COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE

Columbus’s voyages started the Columbian Exchange - a swap of peoples, plants, animals and diseases (NOT ideas – only physical stuff) that transformed both the Eastern and Western hemispheres.

The Americas and Eurasia had been separated for thousands of years before the 15th Century voyages of European nations (except for periodic reconnections in the far north during the era of Vikings). This period of separation resulted in great species divergence and evolution. The collision of the two hemispheres in 1492 began a whole new era of globalization as the two hemispheres were put into direct, consistent contact for the first time in history. The environmental impact of such a collision was enormous. Although both the East and West hemispheres of the planet benefitted from gaining access to new and useful plants and animals, there were also harmful effects, as diseases killed off Native American populations and new vermin, like mosquitoes and rats, were unintentionally spread across the Americas, with harmful effects to the plant and animal life of that hemisphere.

PLANTS

Thomas Jefferson once said that, “The greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.” By this standard, the Columbian Exchange was the greatest benefactor of all time, because by bringing the agriculture of Eurasia and the Americas into contact, it added many useful plants to each.

In Eurasia, each new cargo brought new changes. Some of the exotic new crops had humble beginnings; before the tomato made its way into the Italian diet, it was grown in fields by the Aztec empire. The potatoes grown by Incas were not welcomed at first either; Europeans were afraid because the potato looked similar to a poisonous plant that grew in Europe. But, packing more calories per acre than any European grain, the potato eventually became the dominant food of northern Europe’s working class. Spreading into East Asia, it helped fuel a huge boom in the population of China. A few of the other new plants that moved to Eurasia from the Americas were the cacao bean for chocolate, maize or corn, peanuts, and squash. Plants that came from Eurasia to the Americas included citrus fruits from the Mediterranean and Islamic civilizations, apples from northern Europe, sugar from Southeast Asia, and wheat.

Sugar cane was probably the crop with the most global impact. While originally a Southeast Asian plant, when transplanted to the Americas it thrived in tropical environments like the Caribbean and Brazil. However, it was an amazingly labor-intensive crop, which made reliance on slaves from West Africa for its production skyrocket. Scholars estimate that each ton of sugar cost the life on one worker in the Americas.

Eventually, the slave-based plantation system spread in more areas of the Americas, as slaves raised rice, indigo, and cotton. Africans brought their own crops to the Americas, and rice and yams were spread with the help of these slave populations.

Secondary Source:

“Huge population growth marked the success of the Chinese agricultural system and the benefits of newly imported crops. China’s numbers increased from 165 million in 1500 to 310 million in 1650. In 1720, Frenchman Pierre Poivre traveled to China and marveled at the country’s agricultural success. By Poivre’s time, markets, merchants, and the Chinese state made it possible to transport grain up to a thousand miles. Trade, innovation, and adaptation were changing the landscape of food in China. The slopes of southern China now grew American foods like sweet potatoes, beans, peanuts, cocoa, pineapple, squash, tomatoes and maize.”

(Robert Marks; Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China [Cambridge University Press, 1998]: 284–85.)

ANIMALS

For almost every purpose – meat, milk, leather, fiber, power, speed, agricultural uses and even manure – the AfroEurasian domesticated animals were of greater variety and use than the species available for domestication by the native peoples of North and South America. This gave European conquistadors, settlers, and traders that came to the Americas advantages like the ability to move quickly and utilize huge amounts of extra power in efforts like plowing and clearing land and running mills. Also, the direct contact of AfroEurasians with domesticated animals produced deadlier diseases in European populations. Years of contact with these endemic diseases meant that Europeans had more immunity built up to these diseases. The only significant domesticated animal of the native people of North America was the turkey. South America domesticated guinea pigs and llamas. Although hit extremely hard by diseases like smallpox, native peoples quickly adopted many of the new Eurasian livestock and took advantage of the new animals.

At first though, Cortez’s horses terrified the Aztecs. They bred quickly, and escaped horses created great herds ran wild from northern Mexico to Argentina within a century. Before the Spaniards brought horses to the Americas, buffalo were taken by stalking them on foot. They were then driven into traps or stampeded over cliffs. Tribes that existed for centuries on small game moved west to harvest buffalo, a task which the horse made easy. The Apache, especially, were a Native American tribe became powerful forces in the Southwest through their use of horses.

Pigs also increased their numbers dramatically. The 24 pigs that Diego Velazquez brought to the Caribbean jumped to 30,000 in only 16 years. The 13 pigs that Hernando DeSoto brought to Florida increased to 700 in 3 years. Descendants of DeSoto’s swine are still devouring wild plants and animals today. In the Arizona Ozark Mountains they are called “razorbacks.” Unfortunately, swine on the islands became one of the biggest pests that were imported to the Americas. They ate roots, snakes, grasses, lizards, fruit and baby birds and probably contributed to the extinction of hundreds of plants and animals never recorded.

Triangular Trade and Slavery

In the same period that the Columbian Exchange was occurring, a special trade route also arose called Triangular Trade. This new trade system was part of a larger system of trade being created on the Atlantic Ocean, which we call the Atlantic System. The Atlantic System connections allowed areas bordering the Atlantic to have an important trading system (like the IOMS) for the first time in world history. It was new in that it was centered on the Atlantic Ocean and linked together Europe, Africa, and the Americas in specific ways.

On the Europe to Africa leg of the journey, a ship was loaded with manufactured goods like guns and rum. It sailed from a port in Europe to a port in Africa’s western coast. The African kingdoms there, like Benin and Dahomey, were building their own empires and needed guns and rum to help fight their wars and cement their allies’ loyalty. There, the ship’s captain traded the cargo for Africans from the interior of the continent who had been captured as slaves by the empires of the coast.

The next leg of the journey, known as the Middle Passage, lasted several weeks. Slaves captured from the African interior were loaded into the slaver’s hold and shipped across The Atlantic. Over 80% of African slaves were shipped to the Caribbean and Brazil, areas where they did exceedingly labor intensive sugar production. Often in chains, slaves were packed tightly under the deck of the ship. The space given on the ship for each slave was about 5 feet long by 16 inches wide. Once in the Americas, Africans were either sold immediately to plantation owners or placed in stockades to be auctioned off at large sales.

To conclude the triangular trade, raw materials such as sugar, molasses, tobacco, and rum were loaded into the ship’s now empty hold and shipped to Europe to be sold to the rising middle classes, consumers with a sweet tooth.

The Numbers Game

The number of humans victimized by the slave trade was very high. Although estimates vary, about10 million Africans were supplied to plantations in the Western Hemisphere over a 400-year period, not counting the ones that died along the way. The greatest numbers were carried to the Caribbean and to Brazil, where the largest plantations were located. Smaller numbers were sent to British North America and Spanish MesoAmerica. The kind of slavery they were sold into is called chattel slavery and was done on a scale not seen in the past. Owning people as property was common in the pre-modern world, but using up people as a disposable product in order to create luxury products was different. Slaves sent to the Americas were socially isolated in a way that many slaves had not been in the past: they were completely cut off from the normal social institutions of the society around them, a process unfortunately made easier since all slaves belonged to one identifiable ethnic group, whereas slaves in the past were not all from one ethnic group. Lastly, the level of harshness was generally worse than past kinds of slavery, where slaves were used on a smaller scale for domestic work and less demanding agricultural labor. Not until the early nineteenth century did the slave trade begin to diminish, thanks partly to growing moral outrage against the sale of humans as personal property, and partly to the fact that the technology of the Industrial Revolution was making slavery obsolete.