Jungle
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tation and climate change could tip the scale between precarious viability and failure. Nevertheless, even in these instances, urban centers and ruling classes emerged elsewhere on the landscape. Meanwhile, ecologically experienced food producers persisted, often in large numbers, on the still-productive, though challenging, landscapes that had fed them for so long, even as monuments crumbled around them. Not only that, but while many of these types of cities ultimately fell to ruin, their hardiness shows in their often long spans of existence—longer than five hundred years in the case of Greater Angkor and some Classic Maya urban centers and nearly two millennia for Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka. This is far longer than the majority of industrialized tropical cities, as well as many modern European and northern North American cities, providing a very different perspective on our assumptions about their inevitable “collapse.” Indeed, the timeless strength of agrarian-based, low-density urbanism remains an attractive model for present-day urban planners looking for “green cities” that balance urgent conservation and environmental needs, political and cultural infrastructure, and growing urban populations across the twenty-first-century tropics, something we will return to in Chapter 13.21
There are many, many more examples of cities ruled over by precolonial states and empires that emerged across the tropics in North, Central, and South America (e.g., those of the Triple Alliance of the Aztec Empire and the Inka), mainland and island Southeast Asia (e.g., Bagan of the Pagan Kingdom, Borobudur of the Sailendra Dynasty in Java), the Pacific (e.g., on Tongatapu at the center of the Tu’i Tonga Empire), and West and Central Africa (e.g., the centers of the Kingdom of Benin and Oyo Empire of western Nigeria, the Ashanti Empire of Ghana, and the Kongo Kingdom of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) during the late Holocene, some of which we will meet in the next two chapters. A significant number of these, like the examples of the Amazon and the Postclassic Maya, were still flourishing at the time of European contact. European visitors often even actively admired them. So why, then, do we now tend to think of tropical forests as so hostile to large, food-producing human populations? Why do all of our popular assumptions fit ruins and small, isolated Indigenous bands of foragers to these environments rather than lively, humming streets, residential blocks, and monumental constructions that could stand the test of time? The answer probably has something to do with what happened next. Arriving on ships across the horizon, Europeans did not just bring their notebooks with them to the tropics. They brought new diseases, new crops, new animals, new ways of using and seeing the natural world, and a political, religious, and social agenda that sought to “progress” from anything that had gone before. In the traumatic clash of worlds that followed lie the origins of our globalized, but unequal, world. It is here that our modern economic, political, and climatic reliance on the tropics, no matter where on the planet we live, began.22
Chapter 10
EUROPE AND THE TROPICS IN THE “AGE OF EXPLORATION”
We were not discovered,” read the statement released by a coalition of Indigenous peoples in Mexico’s western state of Michoacán on October 12, 2020—the anniversary of the day when Christopher Columbus (or Christóbal Cólon, as he was actually known) first landed in the Americas.1 “Columbus Day” has been a federal holiday in the United States since 1971 and forms part of a wider public consciousness in Europe and northern North America that has tended to hold up Columbus, as well as other individuals, such as Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco de Gama, and Walter Raleigh, as fearless pioneers of an “Age of Exploration” that spanned from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Particularly within the tropics, they are often credited with “finding” mineral wealth, exotic plants and animals, and new, productive lands that were ripe for the taking—boosting the global economic and political standing of expanding European empires as they did so. Away from individuals, particular royal lineages similarly frequently take the spotlight as the active shapers of “new worlds,” inventing new ways to travel the oceans and wielding unparalleled weapons, as they sought to extract new tropical resources and labor in a bid to gain religious and political prestige back home on the competitive stage of Europe. Certainly, when Pope Alexander VI divided up the lands of the Americas and Asia between the Catholic Monarchs of Castile and Aragon and the Portuguese in 1493 as part of the Treaty of Tordesillas, he had little thought for how the people already occupying these lands might react. This European focus can lead us to assume that existing Indigenous inhabitants were passive or insignificant throughout this process—which, as we have already seen in Chapters 8 and 9, could not have been further from the truth.2
In the fifteenth century, Europe was actually something of a backwater. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it had benefited from a renewed flow of spices and commerce along the Silk Roads that united Europe, the Middle East, eastern Africa, and Asia following the expansion of the Mongol Empire and its successors and the relative peace and stability that ensued (the so-called Pax Mongolica). However, by the fifteenth century, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire based in Constantinople had blocked direct European contact with Central and East Asia and these crucial lines of commerce. Meanwhile, in the tropics, powerful empires had emerged. In the Americas, Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) was the center of the Triple Alliance of the Aztec Empire. In Asia, Vijayanagara was the capital of the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire in southern India. In Africa, the city of Gao was the leading city of the powerful Islamic Songhai Empire in Mali. This is not to mention the significant numbers of other empires, kingdoms, and polities that also occupied the tropical portions of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, jostling with these larger powers for prestige, wealth, and survival, as well as the innovative, resilient island societies we met in Chapter 8. Even in the Amazon Basin, Chapter 9 has shown us, well-populated “garden cities” sprawled across lowland evergreen rainforests, and the latest estimates put the human population of the precolonial Americas at 60.5 million, just shy of Europe’s estimated total at the time. As the last two decades of historical and archeological research have revealed, tropical landscapes at the time of Columbus’s voyages were certainly not empty. Instead, they were very much full of active rulers, merchants, and food producers who took part in vast exchange systems that already spanned across the Americas, across Africa, and across Southeast Asia prior to European arrival. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many Latin American nations therefore question the validity of celebrating misguided, and often murderous, European individuals instead of the Indigenous achievements that preceded them.3
So what changed? How did powerful tropical states and individuals, in stark contrast to their European counterparts, end up as the “people without history”?4 Contact between Europeans and the diverse societies inhabiting the tropics generated shockwaves that have echoed through the landscape of global history ever since. We will now zoom in on tropical forests as the crucial theater for the emergence of a new, interconnected world. Following the latest archeological, ecological, and historical thinking, we will see how the interaction between Europe and the tropics brought disease, warfare, forced relocation, and demands for labor and land that catastrophically impacted Indigenous populations and their traditional management activities. Not only that, but through both deliberate and unintentional “Columbian exchanges,” plants, animals, people, and beliefs began to regularly move between cities as far apart as Madrid, Mexico City, and Manila, reconfiguring entire tropical ecosystems. The outcomes for landscapes and societies were shaped not only by the political, economic, and religious situation back in Europe but also by politics within and between Indigenous states, by local merchants seeking to tap into new global flows of goods, and by Indigenous food producers and hunter-gatherers incorporating or resisting new crops and animals. However, by the end, the varied, and often violent, processes of colonialism and the overall European control of global flows of wealth across oceans led to a masking of the previous human achievements in the tropics. Ultimately, this collision of worlds left us
with the pervasive Euro-American assumption that tropical forests could only be successfully occupied by small-scale, mobile, hunting-and-gathering communities—“green hells” to be profitably converted rather than productive, manageable “forests of plenty.”5
IN THE FIFTEENTH and sixteenth centuries AD, the expansion of the Spanish (in the form of the combined Catholic Monarchy of Castile and Aragon) and Portuguese empires began the joining of two “worlds” that had been separated since the division of the Pangaea supercontinent approximately 150–65 million years ago. Of these empires, the Spanish quickly became the largest. Following the gradual occupation of the Canary Islands (1402–1496), and Columbus’s landfall at Hispaniola in the Americas in 1492, Spain expanded its pantropical grip across the Caribbean, North and Central America, and South America and, toward the end of the sixteenth century, parts of Southeast Asia. So how did they do it? Gunpowder, horses, steel, and shipbuilding innovations certainly helped. So too did the ruthless enslavement of local populations that began almost as soon as Columbus stepped ashore. The maneuvering of local political rivals, often using the Spanish to settle their own scores, was also key. Yet one of the most terrible products of the so-called Columbian exchange, reconfiguring power dynamics both regionally and globally, was the fact that Europeans did not just bring themselves to the tropics. As we now know from extensive archival research of records left by colonizers and Indigenous writers, as well as the recent groundbreaking ability of archeogeneticists to extract DNA not just from ancient humans but also from the diseases that debilitated them, they also brought along the microbial causes of deadly measles, smallpox, typhoid, influenza, and bubonic plague. Where populations had never before been exposed to them and had little to no immune response, the result could be catastrophic. Reconstructing exact population changes, pre- and postcolonial arrival, using census data, archeological sites, and other forms of historical records is notoriously contentious, and fiery debates relating to estimates of precolonial populations in the Americas have raged for the last fifty years. Nonetheless, demographic and earth systems modeler Dr. Alexander Koch of Hong Kong University tells me that he and his team’s latest compilation of published estimates from colonial census figures, archeological data (e.g., numbers of buildings, settlement size), and predictions based on assumptions as to how many people a given environment could hold “suggest a staggering ~90 percent of the Indigenous population of the Neotropics was wiped out within 150 years of Columbus’s arrival by repeated waves of these diseases.” That is nearly 55 million people.6
Figure 10.1. Map of the Iberian empires and regions mentioned in Chapter 10.
Figure 10.2. Timeline of events discussed in Chapter 10.
Two prominent, but very different, tropical examples highlight this reality. In 1492, Tenochtitlan (now, for the most part, buried under the present-day capital of Mexico, Mexico City) was one of the most densely populated cities on Earth. Tenochtitlan, the home of the Mexica ethnic group, lying just south of the Tropic of Cancer, sat at the center of the so-called Aztec Empire, based on the Triple Alliance of three city-states, which extended out across the Valley of Mexico and into the subtropical and tropical lowlands and highlands beyond. The complex drainage system of this often-flooded area, specialized raised fields known as chinampas for growing a diversity of crops, including maize, chili peppers, and beans, and canals for transport as well as fish formed the basis of a vast 14 km2 anthropogenically constructed “floating” urban landscape. Royal courts, the gold, silver, jewels, and exotic feathers of wealthy elites arriving through long-distance exchange networks, detailed inscriptions and texts, vast markets, and giant temples built for human sacrifices both impressed and appalled the Spanish arriving at the capital in 1519. Numbering just 630, the Spanish, headed by Hernán Cortés, defeated this giant through political and biological opportunism. First, after initial encounters and skirmishes, the Tlaxcala, the traditional enemies of the Triple Alliance, entered into an alliance with the Spanish. This was made easier by the fact that an enslaved Indigenous woman from the Gulf Coast of Mexico, La Malinche, gifted to the Spanish by a Maya state, acted as an interpreter, advisor, and intermediary for Cortés. Backed by military support from their local allies, the Spanish advanced onto Tenochtitlan, where they somehow managed to abduct King Motechuzoma I from right under the noses of his subjects. Following retaliation and ejection from the city, the Spanish returned, with reinforcements, and another ally, this time from the nearby city of Texcoco, to lay siege to the capital. Nonetheless, really, given the ongoing staunch Mexica resistance they faced, if it had not been for a smallpox pandemic tearing through Tenochtitlan prior to the crucial battle for the city, something documented in the colonial archival records of the time, they might never have succeeded. Further pandemics, alongside forced labor of enslaved Indigenous peoples in mines and brutal public executions, reduced and pacified the population of the Valley of Mexico, making the subsequent maintenance of control more feasible than it might otherwise have been.7
A similar end awaited the Inka Empire among the montane tropical forests and grasslands of the High Andes. By area, in 1492 the Inka had the largest empire on Earth, spanning from lowland evergreen rainforest in the Amazon Basin to the deserts of Peru. A humongous 6,000 km2 (that’s an area greater than 1 million soccer pitches!) of agricultural terraces identified by archeological landscape survey have been linked to precolonial Andean populations, perhaps even giving the mountain range its name (from los Andenes for steps or terraces) (though see A. Borsdorf and C. Stadel’s The Andes: A Geographical Portrait for discussion of alternative origins). Many of these likely supported an Inkan agricultural system based on crops of potatoes, quinoa, and maize and domesticated llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs. A sophisticated archeological and historical record of pictographs, winding roads, well-placed warehouses, and knotted-string counting systems that acted as a means of conveying tax obligations, census records, calendars, and military orders enabled the Inka to transport goods produced in different corners of the empire to where they were needed. All of this was ruled out of the mountainous city of Qosqo (now Cusco), with its glittering rulers, monumental plazas, giant stone blocks covered in plates of gold, shrines, and tombs. In 1532, an even smaller Spanish party, 168 men led by Francisco Pizarro, moved on the Inka territory, having already seen its riches in 1526. While horses and cannon certainly helped, Pizarro, like Cortés, benefited from the local political situation. The Inka Empire had just emerged from a grueling civil war. Pizarro made the most of the fact that the winning ruler, Atawallpa, left his mountainous citadel and met him at Kashamarka (Cajamarca), where Pizarro captured, blackmailed, and then killed him, throwing his subjects into disarray. Pizarro progressed onto Qosqo. Local factions within the empire saw an opportunity for advancement and supported the Spanish advance. Nevertheless, as Pizarro’s own journals attest, he never felt that he was in a strong political position. Once again, this improbable conquest (it took until 1572 to complete) was spurred on by rampant smallpox, typhus, and influenza epidemics, vividly recorded in text and images by Inka and Spanish chroniclers alike, which had already killed Atawallpa’s father, as well as 200,000 subjects, and continued to catalyze civil unrest and eventual capitulation to the Spanish. Even then, though, the conquest of what was to become the “Viceroyalty of Peru” took decades, with the mountainous and forested terrain frequently invalidating Spanish military advantage.8
The Canary Islands, in many ways, provided the subtropical stepping-stones for the Spanish on their path to the Americas. And here, once again, the spread of diseases was crucial to conquest. Control of the Canary Islands significantly reduced the voyage length for the Spanish to reach the Americas (in much the same way the Azores islands facilitated long-distance Portuguese voyages). As Friar Espinosa, a sixteenth-century Spanish historian and chronicler, wrote, “If it had not been for the pestilence it [the conquest of the Canary Islands] would have taken much longer.”9 Even then, fierce resistance by
well-organized societies, particularly on the islands of Fuerteventura and La Palma, meant it was a long, hard, and often fortuitous slog to victory for the Spanish. Similarly, the first island footholds in the Americas within the Caribbean were only taken following tides of disease that ripped through resident populations. Just fifty years after Columbus’s arrival on Hispaniola, the local Taíno population, estimated at between 100,000 and 1 million people, which had initially put up forceful resistance to Spanish settlers, had all but completely vanished thanks to the spread of disease, warfare, and enslavement. Slightly later in time, the rampant documented advance of smallpox and measles throughout Brazil from the sixteenth century onward, along with enslavement of Indigenous groups, murder, and forced relocation to towns that exacerbated microbial transmission, reduced a once staunch resistance against Portuguese expansion into the evergreen rainforests of the Amazon Basin that numerous European expeditions had shown themselves completely unequipped to deal with. In the absence of these microbiological stowaways, it is hard to see how some of the most magnificent cities and largest, most powerful states that existed anywhere on Earth at that time could so rapidly succumb to invasion. Clearly, in many of the cases mentioned, Indigenous political rivals often exploited European arrival for their own advancement. Nonetheless, cruel European corralling of Indigenous populations as enslaved labor and malnutrition resulting from warfare and the breakdown of existing political and social structures, as we know from more recent pandemic experiences, undoubtedly would have paved the way for perhaps the worst epidemiological disaster ever recorded.10