Outline for "The Columbian Exchange", 1/30
1)Globalization in Eurasia:
-the major empires to 1850
-the elements of exchange: exotic goods, prestige goods, merchant diasporas, multiethnic empires
-the trading world of the Indian Ocean: cotton, textiles, sugar, silver
2)Europe in the world economy:
-Europe's relative backwardness in historical perspective
-technological advances
-coercion and monopoly
-organizational forms: the corporation and the nation-state
-silver
-the role of the Americas
3)Globalization and the Environment:
-globalization of biota
-globalization of resource consumption
-global consciousness
4)The biological ancien regime:
-the agriculture basis of empires
-marriage and birth structures
-mortality and age structures
-the limits to agriculture and surplus
-land holdings and diminishing marginal returns
-cities and states as demographic parasites
5)Global crises in ecological perspective
-the cyclical trend in population growth
-the "little ice age" and climate fluctuations
-political instability and the devastation of war
-Malthusian pressures
6)The history of disease
-Us against the micro-organisms
-escaping the parasites: out of Africa
-from vector diseases to crowd diseases
-herd animals and crowd diseases
-from epidemics to endemics, "plagues" to "childhood diseases", and back again
-the "civilized disease pool" and the expansion of civilization
-the nomadic alternative
7)New World Epidemics
-as a consequence of the civilized disease pool
-the Neolithic revolution in the New World
-virgin soil epidemics and the European conquest
8)New World gifts to the Old
-the different nature of New World crops: corn and potatoes
-others: beans, squash, and chilies; tobacco and cocoa
-New World crops and Old World demography
9)More Old World invasions
-"sheep eating people"
-biological invasions and "ecological imperialism"
-creating "Neo-Europes"
-the difference between the Neo-Europes and other imperialism
10)The ecological significance of Neo-Europes
-population pressure and "ghost acreage"
-timber and cotton
-plantation crops and Old World diet
-the role of the "plantation complex"
11)Biological exchange around the world
-"turkeys", "indians", and "egyptians"
-globalization and pigs
-perceptions of the New World
-the "tyranny of distance" and the limits to ecological globalization
12)The Irish potato famine in context