The Columbian Exchange (book)

At the same time that European diseases, like smallpox, devastated the people living in America, European animals like horses, cows, and sheep came to the Americas and flourished. Plant foods indigenous to the Americas like tomatoes, potatoes, peanuts, and chili peppers went to Europe. This transfer is called the Columbian Exchange.

Smallpox had the most devastating effect on the Americas. Only someone suffering and outbreak can transmit smallpox, which is contagious for about a month.

Although no plants or animals had an effect as immediate as smallpox, the columbian exchange in plants and animals indelibly altered the landscape, diets, and populations histories of both the Americas and Afro-Eurasia.

On his 2nd voyage in 1493, Columbus carried cuttings of European plants, including wheat, melons, sugar cane, and other fruits and vegetables. He also brought pigs, horses, sheep, goats, and cattle.

While smallpox traveled from Europe to the Americas, there’s evidence that syphilis traveled the opposite direction. The 1st well-documented outbreaks of syphilis in Europe occurred around 1495, and one physician claimed that Columbus’ men brought it to Madrid soon after 1492. No European skeletons with signs of syphilis before 1500 have been found but an Amerindian skeleton with syphilis has, suggesting that the disease did indeed move from the Americas to Europe.

Assessing the loss of Amerindian life from smallpox and other European diseases has caused much debate among historians because no population statistics exist for the Americas before 1492. For the entire period of European colonization in all parts of the Americas, guesses as the total death toll from European diseases, based on controversial estimates of pre-contact populations, range from a low of 10 million to a high of over 100 million.

By 1600, extremely successful agricultural enterprises had spread through the Americas. One was sugar, and the other was cattle raising, which took advantage of huge expanses of grasslands in Venezuela and Colombia, from Mexico north to Canada, and in Argentina and Uruguay.

As European food crops transformed the diet of those living in the Americas, so too did American food crops transform the eating habits of people in Afro-Eurasia. American food crops moved into West African, particularly moderns Nigeria, where even today people eat corn, peanuts, squash, cassava, and sweet potatoes.

2 crops in particular played an important role throughout Afro-Eurasia: corn and potatoes. Both produced higher yields than wheat and grew in less desirable fields, such as on the slopes of hills. Although few people anywhere in the world preferred corn or potatoes to their original wheat-based or rice-based diet, if the main crop failed, hungry people gratefully ate the American transplants. By the 18th century, corn and potatoes had reached as far as India and China, and the population in both places increased markedly.