The Columbian Exchange is a term that alludes to the swap of diseases, ideas and food. It refers to the exchange of diseases, beliefs, food crops, people between the New and Old Worlds rops, and demographics between the New and Old Worlds after Christopher Columbus’s 1492 trip to the Americas. Christopher Columbus (Nunn and Qian 163). The Old World, including Europe and the whole Eastern Hemisphere, benefited in several ways from the Columbian Exchange. Discovery hemisphere helped in a multitude of tracks from the Columbian Exchange. The most well-known is perhaps the discovery of new metal sources. For the first time after Pangaea split a billion years ago, the New World collides with the Old World. Europe and North America benefited from increased disease resistance, the acquisition of new global cuisines and staple crops, and the advancement of civilization.
To begin, African, Asian, and European populations maintained a variety of domestic animals, including cows, pigs, lambs, and dogs. By contrast, in the Americas, just a few cultures kept any animals at all. It indicated that more diseases had been transmitted from animals to humans than in the Americas in Afro-Eurasia. Additionally, the Columbian Exchange aided in expanding Europe’s populace by importing new foods from the Americas and brought in Europe’s economic shift to private enterprise. Colonization altered ecosystems, introducing new species like pigs while destroying others like beavers. There is a good deal of substance in this section of the Columbian Exchange. Jordan contends that the “Columbian Exchange,” a notion coined by Alfred Crosby, a historian, illustrates the movement of diseases, plants, and animals, between the Americas and Old World the after Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492.
Second, the first exposure of a group of persons to disease is always the most dangerous humans who survive a sickness pass on their resistance to their descendants. Since Afro-Eurasia has a higher rate of illness, they also have a higher rate of disease resistance. When all the diseases were combined, the Americas suffered far more than Afro-Europeans. Additionally, the effect was most extreme in the Caribbean, whereby 1700, Native American populaces on most islands had dwindled to less than 1percent. By 1660, people in the Americas had plunged from 50 to 95 percent (Nunn and Qian 174). The Columbian Exchange’s sickness component was decidedly one-sided.
Additionally, although they were not as adept at avoiding disease, the vast established countries of the Americas excelled at farming. The Aztec and Inca Empires developed crops that produced very nutritious, balanced vegetarian meals. These crops were introduced to Afro-Eurasia, improving the already disease-resistant people’s health and resistance to disease.
Finally, although the Americas lacked silk and other beautiful things that the Europeans first craved from Asia, they did possess stuff that the Europeans desired. Native Americans, on the other hand, undoubtedly received the short end of the stick. Even some of the “positive” items they acquired due to the trade, such as coffee, sugar cane, and bananas, required considerable work to cultivate, resulting in their enslavement and forced labor (Jordan 7). Regrettably, Africans had immunities that Native Americans did not explain why the African slave trade grew to such proportions. Europeans needed someone to undertake the task for which Native Americans were dying.
For reasons ahead of human control and deeply rooted in the continents’ different evolutionary histories, the Columbian Exchange benefited the populace of Europe and its colonies enormously while bringing horrible crumbliness to Native Americans. The Exchange helped Europeans by supplying them with new products and land to make money. The Columbian Exchange benefited Europeans globally, as they gained a surplus of staple food and prospered from cash crops and new land plundered from Native Americans.
Work Cited
Jordan, I. King. “The Columbian Exchange as a source of adaptive introgression in human populations.” Biology Direct 11.1 (2016): 1-8.
Nunn, Nathan, and Nancy Qian. “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 24, no. 2, May 2010, pp. 163–188, scholar.harvard.edu/files/nunn/files/nunn_qian_jep_2010.pdf, 10.1257/jep.24.2.163.
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