The Columbian Exchange is a term commonly used synonymously with the discovery of the New World. In 1492, Christopher Columbus was desperate to travel overseas and to find a path to India. Upon his accidental discovery of the Americas, the Old-World Europeans became eager to settle and trade with new people. With the movement of people, the exchange of diseases, crops, and culture, are inevitable. The Old World gained new crops such as sweet potatoes and maize, which increased the European populations by huge amounts.
The exchange created a much-needed path across the world and in turn, increased trade. Among the many gains the exchange wrought, it also festered losses. European exchange with the New World highlighted the lack of immunity to common bacteria and illnesses that the Native Americans had. The transmission of diseases brought by Europeans to formerly isolated areas caused death and devastation in the New World communities. Europeans spread smallpox, typhus, and smallpox. However, the spread of diseases wasn’t one sided in the Columbian Exchange. Sailors brought syphilis to Europe on the journey home, which caused social stratification in the Old World.
The devastative effect of the European diseases on the American population left a demand for labor that outweighed the supply of people able to work. This propelled the forced movement and capture of over 12 million Africans over three centuries (Manning, 1990).
Exploration
Until then the Western countries had lain on the fringe of civilization, with nothing apparently beyond them but Iceland and small islands. With the discovery of the Cape route and America, nations formerly peripheral found themselves central, with geographical forces impelling them to leadership. The opening of old lands in Asia and new ones in America changed Europe forever, and the Iberian countries understandably felt the changes first. The Portuguese government, for a time, made large profits from its Eastern trade, and individuals prospered; but Oriental luxuries were costly compared with the European goods that Portugal offered, and the balance had to be made up in specie. This eastward drain of gold and silver had gone on long before Portuguese imperial times, but it was now intensified. Much of the bullion reaching the Orient did not circulate but was hoarded or made into ornaments; consequently, there was no inflation in Asia, and prices there did not rise enough to create a demand for Western goods, which would have reversed the flow of bullion from the West. The Portuguese obtained most of the precious metal for this trade from spice sales through Antwerp and from Africa. The drain proved critical, and, by the reign of John III, the government found itself hard pressed economically and forced to abandon overseas posts that were a financial burden. Later, beginning in the 17th century, Portugal drew its own supply of jewels and gold from Brazil.
Spain’s case was the reverse; although the first American lands discovered yielded little mineral wealth, the mines of Mexico by the 1520s and those of Potosí (in modern Bolivia) by the 1540s were shipping to Spain large quantities of bullion, much of it crown revenue. This did not furnish Charles V and Philip II their largest income; Spanish taxation still exceeded wealth from the New World, yet American silver and gold proved sufficient to cause a price revolution in Spain, where costs, depending on the region, were multiplied by three and five during the 16th century. The Spanish government wished to keep bullion from leaving the kingdom, but high prices in Spain made it a good market for outside products. Spanish industry declined in the 16th century, in part because of the sales taxes imposed by the crown, which necessitated more buying of foreign merchandise. Great quantities of bullion had to be poured out to finance the expensive Spanish European empire and the costly wars and diplomacy of Charles V and Philip II, both of whom were constantly in debt.
Price rises followed in other countries, largely from the influx of Spanish bullion. In England, where some statistics are available, costs by 1650 had risen by 250 percent over those of 1500.
The European commercial revolution, which brought increased industry, more trade, and larger banks, had begun before the discoveries, but it received stimulus from them. Bullion from America helped create a money economy, replacing the older and largely barter exchange—a trend accentuated by greater European mineral production in the early 16th century. The trade emporiums of Italy and the Baltic Hanseatic League declined and were largely replaced by those of the Dutch Republic, England, and France. Joint-stock companies made an impressive appearance, notably the East India Companies of the Dutch Republic, England, and France in the 17th century. The mercantile theory that precious metals constitute the true wealth, though it had attracted advocates for a long time, now came into full vogue and continued to dominate economic thinking.
Discovery introduced Europe to new foods and beverages. Coffee, from Ethiopia, had been consumed in Arabia and Egypt before its wide European use began in the 17th century. Tobacco, an American plant smoked by Indians, won an Old World market despite many individual objectors; the same proved true of chocolate from Mexico and tea from Asia. The South American potato became a staple food in such places as Ireland and central Europe. Cotton, from the Old World, took firm root in the New, from which Europe received an enormously increased supply. Sugar, introduced to the American tropics, along with its molasses and rum derivatives, in time became the principal exports of those regions. Spice was certainly more plentiful than before the discoveries, though the Dutch, when they controlled the East Indies, were able to limit production and thus to keep the price of cloves and nutmegs high.
The influence of the discoveries permeated literature. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, printed in 1516 and dealing with an imaginary island, was suggested by South America. The Portuguese poet Luís de Camões recounted the voyage of Vasco da Gama, though fancifully, in epic verse. Michel de Montaigne discoursed upon American savages, some of whom he had seen in France. Christopher Marlowe’s drama Tamburlaine (1587), though based on the life of the Asiatic conqueror, was an exhortation to his fellow Englishmen to penetrate the New World.
Historiography acquired a broader base by taking the newly discovered lands into account. Astronomy was revolutionized by European penetration of the Southern Hemisphere and discovery of constellations unknown before. Map makers, typified by the Fleming Gerardus Mercator and the Dutchman Abraham Ortelius, portrayed the world in terms that are still recognizable.
Colonies from northern Europe and mercantilism (17th century)
The northern Atlantic powers, for understandable reasons, acquired no permanent overseas possessions before 1600. The United Provinces of the Netherlands spent the final decades of the 16th century winning independence from Spain; France had constant European involvements and wars of religion; England, matrimonially allied with Spain as late as 1558, was undergoing its Protestant Reformation and long was unwilling to challenge predominant Spain openly in any manner.
The English
There is evidence that Bristol seamen reached Newfoundland before 1497, but John Cabot’s Atlantic crossing in that year is the first recorded English exploration. After the death of Henry VII in 1509, England lost interest in discovery and did not resume it until 1553 and the formation of the Muscovy Company, which tried to find a Northeast Passage to Asia, discovered the island of Novaya Zemlya, and opened a small trade with Russia. The English also searched for a Northwest Passage, and Martin Frobisher sailed to Greenland, Baffin Island, and the adjacent mainland.
England’s American colonies
The English West Indies for many years exceeded North America in economic importance. The Lesser Antilles, earlier passed over by Spain in favour of the larger islands, lay open to any colonizer, though their ferocious Carib inhabitants sometimes gave trouble. The Leeward Islands of Antigua, St. Kitts, Nevis, and Barbados, as well as the Bermudas, were settled by Englishmen between 1609 and 1632. Barbados, at first the most important, owed its prosperity to the introduction of sugar culture about 1637. The size of landholdings increased in all the islands, and the white populations accordingly diminished as slavery came to furnish most of the raw labour. When an expedition sent by Oliver Cromwell took Spanish Jamaica in 1655, that island became the English West Indian centre. Settlement of Belize (later British Honduras) by buccaneers and log cutters began in 1636, although more than a century elapsed before Spain acknowledged that the English indeed had the right to be there.
The English islanders, to the envy of their Dutch and French neighbours, enjoyed such constitutional privileges as the right to elect semipopular assemblies. Barbados once hoped to have two representatives in Parliament, and some Barbadians, during the English (Glorious) Revolution (1688–89), thought of making their island an independent state, but nothing came of this.
The original English mainland colonies—Virginia (founded 1607), Plymouth (1620), and Massachusetts Bay (1630)—were founded by joint-stock companies. The later New England settlements—New Hampshire, New Haven, Connecticut, and Rhode Island—began as offshoots of Massachusetts, which acquired jurisdiction over the Maine territory. The New England colonies were first peopled partly by religious dissenters, but except for the separatist Plymouth Pilgrims they did not formally secede from the Church of England for the time being.
Proprietary colonies, under individual entrepreneurs, began with Maryland, founded in 1634 under the Catholic direction of Cecilius and Leonard Calvert. Also proprietary was Pennsylvania, which originally included Delaware, founded by the Quaker William Penn in 1682. Maryland and Pennsylvania, except for a brief royal interlude in Maryland, continued under Calvert and Penn heirs until the American Revolution; all other colonies except Connecticut and Rhode Island ultimately had royal governments. The Carolinas, after abortive attempts at colonization, were effectively founded in 1670 and became first proprietary and, later, royal colonies. Georgia, last of the 13, began in 1732, partly as a philanthropic enterprise headed by James Oglethorpe to furnish a rehabilitation home for debtors and other underprivileged Englishmen. All the mainland colonies eventually had representative assemblies, chosen by the propertied classes, to aid and often handicap their English governors.
The original settlers, predominantly English, were later supplemented by French Huguenots, Germans, and Scots-Irish, especially in western New York, Pennsylvania, and the southern colonies. New York, acquired from the United Provinces of the Netherlands and including New Jersey, continued to have some Dutch flavour long after the Dutch had become a small minority. By the French and Indian War (1754–63, the American portion of the Seven Years’ War), the total population of the mainland colonies was estimated as 1,296,000 whites and 300,000 blacks, enormously in excess of the 55,000 whites inhabiting French Canada.
The only bond of union among the British colonies was their allegiance to the king, and in the wars with France (c. 1689–1763) it proved hard to unite them against the common enemy. All the colonies were agricultural, with New England being a region of small farms, the Middle Atlantic colonies having a larger scaled and more diversified farming, and the southern ones tending to plantations on which tobacco, rice, and indigo were raised by slaves (although slavery was legal throughout all the colonies). There was much colonial shipping, especially from New England, whose merchants and seamen traded with England, Africa, and the West Indies; Massachusetts shipbuilders had built more than 700 ships by 1675. By 1763 several towns had grown into cities, including Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston, South Carolina.
Mercantilism
By the time the term mercantile system was coined in 1776 by the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, European states had been trying for two centuries to put mercantile theory into practice. The basis of mercantilism was the notion that national wealth is measured by the amount of gold and silver a nation possesses. This seemed proven by the fact that Spain’s most powerful years had occurred when it was first reaping a bullion harvest from its overseas possessions.
The mercantile theory held that colonies exist for the economic benefit of the mother country and are useless unless they help to achieve profit. The mother nation should draw raw materials from its possessions and sell them finished goods, with the balance favouring the European country. This trade should be monopolistic, with foreign intruders barred.
The English navigation acts
England adhered to mercantilism for two centuries and, possessing a more lucrative empire than France, strove to implement the policy by a series of navigation acts. The first, passed by Oliver Cromwell’s government in 1651, attempted chiefly to exclude the Dutch from England’s carrying trade: goods imported from Africa, Asia, or America could be brought only in English ships, which included colonial vessels, thus giving the English North American merchant marine a substantial stimulus. After the royal Restoration in 1660, Parliament renewed and strengthened the Cromwellian measures. By then colonial American maritime competition with England had grown so severe that laws of 1663 required colonial ships carrying European goods to America to route them through English ports, where a duty had to be paid, but from lack of enforcement these soon became inoperative. In the early 18th century the English lost some of their enthusiasm for bullion alone and placed chief emphasis on commerce and industry. The Molasses Act of 1733 was in the interest of the British West Indian sugar growers, who complained of the amount of French island molasses imported by the mainland colonies; the French planters had been buying fish, livestock, and lumber brought by North American ships and gladly exchanging their sugar products for them at low prices. Prohibition of colonial purchases of French molasses, though decreed, went largely unenforced, and New England, home of most of the carrying trade, continued prosperous.
things to mention
– European need for expansion (explain crusades)
– Finding the Americas
– Colonization
– Use of guns and violence but also the accidental murder using disease
The Unknown Passengers
As previously mentioned, the diseases that travelled to the New World alongside the Europeans included measles, smallpox, bubonic plague, typhus, and chicken pox. The native population had never before encountered diseases of the same complexity, therefore this led to the underdevelopment of their immune systems. These factors made them especially susceptible to the silent killers on board ships from Europe. Estimates place the percent of Native American population killed off upwards of 80-95 percent in the first 100 years of European involvement in the Americas (Newson 2001).
Unbeknownst to the Europeans as they set out to the New World, they had a deadly weapon that didn’t contain a bit of gunpowder, smallpox. Smallpox is a virus that sweeps through the body, completely disabling the functionality of the human victim. It enters through the throat and nose, and takes a tour through the respiratory system. Smallpox visits the lungs and eventually makes its way to its’ final destination: the lymphatic system. This network of tissues and organs helps “rid the body of toxins, waste, and other unwanted materials” and it’s primary function is to fight against infections (Zimmermann 2018). Within days, blisters break out over the victim’s skin. Each is filled with smallpox DNA, and if punctured, the blisters project the particles into air. This allows smallpox to quickly become airborne and contagious by simply breathing in affected air.
The disease was born in cramped, urban, European cities. The abundance of people and domesticated animals living in such close proximity allowed these infections to evolve into new strains of bacteria which could kill man. Smallpox, influenza, and measles were all products of thousands of years of Old World farming practices. As with all diseases, with destruction comes evolution and eventual immunity. As Europeans gained antibodies to protect themselves, the deaths caused by diseases gradually decreased.
As Europeans expanded their global conquest, the indigenous peoples with which they encountered stood no chance due to the factor of disease.
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