The Columbian Exchange
What is the Columbian Exchange?
The massive
exchange of
agricultural goods,
slave labor,
communicable
diseases, and ideas
between the Eastern
and Western
Hemispheres after
1492.
First Voyage, Departure for the New World,
August 3, 1492
Positive Impacts
• The Columbian
Exchange is one of the
most significant results
of the Age of
Exploration and the
First Global Age.
• positive--new food
supplies, livestock and
better diets
World Impact
• For millions of years
before Columbus, each
continent was vastly
different from the others
due to the separation of
the oceans
• Exploration greatly
affected almost every
society on earth
Christopher Colombus map. Lisbon, workshop of
Bartolomeo and Christopher Colombus, c.1490
Columbian Exchange - Animals
Columbian Exchange - Animals
Example …
• The horse changed the
lives of many Native
American tribes on the
Great Plains
• Allowed them to shift to
a nomadic lifestyle
based on hunting bison
on horseback.
Planting in the New World
• New world: CORN …
provides little nutrition
and must be planted
individually
• Old world: millet, oat, rye,
rice … scatter the seeds
for planting, more
nutritional value
• WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
Germs and Disease
Germs and Disease
People
• Within decades of
Columbus' voyages, the
trans Atlantic slave
trade had begun
• The Spanish brought
African slaves to work
on sugar plantations
• Slave trade would
continue until the late
1800s – American Civil
War
Food for thought …
• Why have some historians contended that
Europeans’ most powerful weapons were not
bullets, but rather the germs, weeds, and animals
that accompanied them to the Americas?
• How does the Columbian Exchange complicate
your notions of food and culture?
• Consider that before 1492 …
– no potatoes were grown in Ireland
– Italian cuisine had no tomatoes or bell peppers
– the Plains Indians lacked horses