The Columbian Exchange

Vas happenin'? Today's Core Concentration blog assignment is to name some positive and negative effects of the Columbian Exchange. I'm going to do this in bullet point format, if you don't mind.

Positive effects:

• Most notoriously, a ton of new crops were introduced from the Americas to Europe as a result of explorers navigating there and claiming land for various European nations and states, and vice-versa. From the Americas, Europeans got things like corn, potatoes, cacao, and turkeys, and from Europe the native Americans got things like grapes, coffee beans, and onions.
• Cultures of Europeans and native Americans blended and many new cultures and traditions were born.
• Both Europeans and the people of the Americans became more worldly and their knowledge of the world and its people increased, probably the most important thing you can pick up from this history unit and these chapters. This helped Europeans develop the philosophies of enlightenment and human responsibility that were born in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
• European countries gained more land, as I mentioned before, and Europeans as a whole expanded their reach politically.

Now, some negative effects:

• Reminder: Africans were also involved in the Columbian exchange in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Millions of West Africans were sent as slaves to the Americas and subjected to mistreatment, the tradition of which lasted until the late 1800s.
• The native peoples of the Americas were also mistreated by the Europeans who conquered them. Social hierarchies formed within the new European settlements and Americans were always at the bottom. Their cultures were erased like those of the Africans.
• European explorers and conquerors also brought diseases with them when they went to the Americas. Many natives and slaves died because unlike the Europeans, they had not built immunity to them. These diseases included smallpox and the measles. This caused a population decline among these native Americans, which contributed to the erasing of their culture and the racism involved in the interactions between Europeans and Americans.

I hope that this blog post helped you see that while the Columbian Exchange had many positive outcomes and results, one of the things that makes it a unique and memorable historical event was its many negative effects. In this way, we can study and learn from the Columbian Exchange in terms of its success and its mistakes. I hope this helped.