Columbian Exchange

Matt Price

Histories of Contact

  • early histories of European expansion generally tried to explain the European conquest of America (& then much of the rest of the world) on the basis of some innate superiority of european "races"
  • in late Twentieth Century, Alfred Crosby (Crosby & McNeill, 2003) introduced a new argument: that the encounter between indigenous Americans & Europeans had an irreducible biological component that had nothing to do with "superiority" as it had been understood
  • Instead, the contact between two continental systems involved an exchange of biological material with tremendous consequences.
  • This "Columbian Exchange" – in both directions – changed the whole world

The Exchange

  • Europeans brought Old World organisms to the new world, both purposely and by accident
  • They also appropriated New World organisms and brought them back to Asia, Africa, and to a lesser extent Europe
  • Finally, they settled in the New World, adopting American foods and customs, and also intermarrying
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Figure 1: Some Columbian Exchanges (cf. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - OpenStax CNX)

Disease

  • Eurasian and African peoples had domesticated large numbers of mammalian and avian species
  • By contrast, few American peoples had done so
  • relatively few large population centres in the Americas (though there were still a good number!)
  • As a result, many fewer zoonotic diseases were endemic to the Americas
  • Europeans brought: smallpox, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, bubonic plague, typhus, and malaria
  • We don't know exactly how much death was due to disease and how much due to brutality/intentional genocide, but various sources of evidence suggest indigenous population crashed by 80-95% after European contact (Liebmann, 2021)
  • in the other direction, much less damage, because of the relatively small reservoir of novel infectious agents

Peoples

  • Europeans, having murdered, dispossessed, and enslaved indigenous peoples, settled on their stolen land
  • the extractive economy required tremendous labour; like the earliest agricultural societies, they relied on slave labour for the hardest work.
  • Existing slave-trading networks were rerouted to the Americas and dramatically expanded. We'll learn more about that next week.

Foods

  • Europeans brought crops but especially livestock to New World.
    • sheep and especially cows had a devastating effect on natural ecosystems.
    • horses had important military consequences for native peoples
    • eventually, tropical crops from Africa became important in New World, especially coffee, sugar and (really in c. 19) bananas
  • They also took many foods back to Old World:
    • Maize, squash, potatoes: dramatically increase caloric production of esp. Asian agriculture
    • chili peppers, tomatoes, chocolate radically transformed cuisine in India,
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Figure 2: Cattle rampaging through Americas
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Figure 3: Maize, most important import to Old World
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Figure 4: Cacao Bean Pod

A Transformed World

  • Both hemispheres transformed forever by Columbian Exchange
  • huge shift in Old World power balance
  • immense disruption to American Indigenous ways of life
  • New "hybrid" cultures, traditions, arise all around the world

Sources

Crosby, A. W., & McNeill, P. J. R. (2003). The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. ABC-CLIO, LLC. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utoronto/detail.action?docID=4543926
Earle, R. (2009). European cuisine and the Columbian exchange: introduction. Food & History, 7(1), 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1484/j.food.1.100632
Freedman, P. (2007). Food: the history of taste (No. 21). University of California Press.
Liebmann, M. (2021). Colonialism and Indigenous Population Decline in the Americas. In The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas. Routledge.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - OpenStax CNX. https://cnx.org/contents/NgBFhmUc@1.9:_z1Sen9U/1-5-%F0%9F%94%8E-Columbian-Exchange
Nunn, N., & Qian, N. (2010). The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 24(2), 163–188. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.24.2.163
Pilcher, J. M. (2017). Food in World History (Second). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315718941