Crops that Grew the World

Vocabulary terms and historical concepts from Bennett Sherry's text on the Columbian Exchange and the global impact of plant transfers.

Islamic Green Revolution

An agricultural transformation from the eighth to thirteenth centuries in which Arab empires connected cultures from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, spreading farming techniques and crops such as sugar, coffee, rice, and citrus fruits.

Alfred Crosby

The environmental historian who argued that the most significant and transformative effect brought about by European conquests after 1492 was biological rather than political.

Afro-Eurasia

A geographic term referring collectively to the interconnected continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia.

Columbian Exchange

The biological transfer of plant species, agriculture, populations, and diseases between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia that began after Christopher Columbus arrived in the Bahamas in 1492.

Staple crops

The primary, most important food crops—such as potatoes and maize—that supply essential calories and nutrition, enabling global populations to grow.

Antoine Parmentier

A French scholar who campaigned to promote the potato from feed reserved for pigs and livestock into a recognized national food staple.

Cash crops

Agricultural crops—such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cacao—grown primarily for sale and maximum economic profit rather than for direct subsistence.

Monoculture

The farming practice of growing large quantities of a single plant species across a vast expanse of agricultural land.

Plantation system

An agricultural system that forced enslaved people to cultivate large-scale fields of monoculture cash crops to supply global trading networks.

Irish Famine of 1845

A catastrophic agricultural disaster in Ireland where a plant disease destroyed the staple monoculture potato crop, resulting in the starvation of millions.