The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492

The Arawaks are Caribbean and South American Indigenous people, like the Taínos, whom Columbus encountered when he first landed in the Americas. European colonization devastated Arawak populations. Before Crosby’s publication, most historians identified Spanish maltreatment for their near destruction. The Arawaks certainly faced exploitation and brutality at the hands of their European colonizers, but Crosby argues that their decimation was the result of numerous European diseases to which they were exposed and against which they had no immunity. The Arawaks, thus, serve as an example of the ecological devastation that the Columbian Exchange wrought. Historians tend to present this Indigenous group as having been destroyed by the Spaniards, but their descendants still exist. 

Alfred Crosby coined the term “Columbian Exchange” to refer to the active and passive transfer of flora, fauna, and diseases between Europe and the American continents in the decades after Christopher Columbus’s 1492 landing. This exchange fundamentally transformed the world for the worse, according to Crosby, because of the biological, ecological, and human damage it caused.

The conquistadors were men who launched costly, private voyages of not only exploration in the Americas but also of conquest. These conquests were approved by the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies after the Columbian voyages. Their military conquests included the toppling of the Aztec Empire in the Valley of Mexico and the toppling of the Incan Empire in South America. Crosby argues diseases brought by the Columbian Exchange facilitated the fall of both empires to the conquistadors, who otherwise may have not been initially successful; at the time of publication, this was a significant observation that helped diminish the myth of the conquistadors as highly skilled military leaders. Conquistadors like Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro were often members of the lesser nobility and had previous military experience that they applied to their conquests. However, epidemics and the accompanying crises of leadership they engendered greatly aided their success, as did their exploitation of existing tensions among Indigenous groups.

“New World” is an outdated and Eurocentric term that refers to North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean. When Crosby authored The Columbian Exchange in the early 1970s, however, this was a standard term for referring to the Americas. This term was first coined by Europeans who realized that in 1492 Christopher Columbus landed in a place previously unknown to them. Indeed, for Europeans the Americas were “new,” but for the Indigenous people who lived there, the Americas had a long and rich history. The theme Old and New Worlds provides further discussion of this term.