Columbian Exchange

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Inca-era terraces on Taquile are used to grow traditional Andean staples, such as quinua and potatoes, alongside wheat, a European import.

The Columbian Exchange (also sometimes known as The Grand Exchange) has been one of the significant events in the history of world ecology, agriculture, and culture. The term is used to describe the enormous widespread exchange of plants, animals, foods, human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases, and ideas between the Eastern and Western hemispheres that occurred after 1492. Many new and different goods were exchanged between the two hemispheres of the Earth, and it began a new revolution in the Americas and in Europe. In 1492, Christopher Columbus' first voyage launched an era of large-scale contact between the Old and the New World that resulted in this ecological revolution: hence the name "Columbian" Exchange.

The Coumbian Exchange greatly affected almost every society on earth, bringing destructive diseases that depopulated many cultures, and also circulating a wide variety of new crops and livestock that, in the long term, increased rather than diminished the world human population. Maize and potatoes became a very important crop in Eurasia by the 1700's. Peanuts and manioc flourished in tropical southeast Asian and west African soils that otherwise would not produce large yields or support large populations.

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This exchange of plants and animals transformed European, American, African, and Asian ways of life. Foods that had never been seen before by some peoples became staples of their diets, as new growing regions opened up for crops. For example, before 1492, no potatoes were grown outside of South America. By the 1840s, Ireland was so dependent on the potato that a diseased crop led to the devastating Irish Potato Famine. The first European import, the horse, changed the lives of many Native American tribes on the Great Plains, allowing them to shift to a nomadic lifestyle based on hunting bison on horseback. Tomato sauce, made from New World tomatoes, became an Italian trademark, while coffee from Africa and sugarcane from Asia became the main crops of extensive Latin American plantations.

Before the Columbian Exchange, there were no oranges in Florida, no bananas in Ecuador, no paprika in Hungary, no zucchini in Italy, no pineapples in Hawaii, no rubber trees in Africa, no cattle in Texas, no burros in Mexico, no chile peppers in Thailand, no cigarettes in France and no chocolate in Switzerland. Even the dandelion was brought to America by Europeans for use as an herb.

Before regular communication had been established between the two hemispheres, the varieties of domesticated animals and infectious diseases were strikingly larger in the Old World than in the New. This led, in part, to the devastating effects of Old World diseases on Native American populations. The smallpox epidemics probably resulted in the highest death toll for Native Americans.

Scarcely any society on earth remained unaffected by this global ecological exchange.

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[edit] See also

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• Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact
• Population history of American indigenous peoples
• Domestication
• Guns, Germs, and Steel

[edit] Lists

• List of domesticated plants
• List of domesticated animals

• List of vegetables
• List of herbs
• List of fruit

[edit] Sources

• The Columbian Exchange: Plants, Animals, and Disease between the Old and New Worlds by Alfred W. Crosby
• Worlds Together, Worlds Apart by Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, Stephen Kotkin, et al.