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    The Columbian Exchange

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    The Columbian exchange was a widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, and ideas between the Old World and the New World in the 15th through 18th centuries. Key aspects included Europeans introducing horses, sugar, and diseases to the Americas in exchange for American exports like tobacco, chocolate, and potatoes being brought to Europe. This dramatic exchange of goods profoundly changed global economies, agriculture, and human populations on both sides of the Atlantic.

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    The Columbian Exchange

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    The Columbian exchange was a widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, and ideas between the Old World and the New World in the 15th through 18th centuries. Key aspects included Europeans introducing horses, sugar, and diseases to the Americas in exchange for American exports like tobacco, chocolate, and potatoes being brought to Europe. This dramatic exchange of goods profoundly changed global economies, agriculture, and human populations on both sides of the Atlantic.

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    The Columbian exchange was a widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, and ideas between the Old World and the New World in the 15th through 18th centuries. Key aspects included Europeans introducing horses, sugar, and diseases to the Americas in exchange for American exports like tobacco, chocolate, and potatoes being brought to Europe. This dramatic exchange of goods profoundly changed global economies, agriculture, and human populations on both sides of the Atlantic.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    160 views7 pages

    The Columbian Exchange

    Uploaded by

    api-294527248
    The Columbian exchange was a widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, and ideas between the Old World and the New World in the 15th through 18th centuries. Key aspects included Europeans introducing horses, sugar, and diseases to the Americas in exchange for American exports like tobacco, chocolate, and potatoes being brought to Europe. This dramatic exchange of goods profoundly changed global economies, agriculture, and human populations on both sides of the Atlantic.

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    of 7

    The Columbian Exchange

    The Columbian exchange moved commodities, people, and diseases across the Atlantic.

    Overview
    Mercantilism, an economic theory that rejected free trade and promoted
    government regulation of the economy for the purpose of enhancing state
    power, defined the economic policy of European colonizing countries.
    Christopher Columbus introduced horses, sugar plants, and disease to the
    New World, while facilitating the introduction of New World commodities like
    sugar, tobacco, chocolate, and potatoes to the Old World.
    The process by which commodities, people, and diseases crossed the
    Atlantic is known as the Columbian Exchange.

    Commerce in the New World


    As Europeans expanded their market reach into the colonial sphere, they devised
    a new economic policy to ensure the colonies profitability. The philosophy of
    mercantilism shaped European perceptions of wealth from the 1500s to the late
    1700s. Mercantilism held that only a limited amount of wealth, as measured in gold
    and silver bullion, existed in the world. In order to gain power, nations had to
    amass wealth by mining these precious raw materials from their colonial
    possessions. Mercantilists did not believe in free trade, arguing instead that the
    nation should control trade to create wealth and to enhance state power. In this
    view, colonies existed to strengthen the colonizing nation.
    Colonial mercantilism, a set of protectionist policies designed to benefit the
    colonizing nation, relied on several factors:

    Colonies rich in raw materials


    Cheap labor
    Colonial loyalty to the home government
    Control of the shipping trade

    Under this system, the colonies sent their raw materialsharvested by enslaved
    people or native workersto Europe. European industry then produced and sent
    finished materialslike textiles, tools, manufactured goods, and clothingback to
    the colonies. Colonists were forbidden from trading with other countries.

    Commodification quickly affected production in the New World. American silver,


    tobacco, and other itemswhich were used by native peoples for ritual
    purposesbecame European commodities with monetary value. Before the arrival
    of the Spanish, for example, the Inca people of the Andes consumed chicha, a
    corn beer, for ritual purposes only. When the Spanish discovered chicha, they
    bought and traded for it, detracting from its spiritual significance for market gain.
    This process disrupted native economies and spurred early commercial
    capitalism.

    Claude Lorrain, a seaport at the height of mercantilism. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

    The Columbian Exchange: goods introduced by


    Europe, produced in New World
    As Europeans traversed the Atlantic, they brought with them plants, animals, and
    diseases that changed lives and landscapes on both sides of the ocean. These
    two-way exchanges between the Americas and Europe/Africa are known
    collectively as the Columbian Exchange.
    Of all the commodities in the Atlantic World, sugar proved to be the most
    important. Indeed, in the colonial era, sugar carried the same economic
    importance as oil does today. European rivals raced to create sugar plantations in
    the Americas and fought wars for control of production. Although refined sugar
    was available in the Old World, Europes harsher climate made sugarcane difficult
    to grow. Columbus brought sugar to Hispaniola in 1493, and the new crop thrived.
    Over the next century of colonization, Caribbean islands and most other tropical
    areas became centers of sugar production, which in turn fueled the demand to
    enslave Africans for labor.

    Slavery in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. Image credit. Wikimedia Commons
    The Columbian Exchange: from the New World to
    the Old World
    Though of secondary importance to sugar, tobacco also had great value for
    Europeans as a cash cropa crop cultivated for sale instead of personal
    consumption. Native Americans had been growing tobacco for medicinal and
    ritual purposes for centuries before European contact, believing tobacco could
    improve concentration and enhance wisdom. To some, its use meant achieving an
    entranced, altered, or divine state.

    Tobacco was unknown in Europe before 1492, and it carried a negative stigma at
    first. The early Spanish explorers considered native people's use of tobacco to be
    proof of their savagery. However, European colonists then took up the habit of
    smoking, and they brought it across the Atlantic. Europeans ascribed medicinal
    properties to tobacco, claiming that it could cure headaches and skin irritations.
    Even so, Europeans did not import tobacco in great quantities until the 1590s. At
    that time, it became the first truly global commodity; English, French, Dutch,
    Spanish, and Portuguese colonists all grew it for the world market.

    Native peoples also introduced Europeans to chocolate, made from cacao seeds
    and used by the Aztec in Mesoamerica as currency. Mesoamerican Indians
    consumed unsweetened chocolate in a drink with chili peppers, vanilla, and a
    spice called achiote. This chocolate drinkxocolatlwas part of ritual ceremonies
    like marriage. Chocolate contains theobromine, a stimulant, which may be why
    native people believed it brought them closer to the sacred world.


    Triangular trade of the Columbian Exchange. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

    The Columbian Exchange: from the Old World to the


    New World
    The crossing of the Atlantic by plants like cacao and tobacco illustrates the ways
    in which the discovery of the New World changed the habits and behaviors of
    Europeans. Europeans changed the New World in turn, not least by bringing Old
    World animals to the Americas. On his second voyage, Christopher Columbus
    brought pigs, cows, chickens, and horses to the islands of the Caribbean. Many
    Native Americans used horses to transform their hunting and gathering into a
    highly mobile practice.
    Travelers between the Americas, Africa, and Europe also included microbes:
    silent, invisible life forms that had profoundly devastating consequences. Native
    peoples had no immunity to Old World diseases to which they had never been
    exposed. European explorers unwittingly brought with them chickenpox, measles,
    mumps, and smallpox, decimating some populations and wholly destroying others.
    One disease did travel the other directionsyphilis, a lethal sexually transmitted
    disease, came with travelers from the New World to Europe for the first time.
    The Columbian Exchange embodies both the positive and negative environmental
    and health results of contact as well as the cultural shifts produced by such
    contact.

    Information from KHAN Academy


    https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-us-history/period-1/apush-old-and-n
    ew-worlds-collide/a/the-columbian-exchange-ka

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