The Columbian Exchange

- [Instructor] Although we tend to think
about Christopher Columbus' first voyage in 1492,
transforming the history of the Americas,
it actually transformed a great deal more than that,
and in this video I want to talk
about the larger world historical process
that Columbus' voyage opened up,
that transformed not only the Americas,
but also Europe and Africa, and this was called
the Columbian Exchange.
So what was the Columbian Exchange?
This was a process of transferring
plants,
animals,
microbes
and people
across the Atlantic in both directions.
And not just trading these goods,
but transplanting them from Europe and Africa
into the Americas and the other way around.
And some of these exchanges of species were intentional,
like bringing new crops to grow in environments
that were suited to them, and some of them
were unintentional, like the microbes and pests,
which were like little hitchhikers on the bodies
and crops that Europeans brought to the New World.
And it had a tremendous environmental affect
that had real consequences
for people on both sides of the Atlantic.
So let's look a little bit closer at some of the things
that were exchanged across the Atlantic
after Columbus began the process
of bringing things from the Old World to the New World,
and from the New World to the Old World.
So first let's take a closer look at the plants.
Now, Spain, much like Portugal, was hoping
to use this tropical landscape to grow cash crops.
So Columbus brought with him sugar and grapes
for wine, and coffee, these were all crops
that would fetch high prices in Europe.
It was so lucrative to grow sugar in the Caribbean
that they didn't even want to give up any space
to grow food, they imported their food
so that they could spend all of their land growing sugar.
The Europeans also brought New World crops
back to the Old World, and some of these it's
almost impossible to imagine a world before,
for example, the tomato had ever come to Europe.
Can you imagine Italian food with no tomato sauce?
They also brought corn and potatoes
and sweet potatoes and cassava, or manioc.
And what's important about most of these crops is
that they're very calorically dense.
So if you grew a field of potatoes,
instead of a field of wheat, which might be
a typical crop grown in the Old Word before contact,
you can feed three times as many people
with a field of potatoes than you can with wheat.
So what does this cause?
It causes a real increase in population in Europe.
It also causes an increase in population in Africa,
where manioc is a crop that was frequently grown
and also very calorically dense.
So New World foods helped Europe and Africa
increase their populations.
So what about these animals?
The Europeans brought cattle, sheep,
pigs, and horses to the New World, with mixed results.
Horses, for example, were a tremendous technology
that was widely adopted throughout Mexico
and the Native Americans living in the Great Plains
of what is today the United States found
that horses revolutionized their ability to hunt.
So that was a great step up for them.
The pigs they brought over, however,
weren't so great because Europeans allowed the pigs
to roam freely, which meant that they ate everything,
including the Native Americans' crops,
and they multiplied very quickly.
So they became kind of a pest in the New World.
Probably the thing that had the biggest affect
in the Columbian Exchange was the transfer
of Old World diseases to the New World.
With Europeans came smallpox, measles,
whooping cough, and the Native Americans
had very little immunity to these diseases.
It's estimated that within 100 years
of Columbus landing in Hispaniola,
90% of all people who were living
in the Americas died of disease.
This is a demographic catastrophe
the likes of which the world has never seen
before or since.
And most of the Native Americans who were affected
by these diseases would never have actually interacted
with a European, they just had trade networks
that spread these diseases back and forth
throughout the Americas.
Now, you might be wondering, okay,
so if the Native Americans were being exposed
to new diseases from the Europeans,
weren't the Europeans also being exposed
to new diseases from the Native Americans?
Why didn't it have such a strong impact on them?
There are a couple of reasons for that.
One is that there was a greater population density
in Europe and Africa, there were more people
and they lived closer together in cities.
So this gave diseases opportunities to bounce
back and forth between people and evolve
and become stronger.
The other important thing is that Europeans lived
close to animals,
and as we remember from things like bird flu
or swine flu, animals and humans can pass diseases
back and forth between each other,
and that makes those diseases even stronger.
In comparison, Native Americans didn't have much
population density and they only domesticated dogs.
And dogs, unlike pigs, can't pass that many diseases
back and forth between humans.
So Native Americans just didn't have diseases
that were as vicious as the diseases
that had been passed from person to person
for many thousands of years in Europe and Africa.
So this gets to the last aspect of the Columbian Exchange,
the exchange of people.
Very quickly after Europeans arrived,
the Native American population suffered
from tremendous outbreak of disease,
which meant that although the Europeans had hoped
to enslave them and use them as a labor force
in these Caribbean plantations, very few of them survived,
which meant that the Europeans needed another labor force.
They found that labor source on the West Coast of Africa,
where there was a long tradition of slave trading,
and they brought enslaved African people against their will
across the Atlantic to work in the Caribbean,
so that very quickly a majority of the population
in the Caribbean was of African descent.
Ironically, this population explosion brought on
by New World foods meant that there were more people
in Africa who were possible subjects to enslavement,
and it helped them keep their population numbers
relatively steady despite the exodus of
as many as 12 to 13 million people
over the course of the years between Columbus arriving
and approximately 1800.
Likewise, this population explosion in Europe led
to worries about overpopulation
in the 1600s and 1700s.
And what did the nations of Europe do?
They began sending people over to the colonies.
So the contact and exchange initiated
by Christopher Columbus when he connected
the Old World with the New had a profound affect
on the environment, not just of the New World,
but of the Old World as well.
And this profound affect on the whole benefited Europe,
at the expense of the Americas and of Africa.

The Columbian Exchange

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