Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange, sometimes called the Grand Exchange was the exchange of goods, ideas, plants, animals, and diseases between the Old World (Europe, Africa, and Asia) and the New World (the Americas). It started in 1492 when Christopher Columbus arrived in the West Indies (the Caribbean).

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

Impact

The Columbian Exchange drastically changed American, African, European, and Asian ways of life.

Foods

The Columbian Exchange greatly impacted the diets of people around the world. 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.

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. Chili and paprika from South America were introduced in India by the Portuguese; today, these are an important part of modern 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 chili peppers in Thailand and India, and no chocolate in Switzerland. Even the dandelion was brought to the Americas by Europeans for use as an herb.

Animals

The first European import to the Americas, the horse, changed the lives of many Native American tribes on the Great Plains, letting them change to a nomadic lifestyle based on hunting bison on horseback. The Columbian Exchange also brought cattle to the New World.

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.

Other goods

Before the Columbian Exchange, there were no rubber trees in Africa and no cigarettes in France.

Table of comparison

Pre-Columbian Distribution of Organisms with Close Ties to Humans
Type of organism	What the Old World Had	What the New World 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)