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 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Conquistador y Pestilencia”
Though Europeans had technological advantages over the Indigenous peoples they conquered in the Americas, their greatest weapon was disease. Crosby, making an observation that was groundbreaking at the time of publication, identifies European triumph as the result of ecological imperialism, one of the book’s themes. Prior to contact, diseases existed endemically rather than as epidemics, with some exceptions. Human migration, however, “is the chief cause of epidemics” (37) because populations that were isolated from illnesses will easily succumb to them when they invade their lands. The New World was ravaged by the diseases brought from Europe because they were unknown to Indigenous populations that had no natural immunity to them. The first 100 years after contact were particularly brutal:
The victims of disease were probably greatest in number in the heavily populated highlands of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru, but as a percentage of the resident population, were probably greatest in the hot, wet lowlands. By the 1580s disease, ably assisted by Spanish brutality, had killed off or driven away most of the peoples of the Antilles and the lowlands of New Spain, Peru, and the Caribbean littoral […] (38).
Sources record numerous epidemics in areas Europeans colonized, and smallpox was the deadliest of the diseases that arrived from the Old World. Outbreaks of other illnesses often killed those who survived their bout with smallpox but were left severely weakened by it. Smallpox was endemic in Europe and usually contracted in childhood. Endemic smallpox typically killed between 3 and 10% of those who fell ill, but in populations with no prior exposure, the death rates are much higher. For example, when it arrived in Iceland in 1707, smallpox killed 18,000 people—of a total population of 50,000—within just two years.
The first outbreak of smallpox in the Americas happened in the winter of 1518-19 at Santo Domingo where it arrived from Spain. Though a few of the Spanish colonizers became sick, up to half of the Indigenous population perished. From there, the epidemic spread throughout the Greater Antilles. Smallpox also appeared in the 1510s on the Yucatán Peninsula, where it combined forces with the epidemic from Santo Domingo to invade central Mexico. Outbreaks of other illnesses quickly followed it there. This epidemic contributed to Spanish success in felling the Aztec Empire: “Had there been no epidemic, the Aztecs, their war-making potential unimpaired and their warriors fired with victory, could have purged the Spaniards […] Clearly, the epidemic sapped the endurance of Tenochtitlán” (49).
Smallpox is also the likely cause of mass Indigenous death in Central America, and it arrived in the Incan Empire of South America before the Spanish people arrived there: “Such is the communicability of smallpox and other eruptive fevers that any Indian who received news of the Spaniards could also have easily received the infection of European diseases” (51). It is likely that the disease killed the Incan emperor, thus internally destabilizing the empire and contributing to a successful Spanish conquest as the invaders took advantage of this internal weakness.
These smallpox epidemics also left lasting psychological damage on the Indigenous people who survived. Sources record that the death toll was so high in Mexico that it was difficult for Indigenous people to bury all the victims. In addition to this emotional trauma, survivors were left with physical scars as a visual reminder of their suffering. Moreover, the fact that the disease left the Spanish largely untouched, while Indigenous people easily succumbed to it, had a deep psychological impact on devastated Indigenous communities:
One can only imagine the psychological impact of smallpox on the Incans. It […] must have shaken the confidence of the Incans that they still enjoyed the esteem of their gods. Then came the long, ferocious civil war, confusing a people accustomed to the autocracy of the true Child of the Sun. And then the final disaster, the coming of the Spanish (57-58).
Chapter 2 Analysis
Crosby’s second chapter explains why Europeans successfully conquered the Americas. Previous theories suggested that their victory was due to superior technology, such as the use of gunpowder and the fact that Europeans had horses, but Crosby counters this thesis. Instead, he argues that Europe’s triumph was a biological one.
Numerous primary sources authored by eyewitnesses to events in the Americas in the early years post-contact attest to numerous outbreaks of diseases, often respiratory illnesses, that ravaged Indigenous populations while Europeans were largely unaffected. For example, Crosby cites the account of the Englishman, Thomas Hariot, from Roanoke in the late 1500s, who describes the swift deaths of Indigenous people each time the English passed through their villages. The Puritan cleric Cotton Mather wrote of a similar development in New England, and the Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas noted the severity of a smallpox outbreak among Indigenous Americans in Santo Domingo, while the Spanish colonists were mostly unscathed.
Furthermore, evidence from across time and space shows connections between human migration and the outbreak of epidemics. For instance, about 150 years before the Columbian voyages, the Black Death ravaged most of Europe. This disease entered Europe along trade routes that connected the West with Eurasia; it then spread through a series of leaps along highly traversed roads and waterways and from one port city to another within Europe. Similar phenomena occurred in the Americas, as disease arrived with European colonizers and then rapidly spread through Indigenous populations. Smallpox, for example, spread to the Incan Empire even before its Spanish incubators got there. Disease was, thus, the colonizers’ most powerful, if unintentional, weapon, far more devastating than guns or cannons because of its ability to swiftly eliminate entire populations. Cotton Mather was quick to celebrate this devastation. Crosby’s research highlights the Europeans’ conquest of the Americas through biological warfare.
