The Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange refers to the massive transfer of plants, animals, people, diseases, and ideas between the Americas and the rest of the world that began after Christopher Columbus's voyages of 1492. The historian Alfred W. Crosby introduced the term in his 1972 book The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, arguing that the encounter between the "Old World" (Europe, Asia, and Africa) and the "New World" (the Americas) triggered one of the most consequential ecological events since the end of the last Ice Age. Crops such as maize, potatoes, and tomatoes crossed the Atlantic eastward, while wheat, sugar cane, coffee, and livestock such as horses, cattle, and pigs crossed westward. The exchange also carried devastating diseases, above all smallpox, measles, and influenza, to which Indigenous American populations had no acquired immunity, contributing to demographic collapse estimated by some scholars at up to 90 percent of the pre-contact population within a century or so of contact. Beyond its biological dimension, the Columbian Exchange reorganized global agriculture, cuisine, and demography, laying the material foundations for the modern world economy.