Charles C. Mann, author of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet, discusses the deep history of the Americas, the consequences of globalization, and competing visions for humanity’s future. The conversation ranges across empires, slavery, technological stagnation, regulatory tradeoffs, and the long-running debate between technological optimists (“wizards”) and ecological pessimists (“prophets”).
The Inevitability and Contacts of the Columbian Encounter
Contact between Eurasia and the Americas was likely inevitable given enough time, but the specific form it took—European conquest, mass death from disease, and African slavery—was not predetermined.
The epidemiological disparity between hemispheres was driven by Eurasia’s greater number of domesticable animals, which led to zoonotic diseases like smallpox and measles that devastated immunologically naive Indigenous populations.
Alternative histories are conceivable: Laurent Binet’s novel Civilizations imagines Vikings introducing diseases earlier, leading to Indigenous Americans conquering Europe instead.
Slavery was not an inevitable outcome—there was significant debate in Spain about its morality, and figures like Bartolomé de las Casas pushed for abolition as early as the 1540s.
Empires Are Fragile from Within
The Aztec (Triple Alliance) and Inca empires were powerful but internally unstable, making them vulnerable to external disruption.
Cortés exploited existing resentment among subject peoples of the Aztecs, fomenting civil war and building a coalition that included Indigenous allies who themselves conquered large swaths of Mexico and Central America—a process scholars call “the conquest within the conquest.”
Pizarro arrived in the Inca Empire immediately after a devastating civil war and a major epidemic, allying with the losing faction to overthrow the winners.
This pattern repeats elsewhere: the British East India Company was invited into Bengal by rival Mughal factions, and elites across empires often recognized each other and formed mutually beneficial arrangements that exploited ordinary people.
Why Haiti Was the Only Successful Slave Revolt
Haiti stands out as the only fully successful large-scale slave revolt in the Americas, but defining “success” is complicated.
Haiti was economically crippled by international blockades and remains impoverished, raising questions about long-term success.
Other maroon communities achieved de facto independence for extended periods: Palmares in Brazil lasted over a century; Canudos in Brazil fought to the last person in the 1880s; communities in the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina and remote areas of Mexico operated outside state control.
Many enslaved people in Brazil escaped into the Amazon—today roughly 20 million people in the Brazilian Amazon are descendants of those who fled slavery.
Revolts were suppressed with extreme brutality because they threatened the entire colonial order, not just local slaveholders.
Why Slavery Ended Despite Being at Its Peak
Slavery was a near-universal human institution for millennia—about a third of the Code of Hammurabi (the oldest complete legal code) concerns slave transactions—yet was abolished globally within roughly 150 years.
Multiple explanations exist and historians still debate their relative importance:
Machinery and wage labor became more attractive than enslaved workers, who were costly to control and posed security risks.
Industrialization shifted economic value away from agriculture, where slavery was concentrated.
The collapse of the colonial order undermined the political structures that sustained slavery.
Moral movements—abolitionism in Britain (Wilberforce, the Darwins), anti-caste and anti-slavery movements in South Asia—changed public consciousness.
Las Casas’s campaign in the 1540s led Spain to pass the “New Laws” banning slavery, which would have devastated the colonial economy dependent on slave labor in silver mines—showing that moral arguments had real political force even before industrialization.
Contingency and Universals in Civilizations
Some features of civilizations appear universal (pyramids, elite claims to supernatural authority), while others that seem obviously useful (the wheel, iron/steel) did not develop independently in the Americas.
Pyramids emerge naturally from the geometry of stacking stone blocks—they’re structurally stable and don’t require scaffolding.
The wheel existed in Mesoamerica as a toy but wasn’t applied to transport because there were no draft animals; travois (drag frames) worked better on rough terrain without requiring roads.
Obsidian weapons in Mesoamerica were sharper than steel and didn’t rust, but were brittle—and warfare was oriented around individual glory and prestige, not mass infantry combat, so the technology fit their values.
Japan similarly banned firearms during the Tokugawa shogunate after initial adoption, enjoying centuries of peace but becoming vulnerable when Commodore Perry arrived in the 1860s.
China developed gunpowder but did not evolve it into advanced ballistic weapons—another case where obvious military advantages were not pursued.
Teotihuacan and Chaco Canyon: Egalitarian Revolutions
Teotihuacan began as a typical imperial project with monumental temples, but underwent a dramatic shift toward egalitarian architecture—apartment-like buildings with little distinction between rich and poor—suggesting a possible political revolution.
Recent LiDAR and ground-penetrating radar surveys confirm this egalitarian construction extended over a large area, not just elite structures that happened to survive.
Similarly, Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest featured massive “castles” (like Pueblo Bonito with ~800 rooms) and stark social stratification, but around 1100 CE the population dispersed and their descendants—the Pueblo peoples—built intensely egalitarian societies.
Mann argues this was likely a political revolution, “the first American revolution,” where people overthrew hierarchical elites and created more participatory societies.
Mann’s New Book: The American West’s Future Informing Its Past
Mann is writing a book about the North American West, originally intended as a chapter for 1491 that was cut for length.
The book projects the West’s likely future—hotter and drier due to climate change, ethnically diverse (roughly 40% Latino, large Asian populations along the Pacific coast), energy-rich, and characterized by overlapping sovereignties as Native nations continue reclaiming self-governance—and uses that future as a lens to reinterpret the past.
This challenges Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential “frontier thesis” (1893), which framed the West as a line between savagery and civilization that ended at the Pacific.
Instead, Mann sees the West as a continuous story of Indigenous fire management, Hohokam survival of 13th-century droughts, and ongoing Native resistance—not a story that ends with Lewis and Clark.
Collapse Narratives Are Overstated
Popular books about civilizational collapse (Jared Diamond, Joseph Tainter) often mischaracterize what happened to Indigenous societies.
The “Maya collapse” is a misnomer: there are roughly 30 million Maya people today, with Maya-language radio stations, schools, and ongoing resistance movements (e.g., the Zapatistas in Chiapas).
Societies facing epidemics killing 30-40% of their population in a short time would be severely disrupted—comparable to COVID killing one million Americans (a 330th of the population) but 30-40 times worse.
What looks like collapse may actually be transformation: ordinary people under elite rule may have been better off after the elites’ power dissolved.
Easter Island’s deforestation is not mysterious—Dutch sailors cut trees for ship repair and enslaved much of the population.
The Virginia Company and Imperial Hubris
The British Crown continued subsidizing the Virginia Company despite massive losses and mortality because of a combination of delusion, hope, and imperial competition.
Company backers lied about prospects with rosy presentations (comparable to modern startup burn-rate stories like Uber).
Geographic confusion—believing the Americas were narrow and that a passage to China lay just beyond the Chesapeake—sustained futile searches.
The Spanish had found gold and silver, creating a powerful incentive to believe more existed.
Imperial prestige and competition (“keeping up with the Joneses”) drove colonial ambitions—Germany in the 1890s and China today with the Belt and Road Initiative show similar impulses.
Silver, China, and the Bitcoin Analogy
Spanish silver flowed into China because the Ming dynasty needed a reliable medium of exchange, but acquiring it required sending real goods abroad, weakening the country.
Mann draws a loose analogy to Bitcoin: both involve expending real resources (silver mining/goods trade vs. electricity and computing power) to create a medium of exchange.
The mystery of money is the human willingness to assign value to arbitrary things—cowrie shells, giant stones on Yap (where ownership transferred without physical movement), paper bills, or strings of zeros and ones.
Bitcoin miners are so driven to access cheap energy that some are willing to move to remote locations near small nuclear plants—upending their lives for a speculative medium of exchange.
El Salvador attempted to build a Bitcoin city powered by geothermal energy from a volcano.
Wizards vs. Prophets: The China Case Study
In The Wizard and the Prophet, Mann frames a long-running debate: wizards believe science and technology can solve environmental dilemmas; prophets believe natural systems have inherent limits (carrying capacity, planetary boundaries).
China illustrates both perspectives: the introduction of American crops (potato, sweet potato, maize) allowed dryland farming in China’s arid western half, causing population to soar—but also triggering massive social unrest, erosion, and land degradation.
In the short-to-medium run (centuries), the crops increased human capacity and suffering simultaneously—evidence for both sides.
China’s fundamental geographic constraint is having roughly 20% of the world’s population but only 7-8% of above-ground freshwater, with rice cultivation requiring enormous water inputs.
Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution
Norman Borlaug’s development of high-yield wheat saved an estimated billion lives, but whether this outcome was contingent on him specifically is debatable.
Swami Nathan, an Indian scientist, independently did similar work and was crucial in adapting Borlaug’s Mexican wheat to Indian conditions—a part of the story Mann found especially striking when researching in Tamil Nadu.
If Borlaug hadn’t existed, someone likely would have made similar discoveries, though perhaps 20 years later—and given the population boom from ending colonialism and discovering antibiotics, those extra years would have meant enormous additional suffering.
The Green Revolution’s opponents correctly diagnosed its social problems (inequality, environmental degradation), even if their proposed solutions were often impractical—analogous to good editors who identify problems in manuscripts but suggest bad fixes.
There’s a risk that without Borlaug’s breakthrough, governments influenced by “prophet” thinking might have rejected the technology entirely, as many countries rejected nuclear power in the 1970s.
Regulatory Tradeoffs: Protection vs. Delay
Regulatory agencies face an inherent dilemma: preventing rare catastrophic harms (which justifies their existence) inevitably slows beneficial innovations.
The FDA was created in the 1930s after elixir sulfanilamide killed hundreds—a genuine regulatory success—but the resulting approval processes introduce delays for everything.
Counter-example: COVID-19 vaccines using entirely new mRNA technology were developed and approved in record time with rigorous safety reviews—a regulatory triumph.
Ongoing example: genetically modified salmon and American chestnuts have undergone extraordinary testing but remain in regulatory limbo.
Nuclear power suffers from a uniquely strict “linear no threshold” radiation standard, while coal plants—which emit more radiation due to residual materials in coal—face more lenient threshold-based rules, a clear case of regulatory capture creating inconsistent standards.
Mann is skeptical that regulatory agencies have permanently killed off major innovations, though they may delay them by a decade or more.
Geoengineering and the Governance Problem
Geoengineering (e.g., injecting sulfur into the stratosphere to cool the planet) could be done unilaterally by a single country at relatively modest cost, raising governance challenges.
Neal Stephenson’s novel Termination Shock explores a billionaire doing exactly this—firing sulfur shells into the stratosphere from a giant gun—which is not actually illegal.
Mann believes geoengineering trials will likely happen within the next decade, though advocates like David Keith think it’s already overdue while precautionary voices think that’s far too fast.
The failure to approve human challenge trials for COVID vaccines—which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives—raises questions about whether international cooperation would be sufficient to prevent unilateral geoengineering.
Declining Research Productivity and Misallocated Talent
Evidence suggests declining per-researcher productivity, but Mann argues this is partly a problem of misallocation rather than genuine diminishing returns.
In particle physics, discoveries are harder because the field has been so successful—this is natural diminishing returns, not a crisis.
In agricultural research, effort is narrowly concentrated on wheat, rice, and maize, while alternative crops (cassava, tree crops, agroforestry systems) that could be crucial for climate resilience receive almost no attention.
Silvopastoral systems (integrating trees and livestock) in West Africa and northern Mexico use far less water and are nearly as productive as annual crops, yet receive minimal research funding.
Researchers could make bigger breakthroughs by working on neglected problems rather than incrementally optimizing already well-studied ones.
Longtermism and the Wizard-Prophet Debate
Longtermism (valuing future people equally with current people) doesn’t clearly favor either wizards or prophets.
Wizards assume future people will want maximum physical comfort and longevity, and that technology can deliver this.
Prophets argue for epistemic humility—we don’t know what future people will want, so we should preserve as many options as possible (the same argument used against burying nuclear waste in ways that can’t be retrieved for 10,000 years).
Mann leans toward the wizard position but finds the prophet argument about preserving options genuinely compelling.
The Free Market Objection to Carrying Capacity
A standard economic argument against carrying capacity limits is that rising prices will naturally reduce consumption and find sustainable equilibria.
Mann considers this a powerful theoretical argument but largely irrelevant in practice because food, water, and energy have never been governed by anything resembling free markets.
Existing distortions are enormous: massive food waste, absurd water arrangements, Texas maintaining its own electrical grid to avoid trading with neighboring states, and arbitrary rules preventing long-distance high-tension power lines.
The free market argument describes a system that has never existed and likely never will for these essential goods.
