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.
Themes
Ecological Imperialism
Alfred Crosby articulated the concept of ecological imperialism in The Columbian Exchange and later expanded on this work in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (1986). European imperialism in the Americas resulted in the exchange of biological materials—including plants, animals, and diseases—between the continents. This biological exchange was most devastating for Indigenous peoples in North and South America, while the impact on Europeans was marginal.
Foremost, European diseases that arrived in the Americas shortly after Columbus’s arrival destroyed Indigenous populations. While syphilis was introduced into Europe through contact with the Americas, its long-term impact was much less devastating than that of smallpox, measles, and typhus, among others, for populations in the Americas. Within just the first century after contact, the Indigenous population was reduced substantially, and this population reduction due to biological factors continued into the 20th century.
Smallpox was the deadliest killer brought by European colonizers. Recent estimates hold that by 1650, European diseases may have killed up to 90% of the Indigenous population in the Americas. Crosby postulates that there might have been as many as 17 epidemics in Peru alone between 1520 and 1600. He counters the theory that European brutality caused the majority of Indigenous deaths. Rather, the speed with which diseases to which the Indigenous people had no immunity decimated the population prior to many of the battles: “Early chroniclers reported that the first epidemics following the arrival of Old World peoples in a given area were the worst, or at least among the worst. European exploitation had not yet had time to destroy the Indians’ health” (39). Those who did not succumb to disease suffered from deadly secondary effects, mirroring the phenomenon witnessed during the Black Death pandemic that swept across Eurasia, North Africa, and Europe in the Late Middle Ages. Some died from famine and lack of care as societies broke down, and the ill were unable to work or provide for the sick.
In both the Aztec (or Mexica) and Incan Empires, epidemics contributed to successful Spanish conquest. The Aztecs were plagued by an outbreak of disease before the conquistador Hernán Cortés besieged their capital, thus weakening their resistance. Disease also preceded the Spanish arrival in the Incan Empire of South America; it led to the emperor’s death and the breakdown of internal political stability, making resistance more difficult and enabling Spanish conquest. Biological factors, thus, played a primary role in the transformation of the Americas and the destruction of Indigenous societies and facilitated European colonial powers’ rise.
Environmental Degradation
Europe’s ecological imperialism of the American continents had a highly destructive impact on the environment. Plants and animals introduced from Europe may have enhanced life in the Americas in some ways, but they also did tremendous damage to the environment and Indigenous societies. The negative implications of the Columbian Exchange were not restricted to the diseases brought with colonization or the brutality inflicted on Indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans.
Animal populations faced depletion because of contact, while colonizers and their newly introduced European livestock, such as cattle, encroached on and damaged Indigenous lands. Within 50 years of the introduction of crops and animals from Europe, the environmental changes to the Americas were permanent. Europeans brought some crops deliberately, but others arrived in mud, dung, and luggage that crossed the Atlantic. Many of these plants displaced indigenous growth: “Today an American botanist can easily find whole meadows in which he is hard put to find a single species of plant that grew in the Americas in pre-Columbian times” (73-74).
Colonialists forced Indigenous peoples to grow European crops, such as wheat and grapevines, on which they were dependent. They either cultivated these for European landholders or had to give a percentage of their crop yield to colonial authorities. Yet they did not typically eat the European plants they produced. Livestock is a different story; some Indigenous people engaged in “enthusiastic acceptance of Old World livestock […]” (74). Nevertheless, the arrival of European livestock had a negative impact on the environment because the animals’ populations in the Americas grew swiftly. Some domesticated animals became feral, and “doubtlessly they had much to do with the extinction of certain plants, animals, and even the Indians themselves, whose gardens they encroached upon” (75). Growing livestock numbers correlate to a decline in Indigenous populations because these animals trespassed on the fields that supplied their primarily plant-based diets while Spanish colonists seized Indigenous farmlands to turn them into pastures for livestock grazing. These new animals also transmitted diseases to indigenous animal species, including the llamas and alpacas of South America. The unintentional importation of insects and black rats was also damaging because they were also vectors of disease. Rats also “set off one of the most spectacular ecological disasters of the age” (97) when they burrowed all over Bermuda, created colonies in trees, and ate much of the colonists’ food stores, causing an outbreak of starvation. The Columbian Exchange degraded the environment in the Americas, the effects of which are visible today.
Old and New Worlds
Crosby designates Europe the “Old World” and the Americas as the “New World,” concepts that developed among European explorers, navigators, and geographers during the early modern era and shortly after the Columbian expeditions. The Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, for whom the continents are named, may have been the first to conceptualize North and South America as a “New World.” Modern historians like Crosby used this Eurocentric framing in their analyses, but not without criticism of the problematic nature of such terminology. Considering the Americas a “New World” ignores the antiquity of the regions and erases the histories of the Indigenous peoples who first populated the continents as long as 30,000 years ago.
This nomenclature also treats the Columbian voyages as missions of discovery for the entire world rather than for Europe; the Indigenous peoples of the Americas established complex civilizations long before the Europeans “discovered” their existence. Columbus’s landing in the Caribbean introduced Europeans to lands previously unknown to them. However, he was not the first European to reach the region. The Vikings first reached modern-day Canada approximately 500 years prior to Columbus’s arrival in what is now the Bahamas, and some sources suggest that Basque whaling ships also arrived prior to Columbus. However, this knowledge was not widespread in Europe. Nevertheless, the Columbian voyages expanded Europeans’ knowledge of the world but did not represent the transfer from an older world to a newer one. The “Old World” concept frames the history that was known to Europeans as predating that of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, reflecting a Eurocentric perspective rather than historical reality.
Rather than conceive of the 1400-1500s as an “age of discovery” that found a “New World,” historians now argue for this period as an “age of encounters” in which peoples who previously had limited or no contact began to interact with greater frequency due to Europeans’ quest for colonization of the lands and people they encountered. The newly consolidated Spanish nation competed against other European powers in a race to exploit new resources, land, and peoples through the construction of global empires. The concept of the Americas as a “New World” is grounded in these colonialist ideas and their conceptions of Indigenous peoples as the “exotic” Other or as racially and ethnically inferior to Europeans. They were seen as “uncivilized” people to be conquered and Christianized and forced into dangerous work in agriculture and mining to support the empires of their invaders. Crosby’s use of “Old World” and “New World” is thus reflective of the time in which his book was published and does not reflect more recent rejection of the terms as reflecting Eurocentric perspectives and colonialist framing.
