Great American Exchange

The Great American or Columbian Exchange refers to the transmission of agricultural crops, domesticated livestock, technology, and disease between the Afro-Eurasian region and the Americas that occurred after the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World reestablished [Page 1362]contact between the two continental systems and their respective populations (Table 1). The most prominent impacts were in the areas of disease transmission and new agricultural crops. These transfers were by no means equivalent. The New World, with its relatively lower population density, did not acquire immunity to the diseases imported from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Native American resistance to malaria, measles, smallpox, tetanus, and typhus was nonexistent, and this resulted in an estimated loss of up to 70% of the population of Middle and Southern America, while the populations in the Americas overall are estimated to have decreased between 50% and 70% following contact. Europeans were introduced to a new form of syphilis in the course of opening up the New World to commerce and settlement.

Table 1 Some major plants and animals of the Great American Exchange

Source: Author.

The exchange of crops and livestock were, however, more balanced. Europe gained tobacco, maize, beans, peanuts, several kinds of potatoes, manioc (which has since become a staple in parts of Africa), squashes, pumpkins, chocolate, papayas, guavas, avocados, pineapples, tomatoes, chili peppers, and cayenne. The Americas received chickens, cattle, goats, pigs, sheep, horses, wheat, grapes, bananas, rice, sugar, and honeybees. However, the impacts of crop exchange were also differential. For Americans, the European crops were somewhat less efficient users of arable land. Their origin in higher latitudes meant that they were adapted to a shorter growing season than that of the tropics, hence they could not be harvested as often as native crop species. In addition, the sudden release of more grazers on natural crops led to famine. In the years that followed, the impact of American silver and gold on the policies of Spain and the general rush to colonization cannot be understated either. In Asia, the impacts of New World crops were remarkable. In China, for example, more than a third of the crops currently grown are of American origin.

Finally, there was an exchange of ideas and people. Some scholars contend that notions of democracy in European societies were reawakened and strengthened by the discovery of relatively egalitarian Native American societies and the corresponding development of Rousseau's “noble savage.” However, the stronger impact was by far the imposition of the plantation model of society on Southern and Central America. The mass movement of millions of Africans into the Americas forever changed the political landscape. The notion of racially based hierarchies of power and wealth eventually prevailed over indigenous power structures based on religion, wealth, and lineage. The Columbian exchange also forced the European colonizers, especially the Spanish and Portuguese, to modify their religiously based mandates for colonization and refine the notion of a “mission to civilize the world,” which would later be spread to African and Asian colonies.