Columbian Exchange

Inca-era terraces on Taquile are used to grow traditional Andean food, such as potatoes, with wheat from Europe.

The Columbian Exchange, sometimes called the Grand Exchange was the exchange of goods and ideas from Europe, Africa, and Asia and goods and ideas from the Americas. It also spread different diseases. It started in 1492 when Christopher Columbus arrived in the West Indies (North America).

This exchange of plants and animals changed European, American, African, and Asian ways of life. Foods that had never been seen before by people became a major part of what they ate. For example, before 1492, no potatoes were 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. The first European import to the Americas, the horse, changed the lives of many Native American tribes on the Great Plains, letting them to change to a nomadic lifestyle based on hunting bison on horseback. Italy became famous for its Tomato sauce, made from New World tomatoes, while coffee from Africa and sugarcane from Asia became the main crops of very large Latin American plantations. Also the chili and paprika from South America was introduced in India by the Portuguese and it is today an important part of Indian cuisine.

Before the Columbian Exchange, there were no oranges in Florida, no bananas in Ecuador, no paprika in Hungary, no zucchini in Italy, no pineapples in Hawaii, no rubber trees in Africa, no cattle in Texas, no chili peppers in Thailand and India, no cigarettes in France and no chocolate in Switzerland. Even the dandelion was brought to America by Europeans for use as an herb.

Before there was regular communication between the two hemispheres, the different types of domesticated animals and diseases were more numerous in the Old World than in the New. This partly led to the horrible effects of Old World diseases on Native American tribes. Smallpox probably caused in the highest death toll for Native Americans.

Barely any civilization on earth stayed the same by this global ecological exchange.

Table of comparison

Pre-Columbian Distribution of Organisms with Close Ties to Humans
Type of organism	Old World list (what they had)	New World list (what they had)
Domesticated animals	camel cattle donkey fowl (several species including chickens) goat horse pig rabbit sheep	alpaca fowl (a few species) guinea pig racoon llama turkey
Domesticated plants	black pepper bananas barley cabbage coffee cotton ("Egyptian" type) citrus garlic hemp lettuce oats onion peach pear rice rye sugarcane turnip wheat	amaranth avocado beans cashew chia chicle (chewing gum base) chili pepper (includes the bell pepper) cocoa cotton (90% of today's cotton production) maize (corn) manioc (cassava) papaya peanut pecan pineapple potato quinoa rubber squash (incl. pumpkin) sunflower strawberry (American species) sweet potato tobacco tomato vanilla
Infectious diseases	bubonic plague cholera influenza malaria measles scarlet fever sleeping sickness smallpox tuberculosis typhoid yellow fever	Chagas' disease syphilis (possibly) yaws yellow fever (American strains)

Columbian Exchange Media

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  The Columbian exchange of crop plants, livestock, and diseases in both directions between the Old World and the New World

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  The 16th century Florentine Codex by the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún provided an early depiction of maize, one of the plants the Spanish brought to the Old World.

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  The evangelization of Mexico

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  A depiction of slaves working at a plantation in Virginia, 1670

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  Native Americans learned to use horses to chase bison, dramatically expanding their hunting range. George Catlin, 1844