The Columbian Exchange

Shmoop.com (adapted)

Columbus: Discovery, Ecology and Conquest

In 1492, Christopher Columbus and his crew washed ashore in the Bahamas,
"discovering" the New World and claiming ownership of it for the Spanish
monarchy. The Taino Indians Columbus encountered—whose homeland he
claimed for Spain—must have thought he was mad, suffering delusions of
grandeur.

But, as we know, Columbus's arrival was indeed the first act in a centuries-long
drama of colonization and conquest in which Europeans and their descendants
largely displaced the Taino and their fellow Native Americans while remaking
the Western Hemisphere in their own image.

How and why were the European colonists able to achieve such total
dominance in far-off continents? Did the Europeans' power lie in their
technological superiority, especially in weapons of war? Or was the European
advantage ideological, rooted in the aggressive expansionism of crusading
Christianity or the profit motive of entrepreneurial conquistadors? Was it simply
a matter of the Europeans proving more brutally committed to a genocidal fight
to the finish?

While a case can be made for the significance of any of these factors—or all of
them—in truth the single most important factor in facilitating the European
conquest of the Americas may be found, surprisingly, in a realm beyond simple human control: ecology.
Unequal Exchange: Food for Disease

Columbus's ships, and those of the innumerable Europeans who followed him to America, short-circuited millions of
years of divergent evolution in the two hemispheres by rapidly introducing Old World plants, animals, and micro-
organisms into New World environments, and vice versa. This manmade reunion of the ecologies of the
hemispheres—dubbed "The Columbian Exchange" by historian Alfred Crosby—had dramatically asymmetric
consequences for the peoples of the Old World and the New.

The New World happened to be much a healthier place than the Old before 1492, hosting few or none of the
devastating diseases that continuously plagued the populations of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Thus, when Europeans
arrived, they generally found life in the Americas to be at least as healthy as back home. By contrast, American
Indians—never before exposed to vicious Old World pathogens like smallpox and thus lacking any immunities to
them—began dying at apocalyptic rates. Many historians now believe that new diseases introduced after
Columbus's arrival killed off as much as 90% or more of the indigenous population of the Americas.

The Indians' "Great Dying"—which may have killed as many as one out of every five humans alive worldwide in the
sixteenth century—ravaged not only Indian bodies but entire Indian societies and cultures. The traumatized
survivors were often left unable to mount any effective resistance against the incursions of the European colonists.

The Columbian Exchange became even more unbalanced with Europe's successful appropriation of New World
staple crops originally developed by Indians. The adoption of efficient, carbohydrate-rich American crops such as
corn, potatoes, and cassava allowed Europeans and Africans to overcome chronic food shortages. Thus, even while
Native American populations were decimated by Old World diseases, European and African populations swelled as
American crops helped to overcome Old World famine.

History as Demography

Simple demographic numbers tell the story of the Columbian

Exchange most starkly. When Columbus sailed the ocean blue,
Europe's population stood at about 60 million. Most historians now
believe that the population of the Americas at the same time stood
somewhere between 40 and 100 million. In other words, it is not
just possible but quite likely that American Indians outnumbered
Europeans outright. (At its peak just before the Spanish arrival, the
Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan was more populous, cleaner, and
more beautiful than Paris.)

But by 1800, after three centuries of the Columbian Exchange,

Europe's population had surged to 150 million, while that of the
Americas' fell to 25 million—of which the vast majority were descendents of European colonists or African slaves,
not American Indians.

The success of European imperialism in the Americas was underwritten by the ecological imperialism of the
Columbian Exchange. The European colonists who would eventually found the settlements that would become the
United States had a powerful—if accidental—ally in the environment itself.
Environment  in  The  Columbian  Exchange  

Continental Drift

Tectonic forces broke up the ancient supercontinent of Pangaea about 180 million years ago, sending the Americas
slowly drifting away from the continents of the Old World (Eurasia and Africa). From that time until 1492, the plants
and animals living in the two hemispheres experienced continuous, divergent evolution. Periodic openings of the
Bering Land Bridge during Ice Ages did allow animals (humans prominent among them) to migrate from Asia to
America, but despite these occasional contacts the human-shaped ecosystems of the two hemispheres developed
very different characteristics.

New World and Old World

The people of the New World cultivated a number of highly nutritious

plant species, South American potatoes and Central American maize
(a.k.a. corn) foremost among them. Thousands of years ago, the
people of southern Mexico successfully bioengineered maize from
strains of inedible teosinte grass. The Indian creation of corn, one of
the world's most calorie-efficient grains, was one of the most
significant technological accomplishments of ancient man;
widespread cultivation of the highly nutritious corn eventually allowed
the agriculturalists of the central Mexican plateau to support the huge, stationary populations needed to sustain a
great civilization.

The New World's wealth in produce was offset by a poverty in domesticable animals. Indians throughout the
Americas kept dogs, and the natives of the Andes tamed the llama, but no other animal species of the Americas
proved amenable to domestication. Indian hunger for meat had to be met by hunting
wild game.

In the Old World, the situation was quite different. Plant sources of carbohydrates were
less robust, but Europeans, Africans, and Asians learned to domesticate a multitude of
useful animals—horses, pigs, cows, oxen, chickens, sheep, goats, and camels, among
others—which provided them with meat, milk, clothing and transportation.

The drawback of Old World civilizations' reliance upon domesticated animals came in
increased incidence of disease. Many of the world's nastiest illnesses derive from bugs
that have leapt back and forth between people and their animals. Humans caught
smallpox from their cows, influenza from their fowl, bubonic plague from the rats who
lived in their houses. By the time of Columbus, the Old World was wracked by endemic contagions of dozens of
deadly diseases, which kept life expectancies low and infant mortality rates high. Largely due to the ravages of
disease (especially bubonic plague), the population of Europe in 1492 was lower than it had been 200 years earlier.

Crossing the "Seams of Pangaea"

Columbus's ships, ferrying people, plants, animals, and diseases between the Old World and the New, instantly
reconnected ecosystems that had developed in complete isolation from one another for millennia. According to
historian Alfred Crosby, who developed the concept of the Columbian Exchange, the voyages of Columbus and his
successors re-knitted the torn "seams of Pangaea," which had ripped apart by continental drift millions of years
before. Suddenly, the separate ecologies of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres merged into a single, worldwide,
man-made ecosystem. The ecological effects were dramatic, and—in ways entirely unforeseen and misunderstood
by both Europeans and Indians at the time—they systematically favored the peoples of the Old World in their
encounters with Native Americans.

The profoundly uneven nature of the Columbian Exchange colored all subsequent American history.

Science  &  Technology  in  The  Columbian  Exchange  

Disease: The Greatest Conquistador

Jared Diamond, best-selling author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, popularized the
notion that European imperialism succeeded due to European advantages over
other people in the areas of, well... guns, germs, and steel. As far as
colonization of the Americas is concerned, though, guns and steel were all but
immaterial. The germs alone were enough.

The word "conquistador" evokes memories of Cortés and Pizarro, but in truth
the greatest conquistadors of the New World were smallpox and influenza—not
to mention typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, measles, scarlet fever, yellow fever,
and malaria.

Every one of these diseases, endemic to the Old World, spread to the
Americas after 1492 with catastrophic effects for indigenous people there. (In
return, the Americas afflicted the Old World with only one major affliction—
syphilis. And even that is in dispute; scientists and historians remain divided on
whether the disease truly originated in the New World.)

Old World diseases—lethal enough already on their continents of origin—

became exponentially more dangerous in America, where they spread as
virgin-soil epidemics among native populations totally lacking in immunities to
them. (In Europe and Africa, countless children died from diseases like smallpox and malaria; those who survived,
however, built up antibodies that inoculated them against adult infection. Since no Native Americans had ever
encountered these diseases, none built up any immunity, leaving entire populations as "virgin soil" for infection.
When the diseases struck, entire communities could be felled in a matter of days.)

Virgin-soil epidemics are among the deadliest phenomena ever experienced by humankind, and the death toll of the
pandemics unleashed in the Americas by the Columbian Exchange far exceeded that of history's most famous
virgin-soil epidemic, Europe's Black Death (an outbreak of bubonic plague in the 1340s). The cataclysmic effects of
virgin-soil epidemics struck Native American societies just as they faced the threat of European invasion, decisively
reducing the natives' capability to resist colonization. (It is worth noting that devastating smallpox pandemics struck
both the Aztecs and Incas just before their respective disastrous encounters with Cortés and Pizarro.)

Mississippian Mystery: De Soto and La Salle

Perhaps the most arresting evidence of the consequences of virgin-soil epidemics came from the entrada of
Hernando de Soto, who led an army of conquistadors deep into the North American mainland in 1539. De Soto
hoped to find gold in the country that today comprises the southeastern United States; he ended up leading more
than 600 men and hundreds of livestock on a four-year wild goose chase. In the end,
his mission proved to be a fiasco—two-thirds of the men, including De Soto himself,
died without ever finding a trace of gold—but De Soto's expedition powerfully illustrated
the destructive force of smallpox, which apparently spread from his pigs to the people
of the Mississippi Valley. Before leaving, De Soto's men recorded their impressions of
the Mississippian people—they found dense settlements, with large villages and cities
often sited within view of each other, separated by carefully tended fields of corn. After
De Soto left the country, no European returned for more than 100 years. When the
French explorer La Salle canoed down the Mississippi Valley in 1682, he found very
few villages, no cities, and no fields of corn, but instead a landscape almost devoid of
people and overrun by buffalo (which De Soto had apparently never encountered).

In the 140 years that passed between the explorations of De Soto and La Salle, something transformed the
Mississippi Valley from a densely populated Indian heartland into a virtually deserted wilderness. That something
was almost certainly smallpox. The landscape encountered by La Salle was not, as he believed, a primeval
wilderness, but rather an ecosystem that had recently experienced the sudden destruction of its keystone species—
Indians. The buffalo wandered in because few Indians survived to hunt them.

From Canada to the Tierra del Fuego, the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas suffered similar calamities, the
Columbian Exchange of diseases ravaging Indian communities and facilitating the European takeover of the
hemisphere.

Culture  in  The  Columbian  Exchange  

American Transplants and European Traditions

What we now consider to be the "traditional" cuisines of Europe are heavily flavored with the
products of the Columbian Exchange. Before 1492, the Italians—hard as it is to believe—ate
no tomatoes. The Irish ate no potatoes, the Spanish no peppers, the Swiss no chocolate.
For tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and cocoa—like corn, cassava, peanuts, avocados,
strawberries, pineapple, vanilla, and tobacco—are species native to the Western
Hemisphere, brought back to Europe for the first time
as the literal fruits of colonial success.
The rapid integration of American foodstuffs into European
recipes was only the most obvious of the cultural adaptations brought on by
the Columbian Exchange. On both sides of the Atlantic, people proved
remarkably willing to reorganize entire social structures to make better use of
previously unknown plants and animals.

Potatoes did not exist in Europe before 1492. They first appeared in Ireland
sometime in the late sixteenth century, and very quickly the starchy tubers—
high in calories, easy to cultivate, capable of rot-free storage in the ground—became the island's staple crop. The
increased nutrition provided by potatoes allowed Ireland's population to explode, from 1 million in the middle of the
seventeenth century to 8 million 200 years later. When a devastating potato blight struck the crop in the 1840s, the
result was mass starvation and an exodus of millions of desperate emigrants. The terrible consequences of the
Great Famine revealed, in tragic clarity, the incredible extent to which the potato—a favorite food of the Incas—had
become an indispensable part of Irish culture and society.
European Horses and Comanche Culture

American Indians integrated European species into their socio-cultural traditions

just as easily as vice versa. Horses were as alien to America in 1492 as potatoes
were to Ireland. It did not take long, following horses' introduction to the New World
by Spanish conquistadors, for Indians to appreciate the strange beasts' value in
transportation, hunting, and warfare. The horse transformed Indian societies, and
even created new Indian nations: The Comanche emerged as a distinct tribe
around 1700, breaking away from the Shoshone in order to adopt a new nomadic
lifestyle made possible only by the horse. The Comanche, who quickly developed
an unrivalled reputation for skilled horsemanship, soon came to dominate the
southern Great Plains. The horse—Europe's favorite domesticated animal—had
become an indispensable part of Comanche culture and society.

Today, nothing could seem more "traditional" than the Irish potato or the Comanche on horseback. Yet those
traditions are comparatively new, only made possible by the unprecedented ecological upheaval of the Columbian
Exchange.

Ideology  in  The  Columbian  Exchange  

Ecological Imperialism Precedes English Colonization

The English colonists who founded the colonies that would eventually become the United States joined the quest for
New World empires very late in the game. The first English attempts to colonize North America came a full century
after the Spanish inaugurated the Columbian Exchange. The colonists of Jamestown and Plymouth Plantation thus
arrived in landscapes—and among peoples—already heavily touched by the forces of ecological imperialism.

But they didn't know it.

When they arrived in America, English colonists found a landscape of great woods, abundant game, and relatively
few Indians. Their mistake was to assume that it had always been this way. The forests the colonists mistook for
primeval wilderness had in fact been more like orchards, carefully and deliberately shaped by Indian fires to provide
better sustenance for human populations. And the small nomadic tribes the colonists mistook for the timeless
inhabitants of those lands were, in fact, only the shattered survivors of history's worst population catastrophe.
European diseases, arriving in places like Massachusetts and the Chesapeake long before permanent European
settlers did, opened up the country for successful colonization.

Epidemic Disease and Manifest Destiny

Neither Europeans nor Indians had any scientific understanding of the ecological processes that had so profoundly
shaped their encounter. Both groups understood phenomena like agricultural abundance or epidemic disease in
spiritual terms, as the respective blessings or punishments of their gods.

Thus, the undeniable facts of the European-American encounter—that Indians seemed to be wasting away, opening
bounteous lands to the newcomers from across the Atlantic—acquired deep cultural and ideological meanings in the
minds of the colonists who eventually founded the United States. Not understanding the scientific processes at
work, Anglo-Americans interpreted their ongoing good fortune as proof of God's special endorsement of their nation.
For example, John Winthrop—Puritan elder and first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—perceived divine
blessing of the colonists' venture in the Indians' Great Dying: "For the natives," Winthrop wrote, "they are neere all
dead of Small poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess."3 A Frenchman on La Salle's voyage
down the Mississippi captured the idea even more bluntly: "Touching these savages, there is a thing I cannot omit to
remark to you, it is that it appears visibly that God wishes that they yield their place to new peoples."4

Through generations of successful colonization—in which the descendents of Europe built some of the world's
healthiest and wealthiest societies in the lands vacated by the Indians—white Americans' conviction that their
presence in America had received a special blessing from God only grew stronger. The cultural and ideological
origins of "manifest destiny" and "American exceptionalism" can be found in the exceptionally uneven terms of the
Columbian Exchange. Only recently have we become fully aware that the special advantages enjoyed by
Europeans in their encounter with Indians were bestowed less by God than by ecology.

Economy  in  The  Columbian  Exchange  

New World, New Foods

The Columbian Exchange of foods richly improved the European (and African) diet, not only by improving and
diversifying its taste but also, in a more basic sense, by simply increasing Old World societies' abilities to feed more
people. Starvation, which had long limited population growth in Europe and Africa, was largely overcome through
the transplantation of New World foods.

Three staple crops of the Western Hemisphere—corn, potatoes, and cassava—proved to be much more efficient
sources of carbohydrates than wheat, the old European standard. An acre of land planted in corn, potatoes, or
cassava yielded twice as many calories as an acre planted in wheat. The increased caloric output of farmers who
adopted New World crops helped to fuel a surge in Old World populations. In Ireland,
for example, widespread peasant farming of the potato allowed the population to
soar from barely one million in 1670 to more than 8 million by the time of the
infamous Potato Blight of the 1840s. Cassava, a tropical root plant, thrived in the
impoverished soils of equatorial Africa, helping to support a population boom in the
Congo. (Much of that new population would end up transplanted, involuntarily, to the
New World through the Atlantic slave trade.)

In the cases of both Irish potatoes and African cassava, New World plants
transplanted to Old World societies helped to sustain millions of lives—lives that were later used as reinforcements
in the European colonization of the Americas. Whether or not of their own free choice—largely not, in the case of
both Irish and Africans—millions of people nourished on American foods would eventually follow in Columbus's
footsteps to repopulate a New World whose native inhabitants had been decimated by disease.

At the same time, the colonies the Europeans established in the New World soon became efficient producers of not
only New World crops, but Old World transplants as well. Thus did North America become a key producer of not
only corn but also wheat, while the Caribbean and South America came to host the world's greatest plantations of
Old World cash crops such as sugar and coffee.

The Columbian Exchange of foodstuffs vastly increased the health and wealth of Europeans and their colonists in
the Americas.