Lecture 6 - The Impacts of the Columbian Exchange

Back to the Americas: The Problem of Numbers - More Recent Interpretations

• Begins with Henry F. Dobyns’ article “Estimation Aboriginal American Population” Current Anthropology vol.7 (1966)…which “left a crater in anthropology”

• His conclusion? The role of infectious disease was enormous - truly massive - in reducing native populations

Big Population Numbers? - Evidence

• Spaniards recorded many epidemics in the 1500s (typhus, influenza, smallpox, diphtheria, measles)

• How many people did these hit? Dobyns calculated a pre-contact population of 112 million

• Evidence of depopulation before contact? George Vancouver’s records of the Pacific Coast

• This meant that old calculations were based on LOWS, not AVERAGES

Built Civilizations in North America

• 1539: de Soto’s expedition in the SE United States - 200 horses, 600 men, 200 pigs…

• …the “well-peopled lands” through which the Spaniards passed

• 1682 - Europeans reappeared (the French)…and they find emptiness

• What had happened?

• Almost certainly it was the pigs’ fault…the problem of zoonosis

Caddoan People

Population before European contact? 200,000

After? 8,500

Cahokia

• This was the largest American city north of the Rio Grande - maybe 50,000 people

• Who built it? Surely not “Indians”?!

• Cahokia, “Indians,” and the place of Indigenous peoples in our consciousness today

Evidence from the South: a Built Environment in Amazonia

• Preamble: archaeology and the “culture wars”

• What is a built environment?

• The Theory: native peoples in the Amazon were not restricted to small, hunter gatherer/semi-nomadic groups (as previously thought). Instead their environments to support population-dense, urban centers

Pre-Contact Amazonia

• Beginning in the 1980s excavations revealed many complex urban settlements; Population estimates in what are now determined to be fully agricultural societies are roughly ca. 10-20 million

• Foundation for all this? Agricultural, managed, Terra Preta soil

• Why did it take so long for this conceptual leap to develop? → archaeological limitations and frankly, “our” view of “them” - the place of Amazonian natives in colonizing culture

Americas to Europe

Tobacco, Quinine, Sweet Potato, Avocado, Peppers, Cassava, Peanut, Potato, Tomato, Corn, Beans, Vanilla

Europe to Americas

Coffee Bean, Peach, Pear, Citrus Fruits, Honeybee, Grains: wheat, rice, barley, oats, Livestock: cattle, sheep, pig, horse, Disease: smallpox, influenza, typhus, measles, malaria, diphtheria, whooping cough

The Beginnings of Global Population Growth

Columbian Exchange produces better diet, etc. → global population rise

• 1500 = 425 m

• 1600 = 550 m (+25%)

• 1700 = 610 m (+12%)

• 1750 = 720 m (+20%)

Phase 1: Empires of Conquest

• Primarily Spanish and Portuguese empires of 1500s/1600s

• Goal: extraction of key resources (gold, silver)

• Intentional enviro-impact small (though as we have seen, the Columbian exchange has serious impacts)

Phase 2: Mercantile Empires

• These were phenomena primarily of the 1600s/1700s, involving GB, France, Holland

• Bullion still important, but commodity production begins to rival it → esp. the commodity of SUGAR

• Environmental impact is quite significant (in the form of the monoculture plantation economy)

Phase 3: Industrial Empires

• A phenomenon of the 1800s-1900s

• Europeans use their dramatic technological advances to control large parts of the globe

• Cash crops grow to include “industrial” products (rubber, hemp, etc.)

• Industrial raw materials increasingly exploited for the benefit of industrialized economies

Capital Accumulation; or How to Create the Third World

• The Atlantic Triangle is an early example of the process, but it’s refined an improved later on (even today)

• Key to success: ships are never empty; value is added at each leg; that value is generated for European purposes and enriches Europe

Industrial Empires & Capitalism

• 1800s - 1900s phenomenon → Europeans use their dramatic technological advantages to control large parts of the globe

• Direct slavery no longer employed for labor; instead, informal levers are used to transfer wealth to Europe → an example is the destruction of India’s cloth industry

• List of industrial crops/primary production and extractive processes persist through the 19^th and 20^th centuries

Intentional Biological Exchanges

• Europeans began to experiment with biological exchange for commercial or political purposes - a nice parable of this process concerns the breadfruit tree

Developing the World Economy

• 1850 and after: A global economic system comes into being

• Only after this point did “Third World” standards of living begin to fall behind those of industrializing countries (or maybe it’s the other way around)

• The debate has been whether the West caused the gap through its exploitation…

• …but perhaps we should ask another question: are the environmental costs of that exploitation bearable into the future?

Environmental Impact of European Imperialism

• Entire regional economies and societies are disrupted by the process of integration;

- foods need to be imported to feed farmers growing cash crops not intended for local consumption;

- The product is designed to benefit the Wet, not the local producers

• Environmental effects and costs are borne locally