Columbian Exchange - Influence

Influence

In the biological and ecological exchange that took place following Spanish establishment of colonies in New World, people of Europe and Africa settled in the New World, and animals, plants and diseases of Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere were introduced to each area in an interchange.

This exchange of plants and animals transformed European, American, African, and Asian ways of life. New foods became staples of human diets, and new growing regions opened up for crops. For example, before AD 1000, potatoes were not grown outside of South America. By the 1840s, Ireland was so dependent on the potato that a diseased crop led to the devastating Irish Potato Famine. Since being introduced by 16th-century Portuguese traders, who brought them from the Americas, maize and manioc replaced traditional African crops as the continent's most important staple food crops. New staple crops that were introduced to Asia from the Americas via Spanish colonizers in the 16th century, including maize and sweet potatoes, contributed to the population growth in Asia. European exploration of tropical areas was aided by the New World discovery of quinine, the first effective treatment for malaria.This caused the slave trade.

One of the first European export, the horse, changed the lives of many Native American tribes on the Great Plains, allowing them to shift to a nomadic lifestyle based on hunting bison on horseback. Tomato sauce, made from New World tomatoes, became an Italian trademark and tomatoes were widely used in France, while coffee from Africa and sugar cane from Asia became the main commodity crops of extensive Latin American plantations. Introduced to India by the Portuguese, chili/paprika from South America is today an integral part of Indian cuisine, as are potatoes.

Before regular communication had been established between the two hemispheres, the varieties of domesticated animals and infectious diseases that jumped to humans, such as smallpox, were strikingly larger in the Old World than in the New. Many had migrated west with animals or people, or were brought by traders from Asia, so diseases of two continents were suffered by all. While Europeans and Asians were affected by the Eurasian diseases, their endemic status in those continents over centuries caused many people to acquire immunity. By contrast, "Old World" diseases had a devastating impact on Native American populations because they had no natural immunity to the new diseases. The smallpox epidemics are believed to have resulted in the largest death tolls among Native Americans, surpassing any wars and far exceeding the mortality from the Black Death. It is estimated that upwards of 80–95 percent of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100–150 years following 1492; the most affected regions in the Americas lost 100% of their population.

Before the Columbian Exchange, there were no oranges in Florida, no bananas in Ecuador, no paprika in Hungary, no tomatoes in Italy, no potatoes in Ireland, no coffee in Colombia, no pineapples in Hawaii, no rubber trees in Africa, no cattle in Texas, no donkeys in Mexico, no chili peppers in Thailand or India, and no chocolate in Switzerland.