40 pages • 1 hour read
Alfred W. CrosbyThe Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Contrasts”
When Italian explorer and navigator Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean in 1492, the American and European continents—the “New” and “Old” Worlds in the Eurocentric nomenclature that was prominent at the time Crosby wrote this text began to shift toward “biological homogeneity” (3). There are significant contrasts between the flora and fauna of the Old and New Worlds that become more apparent as one reaches South America. These distinctions led the French explorer Jean de Léry to declare the American continents so distinct from the rest of the world in people, animals, and plants that they should be knowns as “the new world” (9).
Yet not all was different; for example, there are palm trees in the Americas and Africa. Europeans pondered why these slight differences existed alongside the major ones they noticed, such as the lack of cattle and horses in the Americas. Though Europeans inherited significant medical and geographical knowledge from the ancient Greeks and Romans, these sources—and the Christian and Aristotelian thinking that shaped them—were unable to “accommodate the New World” (9). The New World “called into question the whole of Christian cosmology” (10). Europeans, thus, faced two options for approaching the Indigenous peoples of the Americas: They could view this newly discovered diversity as natural, or they could condemn Indigenous Americans as evil. Most chose the latter.
The existence of entire populations that were previously unknown to Europeans called into question the biblical idea of humanity’s singular creation. In the early 1500s, the Catholic Church concluded that the Indigenous people of the Americas were of God’s creation and had souls; this subjected them to papal and, therefore, Spanish domain. Some theories of multiple creations were put forth but condemned as heretical. Likewise, Europeans did not yet understand the planet’s age or biological evolution, which also made it difficult to comprehend the reasons for the abundant noticeable differences between the Old and New Worlds.
Humans were the final large mammals to arrive in the Americas thousands of years ago, crossing via the Bering land bridge in the late Pleistocene, or Ice Age, and following an abundance of animals they hunted. Crosby notes that for centuries, scholars and explorers noted the physical similarities among Indigenous Americans; they show less diversity in appearance than other populations, such as Europeans from a particular region. Research that demonstrates a “uniformity of blood types” (23) among Indigenous people throughout the Americas suggests that they are closely related, given that blood type distribution is far less uniform among Europeans.
Once the Bering land bridge vanished underwater, the Indigenous population of the Americas grew in relative isolation. This “hampered the growth of their civilizations but also weakened their defenses against the major diseases of mankind,” since the frozen conditions through which they crossed “screened out many diseases” (31). Centuries later, contact with Europe brought new and devastating diseases to the Americas.
Chapter 1 Analysis
The first chapter establishes distinctions between the Americas and Europe, especially highlighting the nature of the North and South American continents prior to contact and explaining the history of human migration to the Americas.
The flora and fauna of the Americas are noticeably different than Europe. For example, “Europeans found the animals of temperate North America less alien than those of lands to the south, but still very unlike the animals of Europe” (6). These kinds of differences led to the importation of European flora and fauna, which disrupted the landscapes of North and South America and transformed Indigenous societies, as the next chapter shows.
European worldviews based on Greco-Roman and Christian thinking led to questions about why these differences existed. If God created the earth and all its life at one time, how could land and people so different from those of the rest of the world exist unknown to Europeans for centuries? Most Europeans continued to believe in a single creation, an idea that they used to justify the subordination of Indigenous people as subject to papal and, thus, Spanish authority. What Europeans did not know, Crosby argues, is that North America and Siberia were once joined, thousands of years ago, by the Bering land bridge, across which the first humans migrated as many as 28,000 years ago. Nevertheless, recent scholarship calls into question the Bering land bridge theory; the earliest migrants may have arrived by boat along the Pacific coastline.
Crosby also argues that the resulting isolation that occurred once the ocean covered the Bering land bridge “hampered the growth of their [Indigenous] civilizations” (31). This view is anchored in the Eurocentric perspective of the “discovery” of the Americas by Europe as a civilizing force, in contrast to today’s views of the contact between continents in terms of an “encounter.” Contemporary approaches to history recognize the sophistication of Indigenous societies and reject the suggestion that their value lies in their degree of similarity to European societies. Numerous American Indigenous cultures established cities, structures of government, and economic systems prior to the arrival of the first Europeans, and even the conquistadors’ accounts recognize this. Crosby’s uses of the terms “Old World” and “New World” throughout his book is rooted in the traditional Eurocentric conception of the world, which is recognized as problematic today in its biases and its failure to acknowledge the achievements of pre-Columbian Indigenous cultures in the Americas. The theme “Old and New Worlds” further explores this issue.
