This source, or rather the essay by William H. McNeill within it, does not claim that “Pizarro brought them [potatoes] to Europe from the Incas”.
Most sources put the potato’s arrival in Europ at around 1570 for Spain, and between 1588 and 1593 for Britain. The first written mention of the potato is a receipt for delivery dated 1567-11-28 between Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Antwerp.
McNeill describes how after 1545 the Spaniards used potatoes to feed it to thousands of conscripted silver miners at Potosí, and how this, between 1545 and 1650, led to an unprecedented scale of silver mining in Peru.
So the Conquistadors “discovered” a plant that was very useful for feeding forced labourers doing very hard work.
At least at the beginning of this (mid 1540ies) they wouldn’t have shipped cheap food for heathens across the Atlantic; they would have utilized all their fleet’s cargo capacity for hauling silver back home. There may have been the odd bag of potatoes making the voyage as a novelty to show to people back home, but not the volume needed to introduce them as a food.
McNeill puts that “within a few decades of Pizarro’s conquest” which fits the general timeline.
Given that Francisco Pizarro was assainated (by supporters of Diego de Almagro II in an internal power struggle) in Lima in 1541, from my point of view saying that one of the results of Pizarro’s conquest was the potato ending up in Europe is accurate; but saying that Pizarro brought potatoes to Europe is stretching things to the point of plastic deformation.
However, the original context was, more or less, ‘popular food in England that originated in places that were at one point British colonies’. Arguably, Ireland qualifies.
Broadly speaking, the potato made it’s way from South America to Spain, and from there to Ireland. Basque fishermen from Spain used potatoes as ships’ stores for their voyages across the Atlantic in the 16th century and introduced the tuber to western Ireland, where they landed to dry their cod. And from Ireland the potato travelled back over the Atlantic, this time to North America. Early colonists in Virginia and the Carolinas may have grown potatoes from seeds or tubers from Spanish ships. But the earliest certain potato crop in North America was brought to New Hampshire in 1719 from Derry.
(I started looking into potatoes beyond their culinary qualities a while back after I tried to get the fact across that the potato actually has a migratory background to some stupid xenophobic asshole. Although I did focus my research mainly around Frederick the Great, his Kartoffelbefehl, the Seven Years’ War, and so on.)
Potatoes. Their history is fascinating.
