Level 3 — The long way around, with the reasons behind it and what the simple version leaves out.
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Words you need
The same words at every level. The first four are this unit’s words; the last two are plainer words the reading leans on.
Columbian Exchange
After 1492, two halves of the world that had been separate started swapping everything.
Indigenous Peoples
The first people to live in a place.
Colonization
Taking control of a place.
Epidemic
A sickness that tears through a community faster than anyone can stop it.
Continent plain word
One of the world’s big landmasses — Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Australia, Antarctica.
Native to plain word
Naturally from that place, having grown or lived there before anyone brought it.
For roughly twelve thousand years, the Americas developed on their own. Different plants were domesticated there, meaning people slowly bred wild plants into crops they could farm. Different animals lived there. Different diseases spread there. Farmers in Mexico bred maize, or corn, out of a wild grass; farmers in the Andes bred thousands of varieties of potato. None of it existed anywhere else, and nothing from Europe, Africa or Asia existed here.
In 1492 that ended. Over the following centuries, plants, animals, people and diseases moved back and forth across the Atlantic in a steady flow that historians call the .
The name is fair, but the word “exchange” is a little misleading. Crops really did move in both directions and both sides gained from them. disease moved almost entirely one way. So did the great majority of the people who crossed. If you tell this story as a list of good things on one side and bad things on the other, as if the two sides cancel out, you have already missed what really happened.
What went out from the Americas
The American crops that mattered most to the rest of the world were the ones that produced the most calories from the least land.
Maize — corn — and potatoes are the clearest cases. A potato field in poor, cold, thin soil yields more food than a wheat field in the same ground, and northern Europe has a great deal of poor, cold, thin soil. Populations that had been limited by how much food their land could produce were suddenly not limited in the same way. Historians link Europe’s population growth in the 1700s and 1800s directly to American crops, and that growth is part of why Europe had people to send abroad.
Other crops changed how people cooked and ate, rather than whether they survived. Tomatoes reached Italy and, within two centuries, became so central to its cooking that Italian food is hard to imagine without them. Cacao, the bean that chocolate is made from, reached Spain. Chili peppers traveled with Portuguese traders into India, Southeast Asia, China and West Africa and became such a normal part of cooking there that those foods now seem as if they always had them. Tobacco crossed to Europe, found a market, and came back as the cash crop, grown to sell rather than to eat, that built colonial Virginia — a plant whose profits would shape who was forced to work the land it grew on. Turkeys went the same way, and are the one American animal that became a farmyard bird on other .
What came in to the Americas
Coming the other way were the main crops of European farming and, with even bigger consequences, its livestock.
Wheat, barley, rice, coffee, bananas and sugar cane all arrived. Coffee is Africa and bananas to Asia, though both are now so ordinary in the Americas that students often assume they started here. Sugar cane deserves its own line: of every plant that crossed westward, it did the most damage, because sugar sold for enormous profits and took an enormous amount of brutal, hard work to grow and process.
The animals were the larger shock. The Americas had no horses, cattle, pigs, sheep or chickens. Horses reached the Great Plains and remade the nations there — hunting, warfare, trade and distance all changed within a few generations, and the horse-riding Plains cultures that many people picture as ancient actually grew out of the Exchange. Cattle and pigs were a different matter. Cattle ate and pigs dug up the crops in fields nations had cleared and planted, and because colonists let their animals roam freely, escaped herds frequently reached a region years before any colonist did.
The part that did not balance
This uneven flow explains most of what happened next, and it is where this reading stops being a list.
The ships carried smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus and others. Europe, Africa and Asia had been trading, invading and living alongside each other and their livestock for thousands of years, and disease had circulated among them the whole time. After that long, every community had survivors, and survivors had immunity, the body’s ability to fight off a disease it has beaten before. A child who lived through measles grew into an adult who would not die of it.
Nothing in the Americas had that history. No one there had ever been exposed to these diseases, and therefore no one had immunity to them, at any age, anywhere. When smallpox entered a community it did not move through it the way an illness moves through a school, taking a few at a time. It took nearly everyone at once — including the adults who farmed, hunted, healed, governed and remembered. A community can survive losing a share of its people. It has much more trouble surviving the simultaneous loss of the generation that knows how everything is done.
Historians’ estimates of how many people died vary widely, and that is not because anyone is being careless: there are few records, nobody counted these populations, and rebuilding the numbers means making assumptions that careful historians disagree about. What they do not disagree about is the overall scale. These killed the majority of the population of the Americas. Many nations lost enormous numbers before meeting a European, because disease moved along trade routes faster than colonists walked.
Disease did move east as well, and the clearest case is syphilis. Europe’s first documented of it breaks out in the 1490s, and DNA taken from ancient skeletons in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia now shows that diseases in the same family as syphilis were in the Americas long before 1492. It is the strongest evidence against any claim that disease traveled only one way, and it killed Europeans for centuries.
Now put it all together, because the overall pattern matters more than which way things moved. Crops moved both ways and both sides gained. Disease moved both ways too — and the consequences did not resemble each other at all. One side lost the majority of its population to it had never been exposed to before. The other lost a great many people to a serious disease. Those are not the same event, and no amount of tomatoes balances the difference.
That gap between the two sides’ losses — not disease moving in only one direction — is what made large-scale possible.
People were moved too
People were moved as well, and the direction of that movement was nearly as lopsided as the disease.
Europeans crossed for land, profit, or the freedom to worship as they chose. Africans crossed in far greater numbers and almost entirely by force: captured, sold, packed aboard ships and delivered to plantations as enslaved people, overwhelmingly to grow sugar and tobacco.
Follow the loop, because it is the point. The Exchange carries sugar cane west. Sugar turns out to be immensely profitable. Growing it demands brutal labor on a scale that no free worker will agree to. The demand for that labor drives the Atlantic slave trade, which moves millions of people west against their will. The movement of a plant and the movement of people are not two separate facts in the same chapter; one produced the other.
This is also why you should keep an eye on the word “exchange.” An exchange is a trade that both sides agree to. For crops, the word fits. For the people chained below deck on those ships, it does not. There it becomes a softer word that hides what was really done to them, and soft words like that are one way uncomfortable history gets made to sound comfortable.
The part the story usually leaves out
Three things that the simple, neat version of this story tends to leave out.
The land looked empty because it had been emptied. Disease traveled along trade routes, which stretched a long way and were busy, so the disease often moved ahead of the colonists rather than behind them. A great many Europeans arrived in places where the dying had already happened — and decided, reasonably enough from what was in front of them, that few people had ever lived in the Americas. Plymouth is the example to remember. The Pilgrims did not clear that ground. They settled the site of Patuxet, a Wampanoag town whose people had been killed by an in the years just before the Mayflower arrived, and they built on ground that had already been cleared and farmed. Some of them believed God had cleared the land for them. It was an . The idea of an empty , which later generations used to justify taking more of it, begins here, in the time between when the disease arrived and when the Europeans who wrote about it did.
The numbers are contested, and knowing why is part of knowing the history. Estimates of the pre-1492 population of the Americas range from roughly 8 million to over 100 million, and estimates of mortality vary accordingly. That spread is not sloppiness. Nobody was counting. Today’s estimates depend on archaeology, on colonial records written by people who had reasons to make the numbers bigger or smaller, and on assumptions about how many people a piece of land can feed. Historians argue about those assumptions openly, and that is a sign the field is working the way it should. Be suspicious of any source that gives you one confident number with no range and no explanation of where it came from — and notice that the size of a writer’s estimate often matches what that writer wants the story to mean.
The Exchange did not end; it changed shape. The crops that crossed westward created an agricultural system — sugar, then tobacco, then cotton — whose profits depended on people who were forced to work. That system is the direct link between this week and next: the triangular trade you will study is the running as a business, with ships moving manufactured goods, enslaved people and plantation crops around one Atlantic circuit. When you meet it, you will already know why the demand existed.
So what?
Told as a food story, the is a lot of fun, and everything in it is true. Tomatoes did reach Italy. Chocolate did reach Europe. Horses did reach the Plains.
But a food story cannot answer the question the unit is actually asking. Millions of people lived in the Americas in 1491, in nations with governments, farms, borders and long histories. Within a few centuries, a far smaller number of newcomers controlled the land. How?
Not mainly by being better armed, and not by outnumbering them. The answer is in how uneven it all was: crops both ways to everyone’s benefit, disease both ways with wildly unequal results, people one way in chains. When somebody hands you a tidy list of what the Exchange gave the world, the useful question is what the list leaves out — and whether it left it out by accident.
Watch the three videos
Three short videos from the lesson this reading was built to sit beside. None of them is longer than a minute and a half. Watch them after you have read, not before.
Under each video there are two boxes. The first box is something the video does not tell you, and you read that one before you watch. The second box is what to do while you watch, and you do that one on paper.
Turn the captions on with the CC button. Every video also has “What the narrator says” underneath it — open that and the words are ordinary text, so they can be read aloud or translated like the rest of the page.
These are videos, so they are not on this sheet. All three
are on the web version at mrbsocialstudies.org/columbian-exchange.html, captioned and with
the words written out. The questions below are the ones to answer as you watch.
1. The exchange begins0:56
A name to notice. The video says “the Arawaks.” Arawak is the name of a group of languages, and many different peoples across the Caribbean and South America spoke them. The people of Hispaniola have a more exact name of their own: the Taíno. That is the name to use.
While you watch.
Check a box every time the video says that thing crossed the ocean. Check them off as you hear them.
Horses
Wheat
Corn
Chickens
Tomatoes
Coffee
Smallpox and measles
People taken from Africa by force
Two boxes should still be empty. Write those two down. Then write one sentence: why do you think a one-minute video left those two out?
NARRATOR: In 1493, Columbus led a small band of men and 24 horses ashore on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The island people, the Arawaks, had seen white-skinned men on Columbus’s first voyage, but they had never before laid eyes on the towering beasts that splashed through the surf that day.
As soon as Columbus arrived in the Americas, worlds that had been separated by vast oceans for millions of years began to merge. This process would transform life on both sides of the Atlantic forever. Sheep, cattle and chickens were all imported into the Americas, as were bananas, coffee and wheat.
And the Americas introduced the world to tomatoes, cocoa, as well as corn and peanuts — foods that now literally feed the world.
2. Horses0:55
Two things the video does not tell you.
Horses were not new to the Americas. They first evolved here. They crossed into Asia and Europe over land that is now under the sea, and then they died out on this side of the world about ten thousand years ago. So the ships in the first video were not bringing the horse to the Americas for the first time. They were bringing it back.
And the buffalo were not “replaced.” Fifteen million of them were still grazing the grasslands in the 1860s. By the 1890s about a thousand were left. Hunters shot them for their hides, mostly in the 1870s and 1880s. It was not only a business, either. Some officials in the government and the army saw a use in it: they believed that if the herds were gone, the army could force Native nations onto reservations. Congress passed a law in 1874 to protect the buffalo. President Grant refused to sign it, so it never took effect.
While you watch.
The video says the buffalo of the plains “were replaced by European cattle.” That sentence never says who did it. Check the one below that does say who.
The buffalo went away, and cattle took their place.
Hunters shot the buffalo, and ranchers put cattle on the land.
Now write one sentence: why does it matter which of those two sentences a person uses?
NARRATOR: Horses frightened the Arawaks when they first saw them, for they believed them to be giant dogs that fed on human flesh. But over time, Native Americans came to use the horse for their own purposes. These dancers of the North American plains lived by hunting buffalo.
But stalking the buffalo on foot was a slow and dangerous affair. Horses revolutionized the hunt. What once took days now took moments. But in time, the buffalo of the plains were replaced by European cattle. With them, a new culture evolved, that of the cowboy.
The all-American rodeo is actually anything but. The bucking bronco, the branded cattle, even the word “rodeo” are foreigners, all Spanish imports.
3. The potato, and what followed it1:23
One word to watch. The video calls the potato blight a fungus. It is not a fungus. It is a water mold, which is a different kind of living thing altogether — closer to algae than to a mushroom. Nobody in 1845 knew that, and the wrong name stuck.
While you watch.
At the very end the video says people crossed the ocean “to start a new life in the Americas.” Two groups of people crossed it. Write yes or no in each box: did that group choose to come?
The Irish families in this video
The Africans in the reading, who were taken by force
Now write one sentence: is “to start a new life” a fair way to describe both groups?
NARRATOR: If European imports like horses and cattle forever changed the Americas, American exports to Europe would forever change life there. The humble potato is one important example. It was grown by peoples of the Andes for hundreds of years before the Spaniards arrived.
Once in Europe, this nutritious vegetable became the food of the poor, and it supported a sharp increase in the European population beginning in the 1600s. Ireland’s population grew more than eightfold. For many, meals consisted of potatoes and nothing else. But then another import from the Americas arrived: a deadly fungus.
By the summer of 1845, potato fields stricken by this fungus blackened overnight. The Irish potato famine had begun. Those who had lived by the potato now died without it. Perhaps a million Irish starved to death. A million others took to ships headed westward across the Atlantic.
They became part of perhaps the most significant cargo to move between the continents: the massive wave of people who would cross the oceans to start a new life in the Americas.
Where this comes from
This reading was written for this class. These are the places the information
came from, and where you can read more.
The lesson this goes with
PBS LearningMedia — The Columbian ExchangeWGBH. The lesson this handout was built to sit alongside. Its three videos are on this page; the rest of it stays there, and what you are reading was written for this class. One thing to check if you go and read it: its own text says that rats off the European ships brought the diseases. Rats do carry disease, but the two that did the most damage here, smallpox and measles, passed straight from person to person.