Jungle

by Jungle (retail) (epub)

  These undoubtedly horrific impacts are now well attested, and these diseases have become a major part of discussions of the process of early European colonization. However, this does not mean that the exact same patterns of Columbian exchanges played out everywhere in the tropics, and Europeans and Indigenous populations both negotiated these new connections in a variety of different ways. For example, in the case of Spanish arrival in the Philippines in 1565, Miguel López de Legazpi and his navigator, Andrés Ochoa de Urdaneta y Cerain, settled Cebu and had conquered Maynila (now Manila) by 1571. While European diseases may still have had an impact, the existence of greater local immunity, dispersed Indigenous settlement patterns, and different political structures led to distinctive patterns of Spanish presence and colonization. Slow, morbid warfare against the existing sultanates of Maguindanao, Lanao, and Sulu failed to yield Spanish economic or political control in these parts of the archipelago. Indeed, these fights arguably never ended, given ongoing battles today between the Philippine government and Islamic extremists on the island of Mindanao. The Spanish committed many atrocities in the Philippines. Even during the first five years of settlement on the island of Luzon, soldiers sacked villages, seized food, and enslaved inhabitants. Similarly, in the late seventeenth century, Indigenous converts to Christianity disappeared from founded missions in the Cagayan Valley as they sought to avoid documented ill treatment from a garrison of soldiers at Itugud. Once again, Indigenous resistance is evident. Archeological excavation and scientific dating methods have shown that the majestic UNESCO-protected Ifugao rice terraces we briefly met in Chapter 7, while used for taro in precolonial times, were expanded and repurposed by large Ifugao populations that moved into the highlands to escape and resist Spanish rule in the lowlands. Early Portuguese interactions with West and Central Africa show a similar pattern. Here, local kingdoms such as those of Benin and Kongo actually seem to have grown in response to new trading opportunities in the fifteenth century, materially displayed in the form of remarkable ivory objects deliberately designed for export to Europe and European pipes found in dwellings at the site of Savi in Benin. The Portuguese participated in intermarriage and local politics and constructed their buildings adjacent to existing royal enclosures in traditional architectural forms, only ever really maintaining a firm, settled foothold on the coast and largely relying on African associates to extract resources and enslaved labor from locations further inland. In this case, as we will see in Chapter 11, the coordinated expansion of the transatlantic slave trade, particularly between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, would take the truest toll on local populations across the African tropics and encourage, alongside the discovery of quinine as a potent antimalarial drug from the nineteenth century, later European conquests into the interior.11

  The “Great Dying” of the Americas, as it has become known, turned the global demographic and political status quo on its head. Once thriving populations collapsed, with between approximately 80 and 95 percent of Indigenous populations lost in different parts of the Neotropics, based on a number of different estimates. Today, the sheer scale of this destruction is hard for us to comprehend. The decline of Indigenous populations, from the Caribbean to Central America, from the Andes to the Amazon, led to European writers later documenting failing or small populations in tropical forests that still dictate our stereotypes of these environments today. The initial arrival of the diseases may have been unintentional. However, the historically documented abuses that occurred at the hands of European invaders, which exacerbated and followed this disaster, were not. For example, the Quechua nobleman Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (or Huamán Poma) wrote a famous treatise in Spanish titled El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (or The First New Chronicle and Good Government) that chronicled and denounced the ill treatment of Indigenous populations within the former realm of the Inka in Peru. The ongoing marginalization of Indigenous groups up and down the American tropics stems from these initial, disastrous, genocidal encounters. Archeological and paleoecological evidence for the active introduction of new plants, animals, and land tenure had similar impacts on traditional use of tropical environments. Much of the Americas, as well as the Canary Islands, saw widespread abandonment of well-honed strategies for food production in subtropical and tropical forests as European agricultural species and ideas were imposed on landscapes and Indigenous populations dwindled. Nonetheless, groups that did survive across the American tropics, as well as populations in Asia and Africa, often actively resisted relocation, dictated trade, and gave or did not give the local ecological knowledge that would enable European colonizers to settle different regions. The arrival of Europeans, as well as the diseases, plants, animals, and worldviews they brought with them, had major, sometimes irreparable, impacts on societies and landscapes in the tropics. Yet, given the often slow and limited arrival of Spanish or Portuguese settlers, Indigenous populations, as well as new cultures and groups formed in the melting pot of an interacting world, played a major role in how these things were transposed onto varied tropical canvases.12

  THE CREATOR OF the term “Columbian exchange,” historian Alfred Crosby, in 1972 revolutionized historical research into European colonialism by focusing on both the cultural and biological consequences of the meeting of two worlds. Crosby not only was one of the first to highlight the potential role of transported European diseases in shaping a “new world” but also discussed how plants and animals from both sides of the Atlantic affected landscapes and cuisines the world over. In the context of the tropics, the arrival of the Spanish, who took a particular interest in implanting their own forms of “agriculture” and “pastoralism,” could have major cultural and environmental results. Wheat, as well as grape vines, were particularly important to them, given their association with Christian sacraments. Historians have discussed how many Spanish settlers, including Hernán Cortés, attempted to plant these Middle Eastern and Mediterranean crops, which ultimately failed, particularly in humid, lowland forest areas. Several faced severe malnutrition as a result, and historical records document how, despite resistance, they were forced to eat the local staple crops of maize, manioc, peanuts, or pineapples like their Indigenous neighbors. Indeed, a number of these Neotropical crops still form the basis of cuisines in many North, Central, and South American nations today. Other crops introduced by Europeans were more successful. By the sixteenth century, observers in Peru recorded how lettuce, cabbage, radishes, peas, onions, and turnips were all being cultivated in the Andean highlands. Meanwhile, the Spanish and Portuguese also brought ecologically well-suited crops from their other tropical outposts in Africa and Asia. As a consequence, bananas, mangoes, coconuts, and oranges are all successfully cultivated up and down the American tropics today and, particularly in the case of oranges in Florida, have even often become popularly associated with this part of the world. In this period of new oceanic connections, the tropics not only witnessed arrivals from outside their latitudinal boundaries but also a reshuffling of the plants grown and animals raised in different corners of their equatorial realm.13

  More dramatic environmental consequences occurred as a result of the introduction of domesticated animals, including sheep, goats, cattle, donkeys, and horses. Ranching of cattle and sheep, as well as the keeping of pigs, became perhaps the single greatest economic practice across the Neotropics, from Mexico, across the Caribbean, and south into the Amazon. In Mexico, the introduction and dramatic expansion of sheep, consuming all vegetation in their path, has been shown, through paleoecological analysis of lake records and historical reconstructions of herding, to have led to a drying out of the landscape, reduction of forest cover, increased soil erosion, and the introduction of invasive species through their dung. Similarly, a pollen record from a dried-up river meander bed in the Dominican Republic shows how the introduction of cattle by the Spanish resulted in a decline in tropical forest density on Hispaniola. Cattle were, and still are, a main driving force behind the clearance of the
Amazon Basin from the sixteenth century onward. Even closer to home on the Canary Islands, where sheep and goats were already present, Spanish introduction of new animals, like donkeys, reduced the landscape to such an extent that, in 1491, it is recorded that the Spanish decided to ride out on donkey hunts on Fuerteventura to keep the land profitable! The rabbits introduced on Porto Santo likewise consumed the Spaniards’ crops, causing them to abandon the island. Nevertheless, in Mexico, zooarcheological analysis of animal remains from colonial-era farming sites has shown how Indigenous communities could effectively combine these new agropastoral species within traditional milpa forms of food production. Similarly, in the Caribbean, analysis of linguistics and historically documented Indigenous cosmologies show how domesticated animals brought by Europeans were incorporated into long-held traditional schemes of adopting and taming a variety of animals, including parrots and manatees. Sadly, all too often Indigenous population decline and maltreatment dampened the influence of these more ecologically canny approaches.14

  The Columbian exchange did not just operate in one direction, and many crops domesticated in the Americas also made it back to the Old World. We might often associate capsicum or chili peppers with spicy Indian food, Chinese Sichuan cuisine, or Korean Kimchi cabbage. However, as we saw in Chapter 7, these were first domesticated in the Neotropics. Historical records show that they were brought across by the Spanish to Europe and Africa, becoming the basis of Hungary’s national spice “paprika,” before being carried eastward by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century to be deeply embedded in the cuisines of South and Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, tomatoes, shown by botanists to have been domesticated in South and Central America in the first millennium AD, are first mentioned in European texts in 1544. Cultivation of this fruit in Italy in the sixteenth century paved the way for the creation of some of the most globally distinctive sets of cuisines on the European continent. The Portuguese also likely introduced maize into Africa in the sixteenth century, while manioc was similarly brought to the African continent as part of this process. Cacao, cultivated by farmers in Central America at European arrival, became a taste of kings and queens across much of Europe and a widely distributed drink in the new globalized capital of Madrid, where it remains a famous tourist attraction as a drink in combination with churros to this day. You might associate vanilla with Madagascar; however, historical archives and botanical research show that it too comes from the Neotropics, arriving in Africa via Europe through first Spanish- and then French-mediated hands. The onset of global addictions to cocaine and tobacco, as we saw in Chapter 7, can also ultimately be linked via the Columbian exchange to the Neotropics, although the latter had already been passed up to North America prior to the arrival of the French and British, who developed a liking for it. Zooarcheological and genetic analyses also demonstrate that guinea pigs and turkeys, common pets or Christmas dinners across western Europe and northern North America today, arrived from the American tropics as a consequence of the new global networks that emerged between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.15

  Much discussion of the Columbian exchange often focuses on the Atlantic. However, by colonizing the Philippine Archipelago, the Spanish formed a regular global exchange system that united the Americas, Europe, and Asia. A “galleon trade” was created between Manila and Acapulco in Mexico (then known as New Spain), which, from 1573 saw two fully loaded ships take products from Asia to the Americas and back again in most years. While wheat was eventually successfully cultivated in the Philippines at Spanish direction later in the seventeenth century, less direct European control over agrarian activities than in much of the Americas led to prominent, locally directed incorporation of novel plants and animals, both by Indigenous populations and the more independent religious orders, into subsistence activities. Sweet potatoes arrived from North and Central America and quickly became widely used in local swidden fields, having similar properties to natively cultivated yams and taros. Their journey from the Neotropics is highlighted by the fact that sixteenth-century accounts show that Indigenous communities in the Philippines called them camotes, the Nahuatl (and Uto-Aztecan language) word for the crop. Other arrivals included tomatoes, papaya, pineapples, agave, squash, and tobacco, as well as potatoes, whose global journey we will read more about in the next chapter. Zooarcheological analysis of sites in the Philippines shows that goats were already present in the Philippines in the pre-Spanish period. However, sheep and horses were likely introduced by the Spanish. Meanwhile cattle keeping was more limited here, at least prior to the eighteenth and particularly the nineteenth centuries. As Filipino zooarcheologist Dr. Noel Amano of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History puts it, “Long-term Indigenous use of water buffalos for traction and manure, that still continues in the rural areas of the archipelago today, meant that the new arrivals from Europe provided far fewer local benefits away from a few wealthy, Spanish landowners who could keep thousands of them in profitable herds.”16

  As the example of the Philippines demonstrates, the spread of crops and animals from their regions of domestication into novel ecologies was neither sweeping, uniformly European-dictated, nor necessarily desirable. Archeobotanist Professor Amanda Logan at Northwestern University has further highlighted this point in the context of the spread of maize into tropical West Africa. The arrival of maize has frequently been seen as a “grace” for a continent often framed as doomed to scarcity. Its rapid growth and high yield provided the opportunity to produce a large surplus and support local populations, and monoculture fields of maize continue to be promoted as a means of alleviating food insecurity across Africa in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, working with the Banda community of West Ghana, Amanda has elegantly compiled ethnographic interviews, historical information, and archeological and archeobotanical data to challenge these narratives. First, shifting cultivation of indigenous crops of pearl millet and sorghum, alongside tubers, legumes (e.g., cowpea), and the collection of wild shea nuts, was more than capable of supporting African communities in the region at the time of European arrival. Maize was virtually ignored until later centuries, suggesting that people had plenty to eat. Second, maize can prove incredibly costly for soil fertility, is vulnerable to pests, and can struggle under dry conditions that periodically impact the seasonally dry forest areas of western Ghana, as they did at the time of European arrival. Finally, maize became important more quickly along the coast. Here, African farmers profited from growing it in large quantities to meet increased demand from Europeans, who required it to feed themselves, as well as the economic demands of new, capitalist business initiatives centered on human souls. As Amanda puts it, “An obsession with Africa as a continent lacking in food security, and in need of surplus from introduced Eurasian and American crops, goes completely against millennia of African farming innovations that effectively managed environmental perturbations and that processes of colonialism have prejudiced over the last five centuries.”17

  Indeed, the introduction of new crops and animals has, as we have seen in the Canary Islands and the Americas, often left legacies on landscapes that are not entirely positive. In the case of Africa, a focus on monoculture crops such as maize can leave farmers more vulnerable to climatic change. In China, the arrival of maize and sweet potato, with their very different climatic and soil tolerances when compared to Old World crops, offered the opportunity to expand agriculture into new earthy horizons. Sweet potato arrived from the Philippines in the late sixteenth century and provided a crucial food source for local farmers reeling from climatic-induced devastation of their rice fields. Sweet potato and maize, which arrived via Portuguese-held Macao, also supported emigrating Chinese farmers moving as far southwest as Sichuan and as far northwest as the Gobi Desert. By the eighteenth century agricultural capacity and populations in these previously sparsely utilized regions skyrocketed. Paleoecological records and historical observations document the increasing deforestation and soil erosion that r
esulted. The rich nutrients and carbohydrates provided by these new crops certainly, in part, contributed to China becoming the most populous country on the face of the planet. However, geomorphological study of ancient soil quality, in combination with archival references to soil instability, shows that these new crops replaced tree cover. In doing so, they contributed to the washing away of unprotected soils, the loss of nutrients, an increase in major flooding, and, ultimately, malnutrition of overextended rural populations that the country is still grappling with in many areas today. The Columbian exchange certainly operated in various directions between the now linked worlds, both in terms of cultural influences and potential environmental and nutritional repercussions.18

  Although the Columbian exchange is often popularly described as a product of nations or empires consciously “transporting” and using different crops or animals (and I am also guilty of that in the above!), the examples of West Africa, the Philippines, and China show that, ultimately, it entailed a network built upon the backs of a variety of merchants, food producers, travelers, writers, and government officials from all continents and cultures. Seeds and animals simply were not enough; their appropriate management, especially in the tropics, required different traditions of cultivation and herding that came in the form of people moving. To take one revealing example, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, approximately 12 million to 13 million Africans were forcibly removed from their homes and transported across the Atlantic as part of the transatlantic slave trade. We will see in the next chapter how this represented the onset of increasingly globalized, capitalist, and racist exploitation of landscapes and labor in the tropics. However, it is also worth noting that the Africans who were forcibly shipped, and whose descendants now make up significant proportions of many nations in the Americas, brought with them yams, black-eyed peas, watermelons, and plantains, as well as knowledge of how to farm them, working small “plots” at the edges of the plantations on which they were forced to work. Not only that, but as many of these individuals had already been farming in fields with maize and manioc back in West Africa from the sixteenth century, they also brought a cultural tradition of combining these different foods into new, sustainable systems and eclectic cuisines. Rice cultivation in North America has been suggested to have arrived in a similar manner from West Africa, rather than Asia. These are far from the only examples, but they clearly show that often-neglected, marginalized groups were also key players in the formation of new post-Columbian ecosystems and economies.19