical for diseases and wildfire virus spreads between relatively disparate civilizations) and large margins of error while also being incredibly sensitive to small changes in the base assumptions (a 1% change in expected death rates changing the predicted population size by millions). While these are strong critiques they seem fairly well refuted in the book through a combination of primary sources and genetic immune system research. Is this a fair statement of the actual academic opposition and their critiques?
Second, the author argues that a combination of lacking prior exposure and a higher genetic vulnerability to disease among American Indian populations was responsible for an unprecedentedly severe disease spread in the New World. The subtext of this claim, later made actual text at the end of the section, is that while Europeans perpetrated later acts of outward hostility towards American Indians, the primary cause of the decimation of New World populations and culture was largely outside European's control. Basically, that, at least during early contact, the European's primary moral failing was greedy negligence and military expansionism, not malicious racial warfare. He offers less academic support for this claim, making it more an emergent theme of the section rather than a hard and fast claim. My question here is roughly the same though, is this a fair appraisal of the current academic historical understanding?
Finally, are there any academic reviews of this book which are particularly interesting? The reviews I've seen from journalists are all pretty breathless. Which isn't really surprising considering the book's source and subject matter. I think it's really excellent so far, and narratively I've had a great time reading it. I just want to make sure that I'm doing so with the proper context. Thanks for any help y'all can provide!
Okay, first, I feel that I should clarify that it’s been a few years since I’ve last read 1491 all the way through, so while I took the time to read through the specific part in question, if I omit or misrepresent something he mentions later in the text, anyone reading this can feel free to call me out on it. (I’ll try to focus specifically on the first section so as not to make it an issue).
1491 is generally regarded as a solid work of popular history. Mann does an excellent job of presenting multiple sides to every argument and offers a good survey of the field at the time of writing. However, I feel that it’s important to note that 1491 was first published in 2005. Academia often moves very quickly. Mann himself notes this in the preface to the second edition (2011), but argues that more recent discoveries fit well into the broad arguments he set up in the first edition. In several respects, he’s right. Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have continued to make new discoveries pushing back the arrival of humans into the Americas, most recently the 23,000-21,000 year old footprintsfound in New Mexico, and the field continues to advance our understandings of the complexity of indigenous cultures and the ways in which they shaped and affected the world around them. In this regard, I’d say the second and third parts of the book hold up quite well (though, again, I haven’t read them all the way through in a while). The first part has a few more glaring weaknesses. You are not likely to find someone who uncritically agrees with Dobyns’ hemispheric estimates in the field today, even if population estimates are still far higher than in the pre-Dobyns era.
There’s a few specific points in Part One that are unusual (in particular, his claim that Tawantinsuyu was larger in area than Ming Dynasty China is just factually incorrect), but generally Mann does a good job of presenting the differing arguments as they existed in 2005. However, later scholars have disagreed with several of the points he makes in this part of the book. The main one I’m going to focus on is Paul Kelton’s Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715, one of the only monographs I am aware of dedicated to the specific subject of indigenous depopulation in a specific region, in this case the modern U.S. southeast. Since Mann also discusses this region in his book, it should offer a good point of comparison.
Mann begins the third section of Part One by introducing the Hernando de Soto expedition of 1539-1543. He argues that the pigs brought by the expedition acted as a vector for European disease that would prove devastating to southeastern populations and leave much of the region empty. Specifically, Mann states that:
Sicknesses like measles and smallpox would have burned through his six hundred men long before they reached the Mississippi. But that would not have been true for his pigs.
According to the CDC, animals are not capable of spreading measles or smallpox to humans.
Okay, this is a bit unfair - Mann probably just chose bad examples here. Indeed, the argument that pigs acted as a reservoir for European diseases has been made by several Southeastern scholars. Kelton takes on this argument directly, focusing specifically on influenza, which is known to be transmissible from pigs to humans. Kelton makes several arguments against this transmission occurring in the southeast, noting that pig-to-human transmission of influenza is rare, requires close contact, and typically occurs in places with large and established swine populations, as well as noting that diseases that cross the species barrier still depend primarily on human vectors to spread. He also points out that if any group was likely to be affected by any pig-borne diseases, it was the Spaniards, but no record of any influenza outbreaks are noted in the written records of the de Soto expedition. Kelton concludes that it is highly unlikely that any of de Soto’s pigs wandered off and spread influenza to Native populations - though, given better evidence, it isn’t necessarily impossible.
But this is missing the point a little, because the pig argument didn’t come into existence on its own, its function is to serve as an explanation for a perceived depopulation of much of the southeast in between de Soto and the next European arrivals. Note the word “perceived” here - we’ll get to that soon. I do want to note here, though, that de Soto very likely did have an enormous impact on the southeast, because even if Kelton is correct his expedition was directly responsible for the killing or enslavement of hundreds if not thousands of southeastern Natives, and Kelton agrees that it or other contemporary Spanish expeditions were very likely responsible for introducing malaria into the southeast. Malaria would have been devastating to a people who tended to live in marshy areas along rivers and streams, as was common across the southeast, but not on the scale of civilizational collapse.
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