The Magellan Exchange

How America and China Have Made Each Other
Speaker
Andrés Reséndez
Date
Mon April 24th 2023, 4:00 - 5:30pm
Event Sponsor
Bill Lane Center for the American West
Stanford Department of History
Location
Lane History Corner, Room 307, Building 200
450 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

The Western History Lecture Series presents Andrés Reséndez Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. Reséndez's talk, "The Magellan Exchange: How America and China Have Made Each Other" will be held on Monday, April 24, 2023, and is co-hosted by the Bill Lane Center and the Stanford Department of History.

 

Headshot of speaker
Andrés Reséndez

Andrés Reséndez is an author and professor of history at the University of California at Davis. His specialties are early European exploration and colonization of the Americas, the U.S-Mexico border region, and the early history of the Pacific Ocean. His previous book, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award and winner of the 2017 Bancroft Prize from Columbia University. His latest book, Conquering the Pacific (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), is about the first expedition to go from America to Asia and back, thus transforming the Pacific Ocean into a vital space of contact and exchange.

 

In his talk, Reséndez provides insight on how America and China have gone from enthusiastic trading partners to strategic rivals in only a decade, the latest twist in a much deeper history spanning half a millennium. The Pacific Ocean was the greatest obstacle to the movement of plants, peoples, goods, and ideas until the middle of the middle of the sixteenth century when humans finally beat a path across the water and forged a continuous connection, first through Spanish galleons and then by means of American sailing vessels and steamships. This transpacific link has molded the American continent and China into what they are today. Highly productive American crops enabled China’s rapid population grow, as American corn and sweet potatoes boosted China’s share of the world’s population from 25% in 1500 to an overwhelming 36% by 1800. In turn, China’s demand for silver transformed colonial Latin America, spawning mines across the region, while China’s desire for sea otter pelts from the Pacific coast of North America in the late eighteenth century accelerated America’s westward expansion.

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