Seeds of Change: Five Plants That Transformed Mankind,
Henry Hobhouse. Harper and Row: New York, 1987
Admitting that wheat, rice and corn (maize), among others domesticated by humankind, have been profoundly significant, Hobhouse's extremely unusual and interesting work focuses on Quinine, Sugar, Tea, Cotton and the Potato.
Excluding Tea (which he associates with the development of the English and American opium trade, the resulting debasement of China and its loss of independence), four of these crops impacted American and United States history in a way only recently realized. Think of cotton, for example, the American South, the international slave trade, 200 years of American chattel slavery, four years of bloody Civil War, the institutionalization of racism, and you get some sort of idea of Hobhouse's argument.
Much of European individual or imperial expansion and conquest of the Americas had to do directly or indirectly with slavery, with the enslavement of the Native American. While early slavers such as Columbus took Indians back to Europe, most enslaved Native Americans were forced to work the Spanish silver and gold mines, the sugar cane plantations of the Caribbean, or the farms and cattle ranches that provided the food for the mining and planting industries.
It is in relation to this enslavement of the Native American and their incredibly rapid die off, that two of Hobhouse's chapters are particularly interesting. The first, "Quinine and the White Man's Burden" describes the discovery, in the South American Andes, and world wide spread of the use of quinine. It also explains the apparent introduction of malaria into the Americas and its devastating impact upon the Native Americans.
The second chapter, "Sugar and the Slave Trade," then describes the how's and why's of the slavers' (Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English) shift to West Africa for labor to take the place of the rapidly disappearing Indians. Apparently, most human groups develop immunities to pathogens, to diseases, to which they have been long exposed. Either that, or they die out as a group. By the 1400s, apparently, many West Africans had acquired an absolute or relative immunity to malaria, making them much sought after labor, initially in the infested sugar cane fields of the Mediterranean and southern Europe, and later, for the cane brakes of the Caribbean and the American coastal South.
Millions of Caribbean Indians were destroyed, and millions of West Africans were condemned into the most heinous of international slave trades to produce health destroying sugar, molasses and rum. Think about it.