Charles C. Mann: evaluation

Transcript context

…My first question is: How much of the New World was basically baked into the cake? So at some point, people from Eurasia were going to travel to the New World, bringing their diseases. Considering disparities and where they would survive, if the Acemoglu theory that you cited is correct, then some of these places were bound to have good institutions and some of them were bound to have bad institutions. Plus, because of malaria, there were going to be shortages in labor that people would try to fix with African slaves. So how much of all this was just bound to happen? If Columbus hadn't done it, then maybe 50 years down the line, would someone from Italy have done it? What is the contingency here? Well, I think that some of it was baked into the cake. It was pretty clear that at some point, people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen, right? There was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres––largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia and the Eastern hemisphere. This leads almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases: diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. Most of the great killers in human history are zoonotic diseases. When people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere meet, there are going to be those kinds of diseases. But if you wanted to, it's possible to imagine alternative histories. There's a wonderful book by Laurent Binet called Civilizations that, in fact, does just that. It's a great alternative history book. He imagines that some of the Vikings came and extended further into North America, bringing all these diseases, and by the time of Columbus and so forth, the epidemiological balance was different. So when Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats, and went and conquered Europe. It's far-fetched, but it does say that this encounter would’ve happened and that the diseases would’ve happened, but it didn’t have to happen in exactly the way that it did. It’s also perfectly possible to imagine that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery. There was a huge debate when this began about whether or not slavery was a good idea. There were a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy asking the Pope “Is it okay that we do this?” You could imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way. So, I think some of it was bound to happen, but how exactly it happened was really up to chance, contingency, and human agency, When the Spanish first arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries, were the Incas and the Aztecs at a particularly weak point or particularly decadent? Or was this just how well you should have expected this civilization to be functioning at any given time period?…

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