New World is a highly problematic term: it usually refers to the Americas, which were hardly “new” when Columbus and company “discovered” them more than five centuries ago. Tenochtitlán (today Mexico City) was already one of the largest cities in the world when Cortés and Alvarado arrived, with a sanitation system the scruffy Europeans could only dream of. The “New World” was in fact ancient, with pyramids worthy of Egypt.
The encounter between the “new” and “old” worlds was extraordinarily complex. It…
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