Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., belongs to a select company of social historians. He has devoted his special scholarly talents to re-examine the record of the perduring interaction between man's ways and changes in his condition since Columbus found the New World. As an exponent of what I should like to call “anthropomedical” historiography, he informs us succinctly about this many-faceted chain of altered conditions of life and wellbeing. His retelling of it is an eloquent testimony to man's unquenchable drive to explore his habitat and himself, not always wisely, sometimes too well.
The reader is taken on an engrossing intellectual voyage through the facts and interpretations of the salient cultural and bio-social consequences of 1492. He will gain a balanced view of the worldwide exchange and sociopolitical sequelae of the protean disease, syphilis, and the major communicable diseases of influenza, smallpox, measles, and pneumonia. He can also learn important historical answers to the complex connection between the international movement of disease and man, the cumulative transformation of world food suplies, and some of the noteworthy changes in world population growth.
Professor Crosby is commendably precise in delineating the global dispersal and exchange of the leading New World cultigens (e.g., maize, potato, sweet potato, bean, and manioc) and the characteristic Old World plant and animal food staples (e.g., rice, wheat, barley, oat, and fruit crops; cattle, pig, sheep, goat, chicken, and horse). We are also persuaded by his argument linking the progressive restructuring of national, regional, and local agricultural economies to notable historical declines in food supply and to the continuous rise in the quality, availability, and level of basic world food sources.
The author's thoughtful consideration of the historically significant human and ecological effects of the world exchange of cultigens and micro-organisms should appeal to all serious students of the present human condition. He concludes his well-paced history of the Columbian exchange with an evocative reexamination of the most recent, and, in the long run perhaps, most significant human “resultant” of 1492: the post-1800 phenomenon of vast intercontinental migration.
Is it not ironic that, although worldwide population movements profoundly influence our daily lives, we know far more about the cause, meaning, and consequences of migratory behavior among animals? Should we remain as grossly uninformed about it as at present, we will soon become foolishly uncertain about its probable role in the future course of man's way with fellow man. As a provisional antidote to our lack of knowledge in this area, the reader may wish to join me in pondering over Professor Crosby's observation that today “there are two Europes and two Africas: one on either side of the Atlantic.”
OTTO VON MERING
October 1971