Okay so remember last year when I read 1491? Yeah. This is the sequel.

It was really good. It’s not another 1491–this one is about globalization and trade more than societies. But it ends up parenthetically being about societies anyway, because you can’t talk about trade without talking about people.

And people were part of trade, something Mann does not shy away from. 1493 is full of people being awful, it’s full of the spread of disease and the slave trade and imperialism. Mann doesn’t let issues become, er, black and white. The people who started the transatlantic slave trade were doing something awful–but the true scope of that awful was hundreds of years in the future and completely outside their ability to foresee. They were trying to find workers for plantations and West Africa had plenty to sell.

Again–awful things were awful! Chattel slavery is gross and nasty and terrible! But at some point we had to invent the idea of diminishing people based on race and that was fairly late in the game. Mann talks extensively about how slavery worked before we came up with biological races.