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Interactive Map: The Columbian Exchange | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. History Resources. Back to All Exhibitions. Interactive Map: The Columbian Exchange. Gilder Lehrman. Periods. People. The vast preponderance traveled from Old World to New. Only handfuls went to the Old World.
- Overview
- Commerce in the New World
- The Columbian Exchange: goods introduced by Europe, produced in New World
- The Columbian Exchange: from the New World to the Old World
- The Columbian Exchange: from the Old World to the New World
- What do you think?
The Columbian exchange moved commodities, people, and diseases across the Atlantic.
As Europeans expanded their market reach into the colonial sphere, they devised a new economic policy to ensure the colonies’ profitability. The philosophy of mercantilism shaped European perceptions of wealth from the 1500s to the late 1700s. Mercantilism held that only a limited amount of wealth, as measured in gold and silver bullion, existed in the world. In order to gain power, nations had to amass wealth by mining these precious raw materials from their colonial possessions. Mercantilists did not believe in free trade, arguing instead that the nation should control trade to create wealth and to enhance state power. In this view, colonies existed to strengthen the colonizing nation.
Colonial mercantilism, a set of protectionist policies designed to benefit the colonizing nation, relied on several factors:
•Colonies rich in raw materials
•Cheap labor
•Colonial loyalty to the home government
•Control of the shipping trade
As Europeans traversed the Atlantic, they brought with them plants, animals, and diseases that changed lives and landscapes on both sides of the ocean. These two-way exchanges between the Americas and Europe/Africa are known collectively as the Columbian Exchange.
Of all the commodities in the Atlantic World, sugar proved to be the most important. Indeed, in the colonial era, sugar carried the same economic importance as oil does today. European rivals raced to create sugar plantations in the Americas and fought wars for control of production. Although refined sugar was available in the Old World, Europe’s harsher climate made sugarcane difficult to grow. Columbus brought sugar to Hispaniola in 1493, and the new crop thrived. Over the next century of colonization, Caribbean islands and most other tropical areas became centers of sugar production, which in turn fueled the demand to enslave Africans for labor.
Though of secondary importance to sugar, tobacco also had great value for Europeans as a cash crop—a crop cultivated for sale instead of personal consumption. Native Americans had been growing tobacco for medicinal and ritual purposes for centuries before European contact, believing tobacco could improve concentration and enhance wisdom. To some, its use meant achieving an entranced, altered, or divine state.
Tobacco was unknown in Europe before 1492, and it carried a negative stigma at first. The early Spanish explorers considered native people's use of tobacco to be proof of their savagery. However, European colonists then took up the habit of smoking, and they brought it across the Atlantic. Europeans ascribed medicinal properties to tobacco, claiming that it could cure headaches and skin irritations. Even so, Europeans did not import tobacco in great quantities until the 1590s. At that time, it became the first truly global commodity; English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese colonists all grew it for the world market.
The crossing of the Atlantic by plants like cacao and tobacco illustrates the ways in which the discovery of the New World changed the habits and behaviors of Europeans. Europeans changed the New World in turn, not least by bringing Old World animals to the Americas. On his second voyage, Christopher Columbus brought pigs, cows, chickens, and horses to the islands of the Caribbean. Many Native Americans used horses to transform their hunting and gathering into a highly mobile practice.
Travelers between the Americas, Africa, and Europe also included microbes: silent, invisible life forms that had profoundly devastating consequences. Native peoples had no immunity to Old World diseases to which they had never been exposed. European explorers unwittingly brought with them chickenpox, measles, mumps, and smallpox, decimating some populations and wholly destroying others. One disease did travel the other direction—syphilis, a lethal sexually transmitted disease, came with travelers from the New World to Europe for the first time.
What was the best commodity introduced to the New World by the Columbian Exchange? What was the worst?
How did the Columbian Exchange shift cultural norms of Native Americans? Of European colonizers?
Try to draw your own diagram of the Columbian Exchange on a world map.
[Notes and attributions]
May 19, 2022 · What was the Columbian exchange? A term coined by Alfred Crosby Jr. in 1972, the Columbian exchange is understood as the transfer of plants, animals, and diseases between the Old World of Europe and Africa and the New World of the Americas. How did the Columbian exchange change the world?
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Columbian Exchange Map - A map of the Columbian Exchange. This Columbian Exchange map details important plants, animals and diseases that were exchanged as part of the Columbian Exchange.
Illustrated map which shows the crops, animals, and diseases transferred in the Columbian Exchange. From left to right, text on a purple arrow says, "The Americas to Europe, Africa, and Asia". From right to left the text on a purple arrow says, "Europe, Africa, and Asia to the Americas.
Feb 13, 2023 · The Columbian Exchange was the process by which commodities, people, and diseases crossed the Atlantic. It began when Christopher Columbus 'discovered' the Americas in 1492, and had positive and negative impacts. The Columbian Exchange is the reason why we have many of the commodities we have today, but it was also the cause of the slave trade ...
Aug 17, 2022 · An infographic illustrating the exchange of diseases, animals, plants, populations, and technology between the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia in the wake of Christopher Columbus' 1492 voyage across the Atlantic, known as the "Columbian Exchange" (from Alfred W. Crosby's 1972 book with the same name.)
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