Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Okay.
Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Charles Mann, who is the author of three of my favorite books, including 1491, New Revelations of America Before Columbus, 1493, Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet, Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Vision to Shape Tomorrow's World. Charles, welcome to The Lunar Society.

**Charles C. Mann** (0:23)
It's a pleasure to be here.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:25)
My first question is, how much of the new world was basically baked into the cake? So at some point, people from Eurasia were going to travel to the new world, and they were going to bring their diseases. And, you know, because of disparities in where they would survive, if the Asimoglu theory that you cite is correct, then some of these places were bound to be better, have good institutions, some of them were bound to have bad institutions.
And because of malaria, there were going to be shortages in labor that people would try to fix with African slaves. So how much of this was just bound to happen? If Columbus hadn't done it maybe 50 years down the line, somebody from Italy does it, what is the contingency here?

**Charles C. Mann** (1:07)
Well, I think some of it was baked into the cake. It was pretty clear that sometime people from Eurasia and people from the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen? And there was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres, largely because by quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia in the Eastern Hemisphere, and that led almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases, diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. And most of the great killers in human history are that kind of disease. So they're going to meet, there's going to be those kinds of diseases.
But it's possible to imagine, if you wanted to, some alternative histories, there's a wonderful book by Laurent Binet called Civilizations that in fact just does that. It's a great alternative history book. And he imagines that some of the Vikings came and they actually extended further into North America than they did. And they brought the diseases so that by the time of Columbus and so forth, the epidemiological balance was different. And what happened was that when Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats and went to Europe. And the Inca had conquered Europe in this. And it's far-fetched, but it does say that even this encounter will happen and the diseases will happen, but it doesn't happen to happen in the way that they did. You know, it's perfectly possible to imagine again that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery. There was a huge debate, you know, when this began, about whether this was a good idea or not. And you had a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy, sort of asking the Pope, is it okay that we do this?
And, you know, you can imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way.
So some of it was, I think, going to happen, I think. But, you know, how exactly it happened is really up to chance and contingency and human agency.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:29)
When, I guess, in the 15th and 16th century, when the Spanish first arrived, were the Incas and the Aztecs, were they at a particularly weak point, or particularly decadent, or was this just where you should have expected that civilization? Like, this was basically how well it would have been functioning on any given time period.

**Charles C. Mann** (3:48)
Well, typically, empires are much more, you know, sort of jumbly, fragile entities than we kind of imagine. And there's always, you know, fighting at the top.
And what Cortez was able to do, for instance, with the Aztecs, the Triple Alliance, they're better called the Triple Alliance, Aztec is an invention from the 19th century.
And that was three groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica, who had the great city of Tenochtitlan. But there are other two guys who remember this, really resented them. They were the superior guys. And what Cortez was able to do was to foment a civil war within the Aztec Empire and to take some of the enemies of the Aztecs and some of the members of the Aztec Empire and create an entire new order. And there's a fascinating set of history that hasn't really, I think, emerged into the popular consciousness. Certainly it was new, and I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493 because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it, largely Spanish and Mexican scholars, about the conquest within the conquest. And so the allies of the Spaniards, Tlaxcaclan, Tlatelco and so forth, actually sent armies out and conquered big swaths of northern and southern Mexico and Central America. And so there is a far more complex picture than we realized even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published 1491 So in that sense, yes, but also the conquest wasn't as complete as we think, because what happened is Cortes moves in, and what he does is he marries, I talk a little bit about this in 1493, he marries his lieutenants into these indigenous things and creating this hybrid nobility that then extends on to the Inca.