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The Columbian Exchange (also sometimes known as The Grand Exchange) has been one of the significant events in the history of world ecology, agriculture, and culture. The term is used to describe the enormous widespread exchange of agricultural goods, livestock, slave labor, communicable diseases, and ideas between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres that occurred after 1492. That year, Christopher Columbus' first voyage launched an era of large-scale contact between the Old and the New World that resulted in this ecological revolution: hence the name "Columbian" Exchange.
Exchange
This exchange of plants and animals transformed European, American, African, and Asian ways of life. Foods that had never been seen before by some peoples became staples, as new growing regions opened up for crops. For example, before 1492, no potatoes were grown outside of South America. By the 1800s, Ireland was so dependent on the potato that a disease-based crop led to the devastating Irish Potato Famine. The first European import, the horse, changed the lives of many Native American tribes on the Great Plains, allowing them to shift to a nomadic lifestyle based on hunting bison on horseback. Tomato sauce, made from New World tomatoes, became an Italian trademark, while coffee from Africa and sugarcane from Asia became the main crops of extensive Latin American plantations. Before the Columbian Exchange, there were no oranges in Florida, no bananas in Ecuador, no paprika in Hungary, no zuchini in Italy, no pineapples in Hawaii, no rubber trees in Africa, no cattle in Texas, no burros in Mexico, no chile peppers in Thailand, no cigarettes in France and no chocolate in Switzerland. Even the dandelion was brought to America by Europeans for use as an herb. Before regular communication had been established between the two hemispheres, the varieties of domesticated animals and infectious diseases were both strikingly larger in the Old World than in the New. This led, in part, to the devastating effects of Old World diseases on Native American populations. The smallpox epidemics probably resulted in the highest death toll for Native Americans. (See article: Population history of American indigenous peoples)
Scarcely any society on earth remained unaffected by this global ecological exchange. Since the voyages of Columbus and his successors, no kitchen or garden has ever been the same.
| Pre-Columbian distribution of organisms with close ties to humans | ||
| Type of organism | Old World list (what they had) | New World list (what they had) |
| Domesticated animals |
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| Domesticated plants |
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| Infectious diseases |
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See also
Articles
Lists
Sources
The Columbian Exchange: Plants, Animals, and Disease between the Old and New Worlds by Alfred W. Crosby
Worlds Together, Worlds Apart by Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, Stephen Kotkin, et al.
"Columbian Exchange"