Columbian Exchange

Krystal White

December 5, 2019

Columbian Exchange (sugar)

Of all the commodities in the Atlantic World sugar proved to be the most important. Sugar carried the same economic importance as oil does today. European rivals raced to create sugar plantations in the Americas and fought wars for control of production. Although refined sugar was available in the Old World, Europe’s harsher climate made sugarcane difficult to grow.
Columbus brought sugar to Hispaniola in 1493, and the new crop thrived. Over the next century of colonization, Caribbean islands and most other tropical areas became centers of sugar production which in turn fueled the demand to enslave Africans for labor.

Columbus speaking to a slave on the sugar plantations.

Columbian Exchange (potato blight)

One of the most important crops brought to the Old World was the potato. It is the crop with the largest impact on the Old World. It has enough vitamins to prevent scurvy and enough starch and water to eat as one’s only food.
Potatoes originally came from the Andes in South America. Francisco Pizarro was the first Spaniard to see the potato in its original environment.The potato is grown by planting a piece of itself. When the potato was taken to Spain, only one variety was taken. In Europe they used the same variety of potato everywhere creating fields of potato clones.
When the potato was brought to Europe, people were unsure of it. Some people thought it caused leprosy while others believed it caused gas. Others believed it to be an aphrodisiac and cause lust.
Louis XVI had to help the peasants in France embrace the potato. He had a potato field planted within the royal grounds and guarded. The guards protected the potatoes during the day and left the potatoes unguarded at midnight. After a few nights, peasants stole the potatoes and started growing the potatoes for themselves.
After a famine hit Hungary in 1772, the government ordered that potatoes be planted, grown, and eaten. Even though the Hungarian people had no idea what the potato was, they planted and ate the potato increasing potato production. As other famines hit Europe, the potato became a staple crop, especially in Ireland.
Ireland fully embraced the potato. With deep soils, Ireland had the perfect growing grounds for potatoes. As the population of Ireland grew, so did the consumption of potato. With milk and one-and-a-half acres of planted potatoes, a family could eat for a year in Ireland. The people of Ireland became dependent on the potato as their food and livelihood. Then in 1845, the potato blight hit Ireland. The people of Ireland who once depended on the potato died because of famine due to the blight ruining countless acres. People in Ireland had become so dependent on the potato as food that when the blight hit, people did not know what they could afford to grow and eat.
The blight did not stop the consumption of the potato though. As industrialization brought more people into the cities and the population grew, the potato was relied on even more as a food. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the potato was claimed as the an indispensable plant in Europe.

Columbian Exchange( microbes & diseases)

Travelers between the America, Africa, and Europe also included microbes. Native people had no immunity to Old World diseases to which they had never been exposed.
European explorers brought with them chickenpox, measles, mumps, and smallpox, killing some populations and destroying others.
Plague and the flu were also introduced to the new world. Some suggest the combined population of the new world might have been 100 million in 1500 and that these new diseases decimated the human population long before Europeans could even explore the hemisphere and that’s why some civilizations seemed to have disappeared prior to European conquest.
In the centuries after 1492 these infections swirled as epidemics among Native American populations.
The impact was most severe in the Caribbean, where 1600 Native American populations on most islands had plummeted by more than 99 percent. Across the Americas, population fell by 50 percent to 95 percent.
The disease component of the Columbian Exchange was decidedly one-sided. However, it is likely that syphilis evolved in the Americas and spread elsewhere beginning in the 1490s.

Columbian Exchange ( syphilis)

Syphilis, a lethal sexually transmitted disease, came with travelers from the New World to Europe for the first time.
Syphilis was a New World disease brought back by Columbus, Martín Alonso Pinzón, and other members of their crews as an unintentional part of the Columbian Exchange.
Columbus's first voyages to the Americas occurred three years before the Naples syphilis outbreak of 1495.Exactly 538 skeletal remains in the Dominican Republic have shown evidence characteristic of the disease.
Sometimes called the French Disease
In 1494, France was at war with Naples when the French camp was struck by a terrible disease.
It began with genital sores, spread to a general rash, then caused abscesses and scabs all over the body. Boils as big as acorns, they said, that burst leaving rotting flesh and a disgusting odor. Sufferers also had fever, headaches, sore throats, and painful joints and bones. The disease was disabling, ugly, and terrifying. And people noticed almost from the first that it (usually) started on the genitals, and appeared to be spread by sexual congress.
The Italian kingdoms joined forces and threw out the French, who took the disease home with them, and from there it spread to plague the world until this day.
Syphilis, The French Disease, The Pox, The Great Imitator, The French call it the Napoleon Disease. It is caused by a bacterium that is closely related to the tropical diseases yaws and bejel.

Portrait of Gerard de Lairesse. Rembrandt, 1665. Gerard de Lairesse was an artist who suffered congenital syphilis.

Columbian Exchange (Quinine)

Quinine, an important medicinal “gift” from the New World, had significant consequences for the relationship between Europe and its tropical Old World colonies, particularly its African colonies.
Quinine and related anti-malarial alkaloids are derived from the bark of cinchona trees native to the Andes. The trees grow in scattered clumps in the eastern mountainous forests of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia between 10 degrees north and 20 degrees south at elevations between 800 to 3,400 meters.
Quinine works by inhibiting plasmodium reproduction. The use of quinine as a prophylactic was fist discovered in 1841 by Dr. Thomas R. H. Thomson.
The British government, amidst the expansion of its empire into many malaria- ridden regions, and seeing the potential benefits of quinine, encouraged the Royal Society to research the properties of quinine and explore the possibilities of farming it outside of the Andes.

Columbian Exchange (natural rubber)

Natural rubber is made from latex, which is produced when certain plants are cut
or punctured. Although rubber can be made from many different plants from around the world, the only commercially viable rubber plants are the Hevea rubber tree from Central and South America, and a wild vine that grows in West-Central Africa.
Historically, Africans made little use of rubber, except as an adhesive to fasten spearheads and arrowheads to their shafts. Native Americans, on the other hand, had developed methods to prevent the latex from decaying, which was accomplished by smoking the latex over fifires to form spools of usable crude rubber.
The rubber was used to create a wide range of items that were of central importance in their daily lives: hoods, boots, tents, balls, torches, jars, containers, syringes, toys, breastplates, rubber-headed drum sticks, and adhesives.

Columbian Exchange (smallpox)

Exchange

Exchange-Copy

Europeans brought smallpox and other diseases to the New World and diseases eventually killed off as much as 90 percent of the native population. Smallpox was just one of the many deadly diseases brought to the New World by travelers from the Old World.
Although the smallpox vaccine has eradicated the disease, it was once a deadly disease that brought destruction to the native population in the New World. The first recorded smallpox epidemic in the New World was in 1518 when it spread to Mexico and through South America. The epidemic killed a third or more of the population in just a few months.
Because the smallpox epidemic killed so many, no one wanted to take the blame for spreading it. Even though Spaniards were fighting in Mexico when the epidemic hit, they did not want to be seen as the cause. Spaniards blamed their enslaved Cuban Indians and African slaves as the cause.
Europeans were not as susceptible to smallpox. Europeans saw smallpox as an illness almost every child has while growing up. Because many Europeans had once had smallpox or were at least around it, they developed immunity. This immunity helped Europeans to be uninfected when smallpox epidemics occurred in the New World.
Historians and scientists now better understand the effects diseases like smallpox have on entire populations. During the time when travelers were first coming to the New World, Europeans did not fully understand how diseases were spread or contracted, but they did understand the importance of quarantine. Europeans did not know how devastating their diseases, like smallpox, were to entire populations until they saw the deaths. Lord Jeffrey Amherst purposely gave infected smallpox blankets to Native Americans as a way to lessen the native population during the Seven Years War.This was the only documented case of a disease used purposely to kill a native population in the Americas. Most Europeans saw the effects of disease on native populations as God’s divine work showing European settlers God was on their side. Unfortunately, survival of the fittest occurred when the Old and New Worlds were connected. The Europeans had immunity to some diseases and were not wiped out as native populations were.
History could have a different course if diseases had not spread across the Atlantic Ocean. The native population in the New World could be massive if diseases like smallpox had not decimated them. Hard to imagine what the New World would be like without the effects of disease but look at how influential the Columbian exchange has been to the spread of disease. The spread of disease left tribes without leaders and tribes with less warriors to fight off Europeans coming to live in the New World. The effects of smallpox have a lasting effect on history.