The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492

“Thus it was decided by Rome that the aborigines of America were worthy of conquest and too worthy to be treated as domesticated animals. Again and again during the centuries of European imperialism, the Christian view that all men are brothers was to lead to persecution of non-Europeans […]”

The Church justified the subordination of Indigenous groups by concluding that God created them, along with the rest of humankind, in a monolithic creation. Although Europeans were puzzled by the distinctions between the continents, they ultimately had to incorporate Indigenous people into the Christian worldview if colonization were to succeed. Spain’s Catholic monarchs viewed the conquest of the Americas as a continuation of the Reconquista in Spain, the nearly eight-century battle to claim the Iberian Peninsula for Catholicism. Thus, the Indigenous people of the region were forced to convert to Catholicism, and the conquest was both territorial and religious.

“It was clear and still is clear that American Indians are different from the rest of mankind in a number of important ways, none of which worked to their advantage in their confrontation with Columbus and those who followed him. It may be accurate to say that the Indians were more different from the rest of mankind in 1492 than any other major group of humanity.”

Crosby notes that distinctions between Indigenous populations in the Americas and Europeans placed the original inhabitants of North and South America at a disadvantage when confronted with European imperial power. These differences included fundamentally different religious views of the world, technological differences, different ways of approaching warfare, and, most significantly, according to Crosby, biological distinctions. Indigenous vulnerability to European diseases that did not exist in the Americas caused mass death and devastation of populations.

“That isolation not only hampered the growth of their civilizations, but also weakened their defenses against the major diseases of mankind.”

Crosby’s explanation as to why Indigenous Americans were susceptible to European diseases rests on their isolation from other parts of the world for so many centuries. This statement also reflects his Eurocentric views: He credits this isolation with causing an imagined inferiority of Indigenous societies when compared to Europe, despite the existence of numerous sophisticated Indigenous civilizations—including the Mayans, Aztecs or Mexicas, and Incans—in Mexico and Central and South America.

“It has often been suggested that the high mortality rates of these post-Columbian epidemics were due more to the brutal treatment of the Indians by the Europeans than the Indians’ lack of resistance to imported maladies. But the early chroniclers reported that the first epidemics following the arrival of the Old World peoples in a given area of the New World were worst, or at least among the worst. European exploitation had not yet had time to destroy the Indians’ health.”

Crosby counters earlier scholarship that suggests Indigenous peoples of the Americas died en masse due to abusive and exploitative treatment at the hands of their colonizers. Crosby does not deny that colonialists treated Indigenous people with brutality. Rather, he argues that epidemics of European diseases arrived early and swept through societies with such speed that they preceded the opportunity for European abuse to wreak its havoc.

“The records of every European people who have had prolonged contact with the native peoples of America are full of references to the impact of Old World diseases.”

European-authored primary sources frequently document epidemics of disease among groups of Indigenous people, often marveling at the deadly nature of illnesses that took a far less harsh toll on Europeans who fell sick. This eyewitness evidence makes it clear that European diseases ravaged Indigenous populations in the Americas.

“When the epidemic subsided, the siege of the Aztec capital began. Had there been no epidemic, the Aztecs, their war-making potential unimpaired and their warriors fired with victory, could have pursued the Spanish […]”

A smallpox epidemic likely contributed to the fall of the Aztec (Mexica) Empire to the Spanish. This European disease took a heavy toll on the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan, their capital, so that even after recovery, the empire was too weakened to effectively defend against Spanish conquest. Had it not been for this epidemic, Crosby postulates that the empire may have been more successful in its resistance to Spanish imperialism.

“The impact of the smallpox pandemic on the Aztec and Incan Empires is easy for the twentieth-century reader to underestimate. We have so long been hypnotized by the daring of the conquistador that we have overlooked the importance of his biological allies.”

Smallpox played a significant role in the Spanish conquest of the Incan Empire of South America, just as it did in the case of the Aztecs in Mexico. Before Crosby’s environmental history, historical analyses gave credit to the military prowess and technological might of the Spanish conquistadors in their successes. However, Crosby’s research shows that these factors were less important. Were it not for the havoc wreaked by smallpox, the fate of these empires may have been different. He identifies disease as the most important factor in the conquests of the Americas.

“Suddenly a terrible gap had opened in Incan society: the autocrat had died, and there was no one to take his place.”

Smallpox killed the Incan emperor prior to the Spaniards’ arrival. His death left a political vacuum in the empire and caused fighting among the surviving nobles. This internal fracture and warfare weakened the Incan Empire’s stability, making it more difficult to resist Spanish conquest. Thus, biological factors created a power vacuum that played an important role in the collapse and conquest of this empire.

“To a notable extent, the whole migration of Spaniards, Portuguese, and others who followed them across the Atlantic, and the successful exploitation of the New World by these people depended on their ability to ‘Europeanize’ the flora and fauna of the New World. That transformation was well underway by 1500, and it was irrevocable in both North and South America by 1550.”

Europeans imported plants and animals from Europe to the Americas to support the diets and lifestyles to which they were accustomed. Though they also adapted to the cultivation of indigenous crops, the deliberate and inadvertent introduction of new flora and fauna to the Americas dramatically transformed the environment, often for the worse, causing the extinction of indigenous species and soil erosion. These changes happened swiftly, and within 50 years the landscapes of the Americas changed forever.

“Europeans vastly enhanced their own ability to live in ever increasing numbers in the Americas by distributing Indian plants and seeds to areas where they had been unknown in pre-Columbian times.”

Though Europeans cultivated imported crops and raised animals brought from Europe in their American colonies, they also had to rely on American crops for sustenance. They transported these crops, such as potatoes, from their original areas of cultivation to other regions within the North and South American continents, thus dispersing their production and changing the biological landscape of the continents.

“The Antilles were less than a perfect base camp in the Americas for the European horticulturalists. Wheat and the other European grains failed, and so did grape vines and olive trees: no bread, wine, or oil.”

Columbus first arrived at the Caribbean. In the Antilles, the Spaniards quickly realized that the tropical climate could not support the crops that they were accustomed to growing. Wheat, olives, and grapevines were traditional Mediterranean crops, produced there since ancient times, but they could not be grown in regions of the Americas. This fact forced Europeans to look to alternative, indigenous crops for survival, but they also discovered that these traditional Mediterranean products could grow in very specific areas of the Americas. Today, for example, the South American country of Chile is known for its wine production, a legacy of Spanish colonialism.

“Not all or probably even most of the plants brought to America in the sixteenth century were for human consumption or were brought intentionally.”

The Columbian Exchange was not always conscious. Though Europeans deliberately brought crops and livestock to the Americas, seeds arrived in the folds of clothing and other textiles, in animal feces, and in dirt that traveled across the Atlantic.

“[…] the Indians were forced to raise wheat and other European crops, either under direct European directive or in order to make tribute payments in kind, but they rarely added these to their own diets. The Europeans destroyed the Indian’s civilizations, and even drove his gods into Christian vestments, but in many of the most elemental ways, the Indian remained Indian.”

European colonizers worked to convert Indigenous peoples to Christianity and exploited their labor. Indigenous religions often covertly preserved their gods and religious traditions by overlaying them with Christian saints and rituals. Indigenous populations also resisted the imposition of European culture when they refused to consume the crops colonialists forced them to grow. Food is a fundamental element of cultural identity, and Indigenous populations were able to preserve some aspects of their cultures through food.

“After conquest, the horse played a role of less spectacular but no less significant nature.”

Horses are indigenous to Central Asia and were, thus, introduced to European societies thousands of years ago. They did not, however, exist in the Americas before contact. Horses were an advantageous tool for Europeans in conquest. Afterward, they continued to play an important role in the history of the Americas because they were used in herding in the burgeoning cattle industry, and some Indigenous groups adopted the use of horses. This adoption created greater social stratification in some Indigenous societies and also allowed Indigenous people to engage in uprisings and raids.

“The wild oscillation of the balance of nature happens again whenever an area previously isolated is opened to the rest of the world. But possibly it will never be repeated in as spectacular a fashion as in the Americas in the first post-Columbian century […]”

The arrival of European plants and animals in the Americas was fundamentally transformative for the environment. Changes happened quickly, causing “wild oscillation” due to the rapid invasion of germs, plants, and animals from another region that was unlike anything before and is unlikely to happen again.

“The men and women of Erasmus’s generation were the first Europeans to know syphilis, or so they said, at least. The pox, as the English called it, had struck like a thunderbolt in the very last years of the fifteenth century, but unlike most diseases that appear with such abruptness, it did not fill up graveyards and then go away, to come again some other day or perhaps never. Syphilis settled down and became a permanent factor in human existence.”

Crosby outlines the Columbian and Unitarian theories of syphilis’s origins. Venereal syphilis, however, most likely originated in the Americas and arrived in Europe as part of the “Columbian Exchange.” Early modern Europeans are the first to write about this disease, its symptoms, and attempts at treatment. This illness, however, was different from others known in Europe, such as the Black Death, because it did not kill with the same swiftness, and it was not a disease that came and went. Rather, it became a constant threat for Europeans until penicillin’s development in the modern era.

“Syphilis has a special fascination for the historian because, of all mankind’s most important maladies, it is the most uniquely ‘historical.’”

Crosby notes that syphilis is of particular interest to historians who study disease because it has a specific “history.” That is, there is a moment in time when historians can identify its appearance on the world stage, and they can track the impact of its spread. The Columbian Exchange caused this development.

“Add to the normal emotional difficulties of the sex relationship not just the possibility of the pains of gonorrhea but the danger of a horrible and often fatal disease, syphilis. Where there must be trust, there must now also be suspicion. Where there must be a surrender of self, there must also be a shrewd consideration of future health.”

Crosby suggests that syphilis’s introduction into European society fundamentally transformed social relations, including friendships, but, more significantly, relationships between men and women. Marital relationships rest on a foundation of trust, but this disease created heightened fear and, thus, mistrust within them.

“But how is it that the Old World was able to supply so many millions of emigrants to the New? She did so not by depopulating her own lands: in fact, in the case of Europe, her population was growing so rapidly that the people sent to America can, by and large, be defined as surplus population.”

American crops brought to Europe substantially increased the population. This demographic expansion, in turn, contributed to further colonization of the Americas because Europe could consistently supply its colonies with new immigrants without depopulating European kingdoms. This rising population of colonists in the Americas further displaced and destroyed Indigenous groups.

“In many cases the American crops do not compete with Old World crops but complement them. The American plants enable the farmer to produce food from soils that prior to 1492, were rated as useless because of their sandiness, altitude, aridity, and other factors.”

Crops from the Americas that made their way to Europe, Africa, and Asia did not displace traditional crops. Instead, they added to agricultural outputs and enhanced regional diets because they were not competitors with those local crops and could be grown on unused land.

“The importance of American foods in Africa is more obvious than any other continent in the Old World, for in no other continent, except for the Americas themselves, is so great a portion of the population so dependent on American foods.”

According to Crosby, few of the world’s crops are indigenous to the African continent, so that Africa benefited tremendously from the importation of American crops. Maize, manioc, sweet potatoes, squashes, and peanuts, for example became especially popular in Western Africa, where they are central to modern diets. This cultivation fostered a huge rise in population after 1850 when the spread of these crops took off.

“The men of the Old World continue to enjoy the benefits of biological warfare as American Indians continue to die of Old World diseases.”

Crosby argues that the Columbian Exchange did not end in the early modern period but persists into the modern. Indigenous Americans still suffered the devastating effects of imported diseases in the 20th century. For example, within less than 200 years, the Indigenous population of Tierra del Fuego decreased dramatically. In 1871 the population was between nine and seven thousand people. By the 1940s only 150 people lived on this South American archipelago.

“The most obvious element in the Columbian exchange—at least from the human viewpoint—is the last to be dealt with in this book: people.”

Crosby reminds readers that humans were also part of the Columbian Exchange, including European colonists and enslaved Africans. The Columbian Exchange began the trade of forcing enslaved Africans to the Americas where they were required to labor under brutal conditions on European-owned plantations, especially the sugar plantations. Indeed, the earliest movement of people to the Americas came not from Europe but from Africa.