The Columbian Exchange

1. What is the Columbian Exchange?

2. How did the Columbian Exchange affect society?

Questions of the Day

The Columbian ExchangeThe Columbian Exchange

Essential Questions:1.What was the Columbian Exchange?2.What was its impact on the old and new worlds?3.What are some examples of the impact of the Columbian Exchange?

What was the Columbian Exchange?What was the Columbian Exchange?

� Most significant event in the history of world ecology, agriculture, and culture

� Term used to describe the widespread exchange of:◦ Plants

◦ Animals

◦ Foods

◦ Human populations (including slaves)

◦ Communicable diseases

◦ Ideas between the Eastern and Western hemispheres after 1492

� To America, Europeans introduced crops◦ Crops would later serve as cash

crops for export by the colonists

Impact on Native AmericansImpact on Native Americans

� Colonization brought the spread of disease

� Europeans brought measles, mumps, chicken pox, and small pox

� Diseases devastated Native American communities

� Nearly 1/3 of Hispaniola’s approximately 300,000 inhabitants died during Columbus’s time there

� By 1508 fewer than 100,000 survivors lived on the island

� The European disease was the ultimate conqueror of America

Impact on AfricaImpact on Africa

� The Slave Trade Begins

� With disease devastating the native workforce Europeans turned to Africa for slaves

� African Losses

� African slave trade devastated many African societies

� Before the slave trade ended in the 1800s Africa lost at least 12 million people

Impact on EuropeImpact on Europe

� New types of food and animals were brought back to Europe

� This had both positive and negative aspects:◦ Positive because they served as a valuable source for food

◦ Negative because they destroyed their croplands

� Plants carried back to Europe enriched nutrition in the Old World and this resulted in major population explosions

Horse

Turkey

Chicken

Tomato

Maize

Potato

Syphilis

Smallpox

Old World

Old World

Old World

New World

New World

New World

New World

New World

Allowed Native Americans to shift to a nomadic lifestyle

Provided new food source for Europeans

Provided new food source for New World inhabitants

Staple of Italian cuisine today, world wide use

World’s most important cereal

crop (plant with edible seeds)

World staple crop; failure of Irish crop lead to massive

American migration

First outbreak after 1492 believed to have killed more than 5 million Europeans

Devastated Native populations who were not resistant