way off the list center

[Monte Davis]

Another very good book, building on McNeill, is Alfred Crosby's 1986
_Ecological Imperialism_ (ISBN 0-521-45690-8 pb). He discusses how the
Europeans' livestock, crops, pests and weeds fared, too.

His bottom line is that by reaching agriculture > cities > high population
densities a few thousand years sooner, Eurasia had time to develop tougher,
more virulent pathogens. (And no doubt paid a price, in epidemics we'll
never know about in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley and China. The
Athenian plague Thucydides describes was a late bloomer on that scale.)

When those pathogens -- smallpox above all -- hit the New World and
Australia/NZ, mortality was horrific. In the 1630s and 1640s, to take one
small example that could have eased the way for Constant Slothrop, the
Hurons and Iroquois may have lost 50%. Apparently the diseases had
percolated overland through Africa, because there wasn't the same wave of
death there. Africa (and other tropics) did the best job of biting back,
killing a lot of imperialists with malaria, yellow fever, parasites etc.

The numbers will never be very solid: aside from the Incas and Mexica, the
victims didn't take censuses. But it's hard to imagine the cumulative
culture shock of killer pandemics *plus* encounters with
steel/guns/horses/missionaries *plus* progressive loss of lands, all coming
in a few generations to peoples less accustomed to change than Europeans.
In the wake of that, wouldn't *you* want all the firewater you could get?  
 
Wrenching this a bit back towards the list, I'm just starting Crosby's new
book, _The Measure of Reality_, about the broad shift to *quantitative*
thinking in Europe from about 1250 through the Renaissance: not just the
old standbys of Arabic numerals, clocks, and bookkeeping, but calendars,
explicitly time-signed music, navigation, and lots more. 

 As a Pynchonian, what can I be but ambivalent? That expanding net of
quantities brought us Weissmann and Pointsman -- but also Botticelli, and
Rossini, and poor Roger right on the cusp.

Achtfaden knows it: "You can't swim upstream, not under the present
dispensation anyhow, all you can do is attach the number to it and suffer,
Horst, fella." -- 452

-Monte