The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492

Europeans’ ability to colonize the Americas hinged on their success in importing Old World flora and fauna. This chapter highlights the themes of Ecological Imperialism and Environmental Degradation as consequences of colonization, but it explores both the positive and negative impacts of the transformation of the Americas. The New World’s landscape was forever changed by the mid-1500s. However, due to significant environmental and climate differences, Europeans had to adapt their agricultural production techniques to the various regions of the Americas and were forced to consume new foods that were indigenous to the New World. For example, they discovered that it is impossible to cultivate wheat, a staple of European diets, along the Brazilian coastline, so colonists switched to cultivation and consumption of indigenous crops like manioc (also called cassava or yuca). Furthermore, Europeans introduced native plants to areas of the continents where they had not previously grown but henceforth supported the survival and growth of their colonies.

On his second trip across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, Christopher Columbus brought a variety of European crops to the Americas, including wheat, grapevines, and sugarcane. While some European crops did well, others failed due to climate and environmental factors that inhibited their growth. The Spanish colonists in the Caribbean could not depend on their prior dietary staples of olive oil, bread, or wine. Sugar production, alternately, excelled in the Caribbean and Portuguese-ruled Brazil. Sugar was a profitable cash crop, but Europeans in the Americas also had to feed themselves. They soon found climates for growing wheat, cultivating grapes, and producing olives. The Pacific coast of South America, for example, became an area known for olive oil production. Most plants and crops, however, were inadvertently transported to the Americas, much as diseases were, and rapidly spread.

As Indigenous people died from European diseases, the number of domesticated animals imported from Europe—cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep—rose. These animals had few predators and an abundance of land on which to graze, so their populations increased dramatically within short periods of time. Pork, for example, became vital to the diets of South American colonists, while horses were essential first to conquest and then in the herding of cattle. This development “affected much larger areas of the New World than did any other European endeavor in that period” (81). In turn, industries like mining would not have been possible without the food that the cattle industry provided. Colonialists in Brazil depended on cattle as beasts of burden in the highly profitable sugar industry. Like humans, however, imported animals brought disease that depleted native species, such as the llama and alpaca of South America. The unintended importation of European black rats, known for carrying diseases like bubonic plague and typhus, was also devastating for the Bermudas, where the rats ate food stores and “honeycombed the earth with their burrows” (97). Some colonists starved to death as a result. Moreover, when European animals arrived, they destroyed the croplands on which some Indigenous people depended for survival, thus causing further loss of human life.

Alternatively, the introduction of these animals enhanced the lives of nomadic people who “received the horses, cattle, sheep, and goats not as rivals but as immensely valuable additions to their sources of food, clothing, and energy” (99). Indeed, some tribes became dependent on the products harvested from these animals, such as hides. The arrival of the horse also transformed some Indigenous societies. Horses allowed people to travel greater distances and improved their diets and resources so that their populations expanded. However, this growing wealth caused new social hierarchies that created their own challenges: “The egalitarianism of poverty disappeared” (103). Indigenous peoples’ adoption of horses also gave them an enhanced ability to “resist the advance of Europeans” (104) and to conduct raids against their neighbors.

The importation of “Old World” crops “doubled and even tripled the number of cultivatable food plants in the New World” (107). This change brought benefits because the diversity of crops meant decreased likelihood of famine. European beasts of burden could power a variety of industries, such as sugar plantations, but not without a cost. The introduction of oxen, for instance, contributed to soil erosion because of the heavy plow. Indeed, damage to the environment was quickly evident. The Spanish colonial writer and cleric Bartolomé de las Casas lamented the loss of grasses on the island of Hispaniola. Such a swift and dramatic exchange of flora and fauna is unlikely to occur again.