The Columbian Exchange

The movement of peoples, animals, plants, manufactured goods, precious metals, and diseases between Europe, the New World, and Africa—the Columbian exchange—was one of the most dramatic transformations of ecology, agriculture, and ways of life in all of human history. Columbus started the process when he brought with him firearms, unknown in the Americas, and on his second voyage, horses, which had become extinct in the Americas, as well as pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, cattle, and various plants including wheat, melons, and sugarcane. Enslaved Africans, first brought to the Caribbean in 1503 to 1505, worked on sugarcane plantations, foreshadowing the development of a massive slave economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Chapter 17).

The Europeans also brought with them diseases. Amerindians died in catastrophic numbers because they lacked natural immunity from previous exposure. Smallpox first appeared in the New World in 1518; it and other epidemic diseases killed as many as 90 percent of natives in some places (though the precise numbers are unknown). Syphilis, or a genetic predecessor to it, came back with the explorers to Europe.

The Spanish also brought back tobacco, cacao (chocolate), sweet potatoes, maize, and tomato seeds, changing consumption patterns in Europe. (Their native American wives, concubines, and domestics taught them to drink chocolate in the native fashion: frothy, red in color, and flavored with peppers.) At the same time, Spanish and Portuguese slave traders brought these crops and others—such as manioc, capsicum peppers, pineapples, cashew nuts, and peanuts—from the Americas to West Africa, where their cultivation altered local agriculture and diets. The slavers bought African yams, sorghum, millet, and especially rice to feed the slaves in transit, and the slaves then grew those crops in the Americas. Thus the exchange went in every conceivable direction.