The Columbian Exchange

What is the Columbian Exchange?

The massive exchange of agricultural goods, slave labor, communicable diseases, and ideas between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres after 1492. First Voyage, Departure for the New World,

August 3, 1492

Positive Impacts

• The Columbian Exchange is one of the most significant results of the Age of Exploration and the First Global Age.

• positive--new food supplies, livestock and better diets

World Impact

• For millions of years before Columbus, each continent was vastly different from the others due to the separation of the oceans

• Exploration greatly affected almost every society on earth

Christopher Colombus map. Lisbon, workshop of Bartolomeo and Christopher Colombus, c.1490

Columbian Exchange - Animals

Columbian Exchange - Animals

Example …

• The horse changed the lives of many Native American tribes on the Great Plains

• Allowed them to shift to a nomadic lifestyle based on hunting bison on horseback.

Planting in the New World

• New world: CORN … provides little nutrition and must be planted individually

• Old world: millet, oat, rye, rice … scatter the seeds for planting, more nutritional value

• WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

Germs and Disease

Germs and Disease

People

• Within decades of Columbus' voyages, the trans Atlantic slave trade had begun

• The Spanish brought African slaves to work on sugar plantations

• Slave trade would continue until the late 1800s – American Civil War

Food for thought …

• Why have some historians contended that Europeans’ most powerful weapons were not bullets, but rather the germs, weeds, and animals that accompanied them to the Americas?

• How does the Columbian Exchange complicate your notions of food and culture?

• Consider that before 1492 … – no potatoes were grown in Ireland– Italian cuisine had no tomatoes or bell peppers– the Plains Indians lacked horses