Vol. 14 No. 13 · 9 July 1992
pages 14-15 | 3841 words
Goodbye Columbus
Eric Hobsbawm writes about 1492 and its cultural consequences in Europe
A few weeks ago, in Mexico, I was asked to sign a protest against Christopher Columbus, on behalf of the original native populations of the American continents and islands, or rather, of their descendants. I understand the feelings which inspire such gestures, and have some sympathy with them, although it seems to me that the only object of protesting against something that happened half a millennium ago is to get a little publicity for a cause of 1992 rather than 1492. The consequences of Columbus’s voyages and those of his successors cannot be reversed. The sufferings imposed on indigenous Americans and imported Africans, whether by deliberate human action or as the unintended consequences of conquest and exploitation, are undeniable and cannot be cancelled in retrospect. That the impact of conquest and exploitation on these populations was catastrophic, and not only during the first hundred and fifty years of European conquest, must not be denied or overlooked either. Nevertheless, we cannot cancel history, but only remember or forget or invent it. Everyone who lives in the Americas today, whether descended from the Aboriginal population or from voluntary or involuntary settlers, has been shaped by the five hundred years that have passed since Columbus sailed. But so has everyone in the Old World, though in ways of which we are rarely conscious.
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Letters
Vol. 14 No. 17 · 10 September 1992
From Stuart Pierson
I am puzzled by Eric Hobsbawm’s one-sided or undialectic treatment of borrowings west to east (LRB, 9 July). Surely the most important or ‘major’ contribution of the new world to the old was the fertility and extent of its soil, on which could be grown crops (maybe originating in the old world – does this include Africa?) like sugar, coffee and cotton. These, cultivated on latifundia and plantations by slave or peon labour, transformed European civilisation.
Each is more important than any plant Hobsbawm mentions except maybe potatoes. But of course no plant or product really transforms anything by itself. Alcohol was distilled, and named, in Islam, then banned for non-medical use – fairly effectively too, compared with the daft experiment earned out in the US between 1919 and 1934. Whatever their origin, all these substances entered culture areas where they were endorsed and desired or not, and subsequently gone after or not. What the soils of the American South, the Caribbean islands and the South American foothills gave to Europeans was the opportunity to satisfy the desire for sweets; and for coffee, and for a variety of clothes (don’t forget the connection noted by Mintz in Sweetness and Power between the calories in sugar and the energy workpeople of the Industria) Revolution needed to spin and weave cotton – a connection which should reach a little further back to include the salt cod that New-foundlanders made to feed the slaves that grew the cane). These interrelations make it impossible to sustain any unidirectional currents of ‘contiibution’ from one part of the world to another. What counted all along the chain was not this plant, or fish, or ‘product’, but the abundance and fertility which allowed Europeans to gratify and profit from their already existing wishes.
Stuart Pierson
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Vol. 14 No. 19 · 8 October 1992
From Gerald Noonan
I trust that the rest of Eric Hobsbawm’s interesting historical sweeps and comparisons (LRB, 9 July) are better anchored than his reference to Canada’s lack of effect upon the Old World: a way of stressing the salient example of the USA’s influence, in writing about the cultural consequences of 1492. Canada has always been outnumbered ten to one, didn’t have its own 18th or 19th centuries, and reached official ‘independence’ only in 1931 (by the Statute of Westminster – some place over there, isn’t it?). Canada is only now cobbling together its own constitution (patriated from Britain ten years ago), which, by the way, will grant the ‘inherent right of self-government’ to native (pre-Columbus) peoples – quite a distinct process from that of the USA. Could you ask Eric Hobsbawm to check back for comparison in two hundred and fifty years?
At another extreme altogether is his overlooking of what are surely the three most influential products of the New World: the car, the airplane, the telephone (credit Canada for a part in that one) – overlooked probably, intriguingly, because of their ubiquitous social presence. It is all very well to make us aware that ‘four of the seven most important agricultural crops in the world today are of American origin: potatoes, maize, manioc and sweet potato.’ But can you imagine a world where you couldn’t phone out to the chip shop and get home delivery? I mean, is that civilised, or what?
Gerald Noonan
Wilfrid Laurier University,
