Title:
Columbian Exchange. By: Crosby, Alfred W., Berkshire Encyclopedia of World
History, 2005, Vol. 2
Database:
History Reference Center
HTML Full Text
Columbian Exchange
Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.
Old and New Worlds: People, Crops, & Animals
Separation of the Old and New Worlds: Disease
1492 and the Old World
Further Reading
Two hundred million years ago the continents of Earth were massed together
contiguously. There was maximum opportunity for terrestrial species to migrate and
therefore a higher degree of biotic uniformity than later. Then the continents split, drifted
away from each other, and thereafter each continent's species evolved independently.
North America and Asia reconnected several times in the far north and so share many
species, but there are many contrasts between the two; the Old World, for example, has
such native species as nightingales and cobras, which the New World does not share,
while the New World has hummingbirds and rattlesnakes, not present in the Old World.
Contrasts between South America and the Old World are especially dramatic; in the
former one finds nose-waggling tapirs, whereas in the latter one finds nose-waggling
elephants.
Old and New Worlds: People, Crops, & Animals
Ten thousand years ago the most recent ice age ended, the continental glaciers melted,
and sea levels rose, dividing the Old and New Worlds once again. Before that a number
of species had passed between the two, the most influential of which was the Old World
anthropoid Homo sapiens. Thereafter the peoples of the Old World and the Americas
evolved separately. The genetic differences that resulted were minor, but the cultural
differences were major because the two peoples took different paths in exploiting their
different environments.
Both invented agriculture — that is, the domestication of crops and of livestock — but
two very different systems of agriculture. The Native Americans probably arrived from
Asia with the dog and were therefore familiar with the concept of tame animals, but
domesticated few creatures in America, possibly because there were few suitable. Those
they domesticated included the llama and alpaca, the guinea pig, and several species of
fowl. The Native Americans excelled as farmers, developing one third or so of all of
today's most important food crops: maize, beans of several kinds, the white and sweet
potatoes, manioc (cassava), squashes and pumpkins, peanuts, papayas, guavas, avocados,
pineapples, tomatoes, chilies, sunflower seeds, and others.
Not surprisingly, Old World indigenes, of whom there were many more than Native
Americans and who lived in a wider expanse of land and participated in a greater variety
of ecosystems, domesticated more kinds of animals and plants. Horses, donkeys, cattle,
pigs, sheep, goats, chickens (today's protagonists of our barnyards and meadows and our
chief sources of meat, milk, leather, and animal fiber) are all Old World in origin. The
same is true of wheat, barley, rye, oats, rice, peas, turnips, sugarcane, onions, lettuce,
olives, bananas, peaches, pears, and many other stock items of our diets today.
Separation of the Old and New Worlds: Disease
The Old World outdid the New as a source of infectious diseases, too. The bigger number
of people in a greater variety of ecosystems were bound to have a greater variety of
diseases, especially because they lived in close contact with their livestock. The
intermixing of Old World humans across Eurasia and Africa, and their propinquity with
their animals, produced many of the historically most significant diseases. An
undoubtedly incomplete list columbian exchange 387 includes smallpox, measles,
influenza, malaria, yellow fever, and typhus. Pre-Columbian Amerindians had
tuberculosis and treponematosis (having probably brought the latter with them from the
Old World) and cultivated, unintentionally, new infections in America, including Chagas
Disease, but their indigenous diseases were few and mild compared with those native to
the Old World. (Syphilis is often nominated as a distinctively American infection, but
that is debatable.)
When Christopher Columbus brought the Old and New Worlds together in 1492, he
unleashed the organisms of each on the other. The most spectacular early result of the
intermixing was the traumatic spread of Eastern Hemisphere infections among the Native
Americans. The European conquest of the Americas was not so much a matter of
brutality, though there was plenty of that, as of imported diseases. Smallpox figures
significantly in the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru, and again and again
throughout the Americas. The Native American population fell by as much, claim highly
respected demographic historians, as 90 percent before beginning recovery.
On the other hand, Old World plants and animals immensely increased the capacity of
America to support in time large human populations. Horses, pigs, and cattle, for
instance, went feral from Florida to the Argentine pampa and within a century had
propagated into the millions. Old World livestock revolutionized human life and whole
ecosystems in the Americas. Meat had been a rare item in the diets of the vast peasantries
of the advanced Amerindian societies. After the Columbian Exchange it became
common in many regions and in the others, if not common, at least more available than
before.
There had been no beasts of burden in the Americas except the dog and the llama. The
pyramids and other monuments of the high American civilizations were raised by human
muscle. If the burro had been the only domesticated animal brought to Mexico by the
invaders, it alone would have revolutionized indigenous societies there.
The impact of the horse on Native American societies was particularly spectacular. Many
Amerindians who had been strictly pedestrian became equestrian. From approximately
1750 to 1800, the native peoples of North America's Great Plains (Blackfoot, Sioux,
Cheyenne, Comanche, Pawnee, and others) and of South America's pampas (Pehuenches,
Puelches, Tehuelches, Ranqueles, and others), all took to the horse.
Old World crops did not at first advance in the New World as rapidly as Old World
livestock — they were, after all, not mobile — but also because most of them were
temperate-zone plants not suited to Europe's earliest American colonies, which were all
in the tropics. But European colonists adjusted, imported suitable species such as
sugarcane, for instance, and suitable varieties of homeland crops, and sowed them where
the soils and climates were similar to those at home. They discovered that wheat
prospered in the Mexican high country, for example. Olive trees and grapes for wine did
well in Peru. Within a century of Columbus most of the Old World's important crops
were growing in America.
Among the most profitable was sugarcane, the source of a quasi-addictive substance:
sugar. The market for sugar in Europe seemed endlessly expansive for centuries, and
therefore sugarcane became the single most important crop in the West Indies, Brazil,
and other hot, wet regions in or contiguous to the American tropics. The planting,
cultivation, harvesting, and processing of the cane required millions of laborers. The
Amerindian populations were plummeting, and European immigrants were in short
supply. The workers had to come from some untapped source. The single most powerful
force driving the Atlantic slave trade was the sugar plantations' need for laborers. An
estimated 12.5 million Africans were commandeered to work American soils, a majority
of them, certainly a plurality, to raise an Old World sweet in the New World for Old
World consumption.
1492 and the Old World
Amerindian livestock did not revolutionize life in the Old World. Guinea pigs and
turkeys have never figured significantly in Europe, Asia, or Africa as food sources, and
the llama was so obviously inferior to several Old World animals as a beast of burden
that it has never had more than novelty value in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Amerindian crops, however, had enormous effect on the Old World. Most of those which
became standard in Old World diets were brought back by the Spanish and Portuguese to
Iberia, where they were being cultivated by the sixteenth century; they spread out from
there. Some would flourish where Old World crops would not; manioc, for instance,
where the rainfall was too much or too little, the soil infertile, and the pests too voracious
for traditional staples like rice and yams. Several American foods were more nourishing,
more productive, and easier to cultivate and to harvest than traditional Old World crops.
Maize became a standard crop in sub-Saharan Africa, in some regions the most important
crop.
The white potato, from the high, wet, cool Andes, became one of the most important food
sources for the lower classes of northern Europe. In Ireland it became indispensable for
the peasantry, and when, in the 1840s, an American fungus, Phytophthora infestans,
arrived and destroyed the potato crop, a million died of starvation and disease and a
million and a half fled the country.
The list of examples of the influence of the Columbian exchange in the Old World diets
is a long one; it includes the tomato in Italian cuisine, the chili in Indian recipes, the
presence of maize in most sub-Saharan African diets, and so forth. By way of illustrative
example, let us consider the story of American food crops in a land usually thought of as
resistant to outside influences: China. No Old World people adopted these alien plants
faster than the Chinese.
The eagerness with which the Chinese received American foods is related to population
pressure. Between 1368 and 1644, the years of the Ming dynasty, the Chinese population
doubled at the same time that farmers of the traditional staples, wheat in the north and
rice in the south, were running into problems of diminishing returns. They were close to
raising as much food as they could on suitable land using existing techniques. The
problem may have been especially pressing in the south, where most of the level and
near-level land close to markets and sources of water for irrigation was already occupied
by rice paddies.
The Spanish and the Portuguese, both with American empires, carried the Amerindian
crops to East Asia. The port of Manila, newly Spanish and only a few days' sail from the
China coast, played a major role in the transfer of native American crops to China. Sweet
potatoes, a calorically rich food, arrived in China some time in the last years of the
sixteenth century. This crop did well in inferior soils, tolerated drought, resisted insect
pests, and prospered with little care compared with existing staples such as paddy rice.
By 1650 sweet potatoes were common in Guangdong and Fujian provinces and well on
the way to becoming the staple of the poorer peasants wherever climate would allow.
Maize arrived in China even before the mid-sixteenth century. It, too, was hardy and
required no more attention and strength in weeding and harvesting than children could
provide. It produced food faster than most crops and provided high amounts of calories. It
soon became a common secondary crop from Shanxi in the northwest to Yunnan in the
southwest and eventually a primary crop in several inland provinces.
Peanuts, growing in China at least as early as 1538, have always been considered a
novelty food in the West, but became a common item in Chinese meals. Peanuts provide
plenty of calories and oil, and as they grow enrich the soil with nitrogen.
According to the demographic historian Ho Ping-ti, "During the last two centuries when
rice culture was gradually approaching its limit, and encountering the law of diminishing
returns, the various dry land food crops introduced from America have contributed most
to the increase in national food production and have made possible a continual growth in
population" (Ho 1959, 191-192). That statement applies as well to most of humanity in
the Eastern Hemisphere.
See also Biological Exchanges
Honor sinks where commerce long prevails. • OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1749-1832)
Further Reading
Cook, N.D. (1998). Born to die: Disease and New World conquest, 1492-1650.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Crosby, A.W. (1986). Ecological imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 9001900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Crosby, A.W. (1994). Germs, seeds, and animals. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Crosby, A.W. (2003). The Columbian exchange: Biological and cultural consequences of
1492. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
Denevan, W. M. (1992). The native population of the Americas in 1492 (2nd ed).
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Ho, P. (1959). Studies on the population of China, 1368-1953. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Kinealy, C. (1995) The great calamity: The Irish famine, 1845-1852. Boulder, CO:
Roberts Rinehart Publishers.
Kiple, K. F. (Ed.). (1993). The Cambridge world history of human disease. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Mazumdar, S. (1999). The impact of New World food crops on the diet and economy of
India and China, 1600-1900. In R. Grew (Ed.), Food in global history (pp. 58-78).
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Mintz, S.W. (1985). Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history. New
York: Penguin Books.
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By Alfred W. Crosby