Having resurrected the isolated splendors of the pre-Columbian Americas in his
bestselling 1491, Mann explores the global convergences.and upheavals.inaugurated
by their discovery in this fascinating survey of the "Homogenocene" era. Mann
traces the subtle, epochal influences of the intercontinental "Columbian Exchange"
of flora, fauna, commodities, and peoples, showing how European honeybees and earth-
worms remade New World landscapes; how New World corn, potatoes, and fertilizer
ignited Eurasian population booms; how Old World diseases prompted an eruption of
slavery in the Western Hemisphere (the influx of Africans, not Europeans, to the
Americas, Mann notes, was the main demographic result of the Contact); how Latin
American silver undermined China's Ming Dynasty; and how the decimation of Indian
peoples changed the world's climate. The author interweaves research on everything
from epidemiology to economics into a lucid historical panorama that's studded with
entertaining studies of Chinese pirate fleets, courtly tobacco rituals, and the
bloody feud between Jamestown colonists and the Indians who fed and fought them,
to name a few. Brilliantly assembling colorful details into big-picture insights,
Mann's fresh, challenge to Eurocentric histories puts interdependence at the origin
of modernity.

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