101 Developing Patterns of Atlantic World Exchange

1450–1700

Imagine the sensation coursing through an Iroquois’s body as he spied a European for the first time. What thrill of excitement, wonder, or terror must have seized him, transfixed by a foreboding of change and conflict? The early history of America is very much the story of such encounters. In the Atlantic world during the era of colonization, three richly diverse civilizations (Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans) met and engaged in a lively exchange of goods, peoples, diseases, and ideas that would transform the lives of all involved and shape the formation of North American colonial societies.

The patterns of exchange that emerged resulted in a cultural cross-fertilization as the three groups influenced and were influenced by contact with each other. Europeans and Native Americans traded foods, goods, and cultural assumptions that impacted the diets, trade networks, and worldviews of each. Enslaved Africans brought to the Americas against their will adapted their complex cultural traditions to New World experiences, in turn influencing both Europeans and Native Americans. This exchange left none unaffected, but the benefits were unequally felt, as enslaved Africans knew immediately and as Native Americans discovered when imported European germs decimated their numbers. The colonial societies that emerged on the North American continent were forged by this dynamic exchange.