Columbian Exchange | Diseases, Animals, & Plants (2024)

Columbian Exchange, the largest part of a more general process of biological globalization that followed the transoceanic voyaging of the 15th and 16th centuries. Ecological provinces that had been torn apart by continental drift millions of years ago were suddenly reunited by oceanic shipping, particularly in the wake of Christopher Columbus’s voyages that began in 1492. The consequences profoundly shaped world history in the ensuing centuries, most obviously in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. The phrase “the Columbian Exchange” is taken from the title of Alfred W. Crosby’s 1972 book, which divided the exchange into three categories: diseases, animals, and plants.

Diseases

Before 1492, Native Americans (Amerindians) hosted none of the acute infectious diseases that had long bedeviled most of Eurasia and Africa: measles, smallpox, influenza, mumps, typhus, and whooping cough, among others. In most places other than isolated villages, these had become endemic childhood diseases that killed one-fourth to one-half of all children before age six. Survivors, however, carried partial, and often total, immunity to most of these infections with the notable exception of influenza. Falciparum malaria, by far the most severe variant of that plasmodial infection, and yellow fever also crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas.

In the centuries after 1492, these infections swirled as epidemics among Native American populations. Physical and psychological stress, including mass violence, compounded their effect. The impact was most severe in the Caribbean, where by 1600 Native American populations on most islands had plummeted by more than 99 percent. Across the Americas, populations fell by 50 percent to 95 percent by 1650.

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. More assuredly, Native Americans hosted a form of tuberculosis, perhaps acquired from Pacific seals and sea lions. But they had no counterparts to the suite of lethal diseases they acquired from Eurasians and Africans. The paucity of exportable infections was a result of the settlement and ecological history of the Americas: The first Americans arrived about 25,000 to 15,000 years ago. The domestication of species other than dogs was yet to come. So none of the human diseases derived from, or shared with, domestic herd animals such as cattle, camels, and pigs (e.g. smallpox, influenza) yet existed anywhere in the Americas. Unlike these animals, the ducks, turkeys, alpacas, llamas, and other species domesticated by Native Americans seem to have harboured no infections that became human diseases.

Animals

The animal component of the Columbian Exchange was slightly less one-sided. Horses, pigs, cattle, goats, sheep, and several other species adapted readily to conditions in the Americas. Broad expanses of grassland in both North and South America suited immigrant herbivores, cattle and horses especially, which ran wild and reproduced prolifically on the Pampas and the Great Plains. Pigs too went feral. Sheep prospered only in managed flocks and became a mainstay of pastoralism in several contexts, such as among the Navajo in New Mexico.

With the new animals, Native Americans acquired new sources of hides, wool, and animal protein. Horses and oxen also offered a new source of traction, making plowing feasible in the Americas for the first time and improving transportation possibilities through wheeled vehicles, hitherto unused in the Americas. Donkeys, mules, and horses provided a wider variety of pack animals. Thus, the introduced animal species had some important economic consequences in the Americas and made the American hemisphere more similar to Eurasia and Africa in its economy.

The new animals made the Americas more like Eurasia and Africa in a second respect. With goats and pigs leading the way, they chewed and trampled crops, provoking between herders and farmers conflict of a sort hitherto unknown in the Americas except perhaps where llamas got loose. This pattern of conflict created new opportunities for political divisions and alignments defined by new common interests.

One introduced animal, the horse, rearranged political life even further. The Native Americans of the North American prairies, often called Plains Indians, acquired horses from Spanish New Mexico late in the 17th century. On horseback they could hunt bison (buffalo) more rewardingly, boosting food supplies until the 1870s, when bison populations dwindled. Additionally, mastery of the techniques of equestrian warfare utilized against their neighbours helped to vault groups such as the Sioux and Comanche to heights of political power previously unattained by any Amerindians in North America.

Plants

The Columbian Exchange was more evenhanded when it came to crops. The Americas’ farmers’ gifts to other continents included staples such as corn (maize), potatoes, cassava, and sweet potatoes, together with secondary food crops such as tomatoes, peanuts, pumpkins, squashes, pineapples, and chili peppers. Tobacco, one of humankind’s most important drugs, is another gift of the Americas, one that by now has probably killed far more people in Eurasia and Africa than Eurasian and African diseases killed in the Americas.

Some of these crops had revolutionary consequences in Africa and Eurasia. Corn had the biggest impact, altering agriculture in Asia, Europe, and Africa. It underpinned population growth and famine resistance in parts of China and Europe, mainly after 1700, because it grew in places unsuitable for tubers and grains and sometimes gave two or even three harvests a year. It also served as livestock feed, for pigs in particular.

In Africa about 1550–1850, farmers from Senegal to Southern Africa turned to corn. Today it is the most important food on the continent as a whole. Its drought resistance especially recommended it in the many regions of Africa with unreliable rainfall.

Corn had political consequences in Africa. After harvest, it spoils more slowly than the traditional staples of African farms, such as bananas, sorghums, millets, and yams. Its longer shelf life, especially once it is ground into meal, favoured the centralization of power because it enabled rulers to store more food for longer periods of time, give it to loyal followers, and deny it to all others. Previously, without long-lasting foods, Africans found it harder to build states and harder still to project military power over large spaces. In the moist tropical forests of western and west-central Africa, where humidity worked against food hoarding, new and larger states emerged on the basis of corn agriculture in the 17th century. Some of them, including the Asante kingdom centred in modern-day Ghana, developed supply systems for feeding far-flung armies of conquest, using cornmeal, which canoes, porters, or soldiers could carry over great distances. Such logistical capacity helped Asante become an empire in the 18th century. To the east of Asante, expanding kingdoms such as Dahomey and Oyo also found corn useful in supplying armies on campaign.

The durability of corn also contributed to commercialization in Africa. Merchant parties, traveling by boat or on foot, could expand their scale of operations with food that stored and traveled well. The advantages of corn proved especially significant for the slave trade, which burgeoned dramatically after 1600. Slaves needed food on their long walks across the Sahara to North Africa or to the Atlantic coast en route to the Americas. Corn further eased the slave trade’s logistical challenges by making it feasible to keep legions of slaves fed while they clustered in coastal barracoons before slavers shipped them across the Atlantic.

Cassava, or manioc, another American food crop introduced to Africa in the 16th century as part of the Columbian Exchange, had impacts that in some cases reinforced those of corn and in other cases countered them. Cassava, originally from Brazil, has much that recommended it to African farmers. Its soil nutrient requirements are modest, and it withstands drought and insects robustly. Like corn, it yields a flour that stores and travels well. It helped ambitious rulers project force and build states in Angola, Kongo, West Africa, and beyond. Farmers can harvest cassava (unlike corn) at any time after the plant matures. The food lies in the root, which can last for weeks or months in the soil. This characteristic of cassava suited farming populations targeted by slave raiders. It enabled them to vanish into the forest and abandon their crop for a while, returning when danger had passed. So while corn helped slave traders expand their business, cassava allowed peasant farmers to escape and survive slavers’ raids.

The potato, domesticated in the Andes, made little difference in African history, although it does feature today in agriculture, especially in the Maghreb and South Africa. Farmers in various parts of East and South Asia adopted it, which improved agricultural returns in cool and mountainous districts. But its strongest impact came in northern Europe, where ecological conditions suited its requirements even at low elevations. From central Russia across to the British Isles, its adoption between 1700 and 1900 improved nutrition, checked famine, and led to a sustained spurt of demographic growth.

Potatoes store well in cold climates and contain excellent nutrition. In the Andes, where potato production and storage began, freeze-dried potatoes helped fuel the expansion of the Inca empire in the 15th century. A few centuries later potatoes fed the labouring legions of northern Europe’s manufacturing cities and thereby indirectly contributed to European industrial empires. Both Catherine the Great in Russia and Frederick II (the Great) in Prussia encouraged potato cultivation, hoping it would boost the number of taxpayers and soldiers in their domains. Like cassava, potatoes suited populations that might need to flee marauding armies. Potatoes can be left in the ground for weeks, unlike northern European grains such as rye and barley, which will spoil if not harvested when ripe. Frequent warfare in northern Europe prior to 1815 encouraged the adoption of potatoes.

Over-reliance on potatoes led to some of the worst food crises in the modern history of Europe. In 1845–52 a potato blight caused by an airborne fungus swept across northern Europe with especially costly consequences in Ireland, western Scotland, and the Low Countries. A million starved, and two million emigrated—mostly Irish.

Eurasian and African crops had an equally profound influence on the history of the American hemisphere. Until the mid-19th century, “drug crops” such as sugar and coffee proved the most important plant introductions to the Americas. Together with tobacco and cotton, they formed the heart of a plantation complex that stretched from the Chesapeake to Brazil and accounted for the vast majority of the Atlantic slave trade.

Introduced staple food crops, such as wheat, rice, rye, and barley, also prospered in the Americas. Some of these grains—rye, for example—grew well in climates too cold for corn, so the new crops helped to expand the spatial footprint of farming in both North and South America. Rice, on the other hand, fit into the plantation complex: imported from both Asia and Africa, it was raised mainly by slave labour in places such as Suriname and South Carolina until slavery’s abolition. By the late 19th century these food grains covered a wide swathe of the arable land in the Americas. Beyond grains, African crops introduced to the Americas included watermelon, yams, sorghum, millets, coffee, and okra. Eurasian contributions to American diets included bananas; oranges, lemons, and other citrus fruits; and grapes.

The Columbian Exchange, and the larger process of biological globalization of which it is part, has slowed but not ended. Shipping and air travel continue to redistribute species among the continents. Kudzu vine arrived in North America from Asia in the late 19th century and has spread widely in forested regions. The North American gray squirrel has found a new home in the British Isles. Zebra mussels have colonized North American waters since the 1980s. However, the consequences of recent biological exchanges for economic, political, and health history thus far pale next to those of the 16th through 18th century.