The Columbian Exchange

On his second voyage, in 1493, Columbus carried sugarcane to the Caribbean, and the first cane was planted on Hispaniola. By 1680 the Americas produced most of the world's sugar.

The historian Alfred W. Crosby named this two-way traffic "the Columbian Exchange" in a book of 1972. From the Americas came maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, tomatoes, chili peppers, cacao, peanuts and tobacco. Cassava and maize became main foods in much of Africa. From Europe, Africa and Asia came wheat, rice, sugarcane and coffee, and horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and donkeys. In the Americas the only tame herd animals had been the llama and the alpaca. Horses that strayed from Spanish ranches or were captured probably passed north through trade among Native peoples, and reached the central plains and northern Rockies by the first half of the 1600s. After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico, the Pueblo traded many more horses to their neighbors.

Diseases crossed too, mostly westward, and war, enslavement and forced labor added to the deaths. Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, whooping cough, malaria and others reached peoples who had never met them. Estimates of the 1492 population run from about 8 million to more than 110 million. Many scholars think that 80 to 95 percent of the Native population died within 100 to 150 years. A 2019 study put the 1492 population at about 60 million, with a middle range of about 45 to 78 million, and the loss by 1600 at about 90 percent. The range has not narrowed: the historian David Henige argues that the high estimates rest on weak evidence, while others, such as the writer Charles Mann, favor the high end.

Several library texts show the exchange. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies gives Las Casas's much-doubted figures for the dead of Hispaniola. Maize and Cassava Bread shows Spaniards on Hispaniola learning Taíno crops. The Smallpox in Mexico, 1520 and The Mexica Embassy and the Smallpox in Michoacán record smallpox in Mexico in 1520. The Sickness That Followed the English records deaths in North Carolina towns after English visits in 1585 and 1586; The First Winter and Squanto's Corn shows Tisquantum's emptied town. The Bison Plains and the People Who Follow the Herds shows Plains peoples moving their tents with dogs in 1541, before they had horses.