1491 (charles c mann)

1491 is a book that ought to change the way that history is taught forever. It won’t, because the narrative it is confronting, that of European civilisation triumphing over the indigenous peoples of the americas, is so engrained that it will perhaps, never change. The book might have been sub-headed the decline and fall of the pre-Colombian empires. The multiple empires that grew, thrived, tamed the land, and then faded away, or in the case of those which were still extant upon the arrival of the Europeans, were decimated by plague and war. Mann’s theory is clear: the major factor in the European conquest of the Americas was biological. Only today, perhaps, for the first time in three generations, can we start to understand that germs are far more powerful than steel or gunpowder. However, 1491 is about far more than just the imminent pre-Colombian era. He is also exacting on the scale of both population and urban development of the americas before the arrival of the Europeans, a scale that history, written by the ‘victors’ has failed to either recognise or understand. The book exudes a range of scholarship that is impressive, going into archaeological, ethnological, seismological detail about the history of both continents, North and South, disarming the division that is so frequently drawn between them. It’s hard to say quite how impressive this book is, both in terms of its articulation and defence of its own thesis, and in terms of the radical implications of that thesis for our interpretation of the course of human history, no less.