The so-called discovery of the Europeans of the so-called New World goes down in history as one of the most important and momentous moments in the history of mankind, and is at the height of the arrival of agriculture, the domestication of animals and the discovery of the use of fire. Although the Vikings arrived in Newfoundland around the year 1000, they apparently decided that Greenland would be a much better colony and left, leaving the Spanish in all glory almost five centuries later. The ensuing exchange of plants, animals, people and diseases has since been called the “Columbian exchange” in honor of the charismatic Christopher Columbus, who stumbled upon the Bahamas thinking he had arrived in India.
Over the next several centuries, different groups of European explorers brought crops such as corn, potatoes, cassava, tomatoes, peppers, cocoa, peanuts, strawberries, and tobacco to the Old World from the Americas, meaning that the potato is no longer Irish. that the tomato is Italian, the pepper is Spanish, or the cigarette is French. In particular, carbohydrate-rich corn and potatoes helped alleviate the killer food shortages that were all too common in Europe; Ireland’s population alone increased 800 percent in 200 years, only to be devastated by potato blight in the mid-1840s. Too much to put all your potatoes in one basket.
Of course, it wouldn’t be called the Columbian Exchange if the process hadn’t been both ways. Imagine the plains Indians and then subtract the horses. Imagine a Central American banana republic, then subtract the bananas. Imagine a Colombian donkey carrying a load of coffee beans, then subtract both the donkey and the coffee beans. Imagine a variety of Mexican food, then subtract the rice, cheese, lettuce, black olives, onion, chicken, pork, and beef. Or imagine a handful of remote, arid, and completely impoverished Indian reservations, then subtract smallpox, influenza, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, measles, scarlet fever, yellow fever, and malaria. These were just some of the things that Europeans brought with them during the first years of interaction with the New World.
The New World was a fairly healthy place before the Columbian Exchange, which is why Old World diseases had such an easy time decimating indigenous populations. Think of Jim and Dwight talking about health insurance at The Office. Dwight: “I don’t need it. I’ve never been sick. Perfect immune system.” Jim: “Okay, well, if you’ve never been sick, then you don’t have antibodies.” Having spent centuries suffering from continual outbreaks of some completely nasty diseases, the Old World inhabitants had accumulated a wide variety of antibodies when they arrived in the Americas. In fact, many of the animals they brought to the New World – the aforementioned chickens, pigs, and cows, for example – were one of the main reasons Europeans were so sick all the time. It turns out that sleeping in the same one-room house as your cattle can do perverse damage to your health, especially at a time when taking a bath once a week made you a real dandy.
Before Spanish colonization and the Columbian exchange, the native population of the Americas was estimated to be between 40 and 100 million, meaning that, in all likelihood, Native Americans outnumbered the 60 million citizens of Europe. In fact, in 1492, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán was bigger, cleaner, and more beautiful than any city in Europe, while the Incas had the largest empire in the world. The “Great Death” of indigenous peoples that followed may very well have killed 1 in 5 human beings worldwide. Westerners love to keep talking and talking about the Black Death of the 14th century, but the plague, or even the sum of the many plagues of Europe, cannot be compared to what happened in the New World.
When European settlers arrived in what is now the United States, they were absolutely enchanted by how beautiful, pristine, and park-like the landscape was, and since the “Indians” were dying en masse around them, they thought that God he was giving a sign of his right to the land. Little did they know that they had stumbled upon the labor of thousands of years of maintenance by native peoples, many of whom had been decimated by rapidly spreading European diseases before the settlers had arrived there.
The vast majority of the indigenous people who suffered during the Columbian exchange no longer exist to tell about it. However, some of its unexpected survivors include the black populations of the Americas; The introduction of the cassava plant in West Africa resulted in a population boom that would help fuel the slavery built around the cultivation of Colombian trade crops such as cotton, sugar cane, coffee, and tobacco. Although Americans have long been taught to live by words like “Manifest Destiny” and “American Dream,” we must not forget the millions and millions for whom, to quote the Langston Hughes poem, America was a deferred dream.
