Columbian exchange what was exchanged

The lure of expansion and treasure was great and grew stronger. In , Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese mariner, employed in Spain, set out on an expedition that traveled around the globe by , revealing the Pacific and the full extent of the territories in between. The conquest and carving up of new lands also had a tragic dimension which was transatlantic slavery. As an ancient institution, slavery had a long history worldwide.

Columbus on encountering the Indians already had surmises about enslaving them and took captives himself. Later, when the use of Native American slaves did not suffice, Africa was drawn in. The African slave trade, originally run by Africans and Arabs, was built up by the Portuguese, Dutch, and English, as they carried Africans in bondage across the Atlantic for plantation agriculture. The cruel trade, over the centuries until the mid th century, involved the forced movement between 12 and 15 million Africans.

Learn more about the idea of modernity and definition of turning point. As the contours of new discoveries came into sharper focus, the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain turned to the Pope to help divide the world among them. With papal mediation, a line was drawn across the Atlantic, extending on the other side, the Pacific, with Spain, assigned all the possessions to the west of the line and Portugal assigned newly claimed lands to the east.

The Treaty of Tordesillas of drew the line west of the Azores islands. Later discoveries showed that part of South America bulged out beyond that line, which meant that the vast lands of Brazil fell to Portuguese rule by coincidence.

But times were already changing, and other European kingdoms did not passively accept that division of the globe, instead, a fierce competition broke out over the question of who was to control newly discovered territories? European ideas of the new world presented it as either better than the old, or inevitably debased and inferior.

What document from the s seems to confirm this unintended effect? Bartolome de Las Casas wrote of a sudden infestation of fire ants in and What was the unintended effect to settlers of the introduction of plantains to Hispaniola?

Although they had plantains to eat, they also had to deal with fire ants. As a result, they abandoned their homes. How does Mann combine 16th and 20th century evidence? He uses 20th century science to explain a 16th century eye-witness account. Here Mann gives a specific example of unintended consequences. Natives and newcomers interacted in unexpected ways, creating biological bedlam.

When Spanish colonists imported African plantains [a tropical plant that resembles a banana] in , the Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson has proposed, they also imported scale insects, small creatures with tough, waxy coats that suck the juices from plant roots and stems. About a dozen banana-infesting scale insects are known in Africa. In Hispaniola, Wilson argued, these insects had no natural enemies. A big increase in scale insects would have led to a big increase in fire ants.

So far this is informed speculation. What happened in and is not. But what the Spaniards saw was S. Excerpt 3 Close Reading Questions What is the thesis of this excerpt? What evidence does Mann use to develop this thesis? Why did the Spanish conduct a census of the Indians on Hispaniola in ? What did the census find regarding the Taino population?

The Spanish conducted a census in order to count the Taino so that they could be assigned to Spanish settlers as laborers. This was part of the encomienda system, whereby a Spanish settler was given a plantation as well as the labor of all the Indians who lived on that plantation. The census-takers found that there were few Taino left, perhaps only about 26, According to the author, what two factors caused this change in population? Which cause was the most influential?

The two causes were Spanish cruelty and the introduction of diseases by the Columbian Exchange. The most influential was the introduction of disease.

The third sentence in paragraph 2 of this excerpt uses a rhetorical device called asyndeton. Asyndeton is a list of items with conjunctions omitted and can be used to imply that there are more items that could be added to the list. What types of items does the author list using asyndeton? What is the effect? The author lists diseases, both viruses and bacteria. In fact, other diseases were introduced by the Columbian Exchange, including malaria, yellow fever, whooping cough, chicken pox, the bubonic plague, and leprosy.

Why was the introduction of these diseases so devastating for the Taino and not the Spanish explorers? The Taino had never been exposed to these diseases before and therefore had no natural immunity to stop or control the spread of the disease. The impact of disease on Native Americans, combined with the cultivation of lucrative cash crops such as sugarcane, tobacco and cotton in the Americas for export, would have another devastating consequence. To meet the demand for labor, European settlers would turn to the slave trade , which resulted in the forced migration of some When it came to disease, the exchange was rather lopsided—but at least one deadly disease appears to have made the trip from the Americas to Europe.

Syphilis is now treated effectively with penicillin, but in the late 15th-early 16th centuries, it caused symptoms such as genital ulcers, rashes, tumors, severe pain and dementia, and was often fatal. A competing theory argues that syphilis existed in the Old World before the late 15th century, but had been lumped in with leprosy or other diseases with similar symptoms. Because syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease, theories involving its origins are always controversial, but more recent evidence —including a genetic link found between syphilis and a tropical disease known as yaws, found in a remote region of Guyana—appears to support the Columbian theory.

Soon after , sailors inadvertently introduced these diseases — including smallpox, measles, mumps, whooping cough, influenza, chicken pox, and typhus — to the Americas.

People who lived in Afro-Eurasia had developed some immunities to these diseases because they had long existed among most Afro-Eurasian populations. However, the Native Americans had no such immunities. Adults and children alike were stricken by wave after wave of epidemic , which produced catastrophic mortality throughout the Americas. In the larger centers of highland Mexico and Peru, many millions of people died. On some Caribbean islands, the Native American population died out completely.

In all, between and , perhaps 90 percent of the first Americans had died. This loss is considered among the largest demographic disasters in human history. Ecosystems were in tumult as forests regrew and previously hunted animals increased in number. Economically, the population decrease brought by the Columbian Exchange indirectly caused a drastic labor shortage throughout the Americas, which eventually contributed to the establishment of African slavery on a vast scale in the Americas.

By , the slave trade had brought new diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever , which further plagued Native Americans. Eurasians sent much more than disease westward. Columbus had wanted to establish new fields of plenty in the Americas. On his later voyages he brought many crops he hoped might flourish there. He and his followers brought the familiar food grains of Europe: wheat, barley, and rye. They also brought Mediterranean plantation crops such as sugar, bananas, and citrus fruits, which all had originated in South or Southeast Asia.

At first, many of these crops fared poorly; but eventually they all flourished. After , sugar became the mainstay of the Caribbean and Brazilian economies, becoming the foundation for some of the largest slave societies ever known. The production of rice and cotton, both imported in the Columbian Exchange, together with tobacco, formed the basis of slave society in the United States.

Wheat, which thrived in the temperate latitudes of North and South America and in the highlands of Mexico, eventually became a fundamental food crop for tens of millions of people in the Americas.

Indeed, by the late 20th century, wheat exports from Canada, the United States, and Argentina were feeding millions of people outside the Americas. It is true that the spread of these crops drastically changed the economy of the Americas. However, these new crops supported the European settler societies and their African slave systems. The Native Americans preferred their own foods. When it came to animals, however, the Native Americans borrowed eagerly from the Eurasian stables. The Columbian Exchange brought horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and a collection of other useful species to the Americas.

Before Columbus, Native American societies in the high Andes had domesticated llamas and alpacas , but no other animals weighing more than 45 kg lbs. And for good reason: none of the other 23 large mammal species present in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus were suitable for domestication.

In contrast, Eurasia had 72 large animal species, of which 13 were suitable for domestication. So, while Native Americans had plenty of good food crops available before , they had few domesticated animals.

The main ones, aside from llamas and alpacas, were dogs, turkeys, and guinea pigs. Of all the animals introduced by the Europeans, the horse held particular attraction. Native Americans first encountered it as a fearsome war beast ridden by Spanish conquistadors. However, they soon learned to ride and raise horses themselves. In the North American great plains, the arrival of the horse revolutionized Native American life, permitting tribes to hunt the buffalo far more effectively.