The Columbian Exchange: Goods Introduced by Europe, Produced in New World

The Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange: goods introduced by Europe, produced in New World

As Europeans traversed the Atlantic, they brought with them plants, animals, and diseases that changed lives and landscapes on both sides of the ocean. These two-way exchanges between the Americas and Europe/Africa are known collectively as the Columbian Exchange.

Of all the commodities in the Atlantic World, sugar proved to be the most important. Indeed, in the colonial era, sugar carried the same economic importance as oil does today. European rivals raced to create sugar plantations in the Americas and fought wars for control of production. Although refined sugar was available in the Old World, Europe’s harsher climate made sugarcane difficult to grow. Columbus brought sugar to Hispaniola in 1493, and the new crop thrived. Over the next century of colonization, Caribbean islands and most other tropical areas became centers of sugar production, which in turn fueled the demand to enslave Africans for labor.

The Columbian Exchange: from the New World to the Old World

Though of secondary importance to sugar, tobacco also had great value for Europeans as a cash crop—a crop cultivated for sale instead of personal consumption. Native Americans had been growing tobacco for medicinal and ritual purposes for centuries before European contact, believing tobacco could improve concentration and enhance wisdom. To some, its use meant achieving an entranced, altered, or divine state.

Tobacco was unknown in Europe before 1492, and it carried a negative stigma at first. The early Spanish explorers considered native people's use of tobacco to be proof of their savagery. However, European colonists then took up the habit of smoking, and they brought it across the Atlantic. Europeans ascribed medicinal properties to tobacco, claiming that it could cure headaches and skin irritations. Even so, Europeans did not import tobacco in great quantities until the 1590s. At that time, it became the first truly global commodity; English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese colonists all grew it for the world market.

Native peoples also introduced Europeans to chocolate, made from cacao seeds and used by the Aztec in Mesoamerica as currency. Mesoamerican Indians consumed unsweetened chocolate in a drink with chili peppers, vanilla, and a spice called achiote. This chocolate drink—xocolatl—was part of ritual ceremonies like marriage. Chocolate contains theobromine, a stimulant, which may be why native people believed it brought them closer to the sacred world.

The Columbian Exchange: from the Old World to the New World

The crossing of the Atlantic by plants like cacao and tobacco illustrates the ways in which the discovery of the New World changed the habits and behaviors of Europeans. Europeans changed the New World in turn, not least by bringing Old World animals to the Americas. On his second voyage, Christopher Columbus brought pigs, cows, chickens, and horses to the islands of the Caribbean. Many Native Americans used horses to transform their hunting and gathering into a highly mobile practice.

Travelers between the Americas, Africa, and Europe also included microbes: silent, invisible life forms that had profoundly devastating consequences. Native peoples had no immunity to Old World diseases to which they had never been exposed. European explorers unwittingly brought with them chickenpox, measles, mumps, and smallpox, decimating some populations and wholly destroying others. One disease did travel the other direction—syphilis, a lethal sexually transmitted disease, came with travelers from the New World to Europe for the first time.

The Columbian Exchange embodies both the positive and negative environmental and health results of contact as well as the cultural shifts produced by such contact.

Source: “The Columbian Exchange.” Khan Academy,

Environmental and health effects of European contact with the New World

Environmental changes

The European presence in America spurred countless changes in the environment, negatively affecting native animals as well as people. The popularity of beaver-trimmed hats in Europe, coupled with Indians’ desire for European weapons, led to the overhunting of beavers in the Northeast. Soon, beavers were extinct in New England, New York, and other areas. With their loss came the loss of beaver ponds, which had served as habitats for fish as well as water sources for deer, moose, and other animals. Furthermore, Europeans introduced pigs, which they allowed to forage in forests and other wildlands. Pigs consumed the foods on which deer and other indigenous species depended, resulting in scarcity of the game native peoples had traditionally hunted.

European ideas about owning land as private property clashed with natives’ understanding of land use. Native peoples did not believe in private ownership of land; instead, they viewed land as a resource to be held in common for the benefit of the group. Colonizers erected fields, fences, and other means of demarcating private property. Native peoples who moved seasonally to take advantage of natural resources now found areas off limits, claimed by colonizers.

Introduction of disease

Perhaps the single greatest impact of European colonization on the North American environment was the introduction of disease. Microbes to which native inhabitants had no immunity caused sickness and death everywhere Europeans settled. Along the New England coast between 1616 and 1618, epidemics claimed the lives of 75 percent of the native people. In the 1630s, half of the Huron and Iroquois people living near the Great Lakes died of smallpox. The very young and the very old were the most vulnerable and had the highest mortality rates. The loss of the older generation meant the loss of knowledge and tradition, while the death of children only compounded the trauma.

Some native peoples perceived disease as a weapon used by hostile spiritual forces, and they went to war to exorcise the disease from their midst. These “mourning wars” in eastern North America were designed to gain captives who would either be adopted or ritually tortured and executed to assuage the anger and grief caused by loss.

New plants make new medicines

European expansion in the Americas led to an unprecedented movement of plants across the Atlantic. A prime example is tobacco, which became a valuable export as the habit of smoking took hold in Europe. Another example is sugar. Columbus brought sugarcane to the Caribbean on his second voyage from Spain in 1493, and thereafter a wide variety of other herbs, flowers, seeds, and roots.

Notably, Europeans traveled to America to discover new medicines. The task of cataloging the new plants found there led to the emergence of the science of botany. Early botanists included the English naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, who traveled to Jamaica in 1687 and there recorded hundreds of new plants.

American Indians, who possessed a vast understanding of local New World plants and their properties, would have been a rich source of information for those European botanists seeking to find and catalog potentially useful plants. Enslaved Africans, who used medicinal plants in their native land, adapted to their new surroundings by learning the use of New World plants through experimentation and from the native inhabitants. Native peoples and Africans employed their knowledge effectively within their own communities.

Source: “Environmental and Health Effects of European Contact with the New World.” Khan Academy,

10 Tips for Designing Infographics

Assuming you’re not working for a media corporation with huge graphics and statistics departments at your disposal, you may want to create some infographics for your own articles. With today’s flood of information, infographics allow readers to quickly digest and understand complex data. A good infographic will not only inform readers, but will also create interest and convince people to read your article similar to how good headlines and photos attract readers. In contrast, both boring and overly complex graphics will quickly convince readers to ignore your article.

Here are 10 tips for designing better infographics:

1) Be Concise: Design your infographic to convey one idea really well. You’re not writing a scientific research paper, so don’t expect your reader to dig into a lot of detail. This doesn’t mean you should only visualize one number, but your entire graphic should support one of the major points from the article. You can include additional facts or information to make the infographic stand on its own, but don’t lose sight of the point you want to get across.

This example is an infographic poster I created about the caffeine content in drinks. At this size, you can easily tell which drinks have more or less caffeine, and if you decide to view the higher-resolution image you can dig deeper into the details and additional information that’s included in the poster.

2) Be Visual: Design your infographic with your final for viewing size in mind. A number of articles online require the viewers to click on a text link to view the graphics that accompany an article, and I believe this is a huge mistake. Design your graphics to be viewed in-line with your article. There’s nothing wrong with allowing viewers to click the image to see a high-resolution version, but they should be able to understand the image when viewed with the article. A side benefit is that a viewable image also allows for readers to share the image by itself on social media sites easily.

3) Be Smarter: Build your data and explanation right into the infographic, and don’t make your readers have to work hard to understand what they’re seeing. Your infographic shouldn’t need a legend to be understandable, and there’s no reason to ask your readers to keep moving their eyes back and forth between the chart and the legend to understand the graphic. Treat your readers as intelligent and make your graphic look professional by including the relevant descriptions and numbers in the infographic.

4) Be Transparent: Infographics can be used to lead readers to the wrong conclusions. Always cite your data sources and allow readers to dig deeper into the data if they have the desire. Some of the best articles include easy access to the source data with links to a spreadsheet for readers to view on their own.

5) Be Different: If you can avoid it, don’t use a bar chart, a line chart or a pie chart. This infographic of visualization styles is a great resource to help determine a good visual to use for your data. The different styles are grouped together by the type do data they are trying to communicate and in the interactive version, an example is shown as you mouse over each style.

6) Be Accurate: Remember your geometry and visualize differences using area. When trying to convey the scale of your data, many graphics use different sized shapes or images to show amounts relative to each other. The reader’s eye sees the total area of the image as indicative of scale, not just the height of the image.

For example, if you’re using circles to show one number is 3 times larger than another, the area of the circle must be in proportion to the values being represented. If you make the mistake of making the diameter of the circle 3 times larger, the area is actually 9 times larger.

The infographic below breaks down the number of FedEx trucks using the area of the circles in a mind map style image. This could have been a simple bar chart, but it’s much more visually appealing as a bubble mind map.

NOTE: One common exception to this is a standard bar chart. No matter how wide the bars are, the height is the only dimension that conveys meaning.

7) Be Attractive: Include visuals: Illustrations and photos included in the infographic make a big difference. Even though this example is a bar chart, the inclusion of the company logos make it quicker and easier for the reader to understand.

8) Be Varied: Find a good visual style that’s right for the data you’re trying to share. If your data is about countries, plot it on a world map not a bar chart that lists countries. Also, don’t be afraid to mix visualization styles together in one infographic.

This example infographic by Emily Schwartzman about the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti won a design contest from GOOD Magazine, and mixes map data with a stacked bar and colored boxes for percentages. This is also a great example of viewing size. You can see and understand the visuals, but the actual numbers are available if you view the high-resolution version.

9) Be Gracious: Work on the assumption that your infographic may be viewed or shared without the article you originally designed it for. Make sure that the final graphic includes the following pieces:

• Copyright, to be explicit about any rights and terms of use

• Source data, so anyone can check your facts

• Designer’s name, always give credit to the artist/illustrator/programmer/designer

• Original image/article address, so anyone who sees the image can find your original article

10) Be Creative: Use whatever tools you have available to create your infographic. Of course, the tools you use will depend on what you are trying to visualize. Many infographics can be created using simple applications like a vector drawing program (like OmniGraffle or Microsoft Visio), a charting program (like Microsoft Office or Apple iWork) or an image editing program (like Adobe Photoshop).

Source: Krum, Randy. “10 Tips for Designing InfoGraphics.” San Fran Beat, 24 Apr. 2010, digitalnewsgathering.wordpress.com/author/rtkrum/.

Randy Krum is the author of the Cool Infographics blog that highlights some of the best examples of data visualizations and infographics found in magazines, newspapers and on the Internet. The Cool Infographics blog has quickly grown to be one of the top sites in the information design industry. Randy was interviewed by the Society of News Design (SND) in 2008 and an excerpt of the interview was published on the SND Update blog.