Quotes from Charles C. Mann

After Cortés, the population of the entire region collapsed. By 1620–25, it was 730,000, "approximately 3 percent of its size at the time that he first landed." Cook and Borah calculated that the area did not recover its fifteenth-century population until the late 1960s.

In the long run, Fenn says, the consequential finding of the new scholarship is not that many people died, but that many people *lived.*

More important, the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.

From Bartolomé de Las Casas on, Europeans have known that their arrival brought about a catastrophe for Native Americans. "We, Christians, have destroyed so many kingdoms," reflected Pedro Cieza de León, the traveler in postconquest Peru. "For wherever the Spaniards have passed, conquering and discovering, it is as though a fire had gone, destroying everything in its path.

Colón's signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea.

Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; rats of every description—all of them poured from the hulls of Colón's vessels and those that followed, rushing like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before.

The twenty-five cities were not sited strategically and did not have defensive walls; no evidence of warfare, such as burned buildings or mutilated corpses, has been found. Instead, he said, the basis of the rulers' power was the collective economic and spiritual good. Norte Chico was the realm of King Cotton.

The Columbian Exchange was neither fully controlled nor understood by its participants, but it allowed Europeans to transform much of the Americas, Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Africa into ecological versions of Europe, landscapes the foreigners could use more comfortably than could their original inhabitants.

elegantly than Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire. As Pollan observed, large-scale potato farmers now douse their land with so many fumigants, fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides that they create what are known, euphemistically, as "clean fields"—swept free of life, except for potato plants. (In addition, the crops are sprayed with artificial fertilizer, usually once a week during growing season.)

Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia.

The Inka empire, the greatest state ever seen in the Andes, was also the shortest lived. It began in the fifteenth century and lasted barely a hundred years before being smashed by Spain.

Stakman did not view science as a disinterested quest for knowledge. It was a tool—maybe the tool—for human betterment. Not all sciences were equally valuable, as he liked to explain. "Botany," he said, "is the most important of all sciences, and plant pathology is one of its most essential branches.

A first step toward satisfying that responsibility for Europeans and their descendants in North and South America would be to treat indigenous people today with respect—something that, alas, cannot yet be taken for granted. Recognizing and obeying past treaties wouldn't be a bad idea, either.

One of the penalties of an ecological education [Leopold later wrote] is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell or make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

To Dobyns, the moral of this story was clear. The Inka, he wrote in his 1963 article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism

In this he was echoing conclusions drawn centuries before by Pedro Pizarro. Had Wayna Qhapaq "been alive when we Spaniards entered this land," the conquistador remarked, "it would have been impossible for us to win it.… And likewise, had the land not been divided by the [smallpox-induced civil] wars, we would not have been able to enter or win the land.

a new bishop finally had the courage to land in São Tomé in 1675. He was dead in two months.

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this pattern occurred again and again in the Americas. It was a kind of master narrative of postcontact history. In fact, Europeans routinely lost when they could not take advantage of disease and political fragmentation

Vaclav Smil has calculated that fertilizer from the Haber-Bosch process was responsible for "the prevailing diets of nearly 45% of the world's population." Roughly speaking, this is equivalent to feeding about 3.25 billion people. More than 3 billion men, women, and children—an incomprehensibly vast cloud of dreams, fears, and explorations—owe their existence to two early-twentieth-century German chemists.

The history of the civilizations of the Middle East and Egypt is entwined with the development of wheat and barley; similarly, indigenous societies in Mexico and Central America were founded on maize. In Asia, China's story is written on paper made from rice. The Andes were different. Cultures there were nourished not by cereal crops like these but by tuber and root crops, the potato most important

For aught known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread.

Smallpox was recorded to have appeared on the island of Hispaniola in November or December 1518. It killed a third of the native population before jumping to Puerto Rico and Cuba. Spaniards, exposed in childhood to the virus, were mostly immune.

About 40 percent of the fertilizer applied in the last sixty years wasn't assimilated by plants; instead, it washed away into rivers or seeped into the air in the form of nitrous oxide.

The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated.