WINNERS AND LOSERS: THE BALANCE SHEET OF EMPIRE 169poor. This process of selection actually began much earlier, during the
age of discovery.
For some nations, Spain for example, the Opening of the World was
an invitation to wealth, pomp, and pretension—an older way of doing
things, but on a bigger scale. For others, Holland and England, it was
a chance to do new things in new ways, to catch the wave of techno
logical progress. And for still others, such as the Amerindians or Tas-
manians, it was apocalypse, a terrible fate imposed from without.
The Opening brought first an exchange—the so-called Columbian
exchange—of the life forms of two biospheres. The Europeans found
in the New World new peoples and animals, but above all, new plants—
some nutritive (maize [Indian corn], cocoa [cacao], potato, sweet
potato), some addictive and harmful (tobacco, coca), some industrially
useful (new hardwoods, rubber). These products were adapted di
versely into Old World contexts, some early, some late (rubber does not
become important until the nineteenth century).
The new foods altered diets around the world. Corn, for example,
became a staple of Italian (polenta) and Balkan (mamaliga) cuisines;
while potatoes became the main starch of Europe north of the Alps and
Pyrenees, even replacing bread in some places (Ireland, Flanders). So
important was the potato that some historians have seen it as the source
and secret of the European population "explosion" of the nineteenth
century.^1 But not only in Europe. Grown on poor, hilly soils, the
potato, along with peanuts, sweet potatoes, and yams, provided a valu
able dietary supplement for a Chinese population that in the eigh
teenth century began to outstrip the nourishment provided by rice.
In return, Europe brought to the New World new plants—sugar, ce
reals; and new fauna—the horse, horned cattle, sheep, and new breeds
of dog. Some of these served as weapons of conquest; or like the cat-
de and sheep, took over much of the land from its inhabitants. Worse
yet by far, the Europeans and the black slaves they brought with them
from Africa carried nasty, microscopic baggage: the viruses of smallpox,
measles, and yellow fever; the protozoan parasite of malaria; the bacil
lus of diphtheria; the rickettsia of typhus; the spirochete of yaws; the
bacterium of tuberculosis. To these pathogens, the residents of the
Old World had grown diversely resistant. Centuries of exposure within
Eurasia had selected human strains that stood up to such maladies.
The Amerindians, on the other hand, died in huge numbers, in some
places all of them, to the point where only the sparsity of survivors and
some happy strains of resistance enabled a few to pull through.
Why the Eurasian biosphere was so much more virulent than the