Columbian Exchange Quotes

mistaken. The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colón’s voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike. In this sense the world has become one, exactly as the old admiral hoped. The lighthouse in Santo Domingo should be regarded less as a celebration of the man who began it than a recognition of the world he almost accidentally created, the world of the Homogenocene we live in today.

Back in 1972 Crosby invented a term for this biological ferment: the Columbian Exchange. By knitting together the seams of Pangaea, Columbus set off an ecological explosion of a magnitude unseen since the Ice Ages. Some species were shocked into decline (most prominent among them Homo sapiens, which in the century and a half after Columbus lost a fifth of its number, mainly to disease).

Beyond this, the choice of start date for the Anthropocene will inevitably feed into the stories we tell about ourselves and wider human development. If the Anthropocene is pinned to the Columbian Exchange, the deaths of 50 million people, and the beginnings of the modern world, then it is a deeply uncomfortable story of colonialism, slavery and the birth of a profit-driven capitalist mode of living being intrinsically linked to long-term planetary environmental change. What we do to each other matters, as well as what we do to the environment. And given that nobody meant to transfer diseases that killed tens of millions, it is also a cautionary story: human actions can cause accidents with terrible consequences.

The “Columbian exchange” is the term used to describe the process by which the European encounter with the Americas brought about the large-scale transfer of flora, fauna, culture, and people from each side of the Atlantic to the other. That movement involved plants such as the potato, maize, and the tree bark from which quinine is made moving from the Americas to Europe, but microbes also moved in the reverse direction. Europeans, in other words, introduced smallpox and measles to the Americas. The momentous impact of the Columbian exchange in microbial guise is well illustrated by the experience of Hispaniola, where it first occurred.

It was precisely the existence of trans-Eurasian trade routes that enabled the bacterium Yersinia pestis to kill so many fourteenth-century Europeans. Likewise, European expansion overseas, beginning roughly a century and a half later, led to the so-called Columbian Exchange: pathogens brought by Europeans devastated indigenous American populations; Europeans then brought back syphilis from the New World; and by shipping enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas, Europeans also brought malaria and yellow fever to those places.

After 1492 the world’s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as Crosby called it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.

In what's usually referred to as "the Columbian Exchange" -one of history's great misnomers, given the genocide that followed - Europe took so much of value from the Indigenous people of what became known as North and South America that it was able to rule most of the world until the mid-twentieth century.

The willingness of Africans to participate in the slave trade in Africa allowed it to flourish. Africans delivered fellow Africans into the clutches of European subjugation and servitude, something the mosquito made impossible for Europeans to do themselves. The mosquito would not allow Europeans to pluck Africans from their homelands. Without African slavery, New World mercantilist plantation economics would have failed, quinine would not have been discovered, and Africa would have remained African. The entire Columbian Exchange would have been vastly different, or perhaps not have occurred at all.

The Columbian Exchange was neither fully controlled nor understood by its participants, but it allowed Europeans to transform much of the Americas, Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Africa into ecological versions of Europe, landscapes the foreigners could use more comfortably than could their original inhabitants.

The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colón’s voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike.

the destruction of Indian societies by European epidemics both decreased native burning and increased tree growth. Each subtracted carbon dioxide from the air. In 2010 a research team led by Robert A. Dull of the University of Texas estimated that reforesting former farmland in American tropical regions alone could have been responsible for as much as a quarter of the temperature drop—an analysis, the researchers noted, that did not include the cutback in accidental fires, the return to forest of unfarmed but cleared areas, and the entire temperate zone. In the form of lethal bacteria and viruses, in other words, the Columbian Exchange (to quote Dull’s team) “significantly influenced Earth’s carbon budget.” It was today’s climate change in reverse, with human action removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere rather than adding them—a stunning meteorological overture to the Homogenocene.

To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.