Columbian Exchange Crosby, Afred W.

Columbian Exchange

Crosby, Afred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1972. Print.

Alfred Crosby's book the Columbian Exchange looks at a different aspect of the exchange that took place between the Old and New Worlds as a result of Columbus's voyage to the Americas in 1492. For Crosby, historians have placed too much emphasis on political and economic consequences of 1492 but have paid little attention to the biological consequences. Crosby argues that the latter were more fundamental and significant for our understanding of the true impact of 1492 and the exchange the Columbian encounter with American Indians entailed. Crosby's main argument is that the post-Columbian exchange significantly disrupted and damaged the ecological balance of the Old and New Worlds. To make his point, Crosby focuses on three underlying themes: diseases such as smallpox, measles, and syphilis; food crops (maize, beans, wheat, potatoes, sweet potatoes, etc.); and domestic animals, especially cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and pigs.

Crosby's arguments are premised on an idea that "man is a biological entity before he is . . . anything else," and therefore "the most important changes brought on by the Columbian voyages were biological in nature" (xiii-xiv). Hence understanding biological differences in the Old and New Worlds on the eve of Columbus's journey to the Americas is crucial for reconstructing the history of the encounter and what happened as a result. The plants and animals in the New World, Crosby argues, were quite different from those in the Old World. Many plants, for example, were so unique that a plant such as cacti, despite being shipped between North America and the rest of the world for hundreds of years remains to be primarily of American origin even today (only eighteen percent of the plant species are of non-American origin). The same was true of animals. For instance, most explorers could not help but be wondered at the smallness of mammals in the New World. The Europeans were really impressed to see such mammals as reptiles, snakes, birds, and insects which looked different from the ones they had ever seen. Many early European travelers to the Americas returned to Europe with stories of mythical beasts which Europeans before could not have even imagined.

The Americas were so different that what Jean de Lery said based on his trip to Brazil was, for most Europeans at the time, true of the entire area. The Americas, Lery said, were so "different from Europe, Asia, and Africa in the living habits of its people, to the forms of its animals, and, in general, in that which the earth produces, that it can well be called the new world. . . ." (9). The ecosystems were not the only distinguishers of the Old and New Worlds. Crosby says that on cultural terms, too, American Indians looked so distinct for Europeans, and vice versa, that both sides concocted a set of myths and legends about each other based on stereotypical and superficial observations. For example, American Indian values with regard to sexuality, family relations, the structure of the institution of marriage, incest, sodomy were so distinct that many Europeans were shocked and developed very negative attitudes towards American Indians. The Americas, their peoples, their flora and fauna were so unique in Europeans eyes that it "called into question the whole Christian cosmology" (10). In an attempt to explain the uniqueness of Native Americans, some European philosophers and thinkers began to challenge the Christian dogma which stated that there had been only one creation.

Crosby argues that the differences between the Old and New Worlds were not just the matter of perception of peoples who lived on both sides of the Atlantic at the time. According to Crosby, American Indians are different from the rest of the world in significant ways, but regrettably none of those differences worked for their advantage in their encounter with Columbus and other European voyagers. "It may be accurate to say," Crosby writes, "that the Indians were more different from the rest of mankind in 1492 than any other major group of humanity" (21, italics original). The American Indian difference is not all about difference in their physiological or physical structure -- in many respects, Crosby argues, they are similar to other Mongoloid races in this regard -- but in their isolation from the rest of mankind, which helped them to develop a unique and almost totally homogenous blood type. The ancestors of American Indians, Crosby writes, came to the Americas from Siberia through the Bering land bridge before agriculture had taken root in Siberia. And as a result of living in the Americas for thousands of years, the "American Indians developed their ways of life in very nearly complete isolation" (31). This isolation, Crosby argues, weakened American Indians' defense immunity systems against the deadly diseases of people living in the Old World. In their isolated ecological and cultural environment, Native Americans were able to develop defenses against a selection of pathological microbes that existed in their environment. When Columbus and his crew finally reached the Americas, American Indians were to meet their "most hideous enemy" in the forms of "invisible killers" European men brought "in their blood and breath" (31).

In chapter 2, Crosby tackles with the question of why the Europeans were able to conquer the Americas easily and why this was so disproportionally devastating to American Indians. There were many reasons that allowed Europeans to gain upper hand over American Indians, Crosby says. Among the factors that influenced the course of events as a result of encounter were the supremacy of steel, firearms, and cannon over stone, bows, and arrows. The ability of Europeans to instill fear on American Indians with such beasts as horses and the Native American mythologies which motivated them to assume that the Europeans were the prophesized white gods also played important roles. But these factors alone, according to Crosby, cannot explain the destructiveness of the European arrival for American Indians. The chief cause of depopulation in the Americas was the disease Europeans brought with themselves. "The fatal diseases of the Old World killed more effectively in the New," Crosby writes, "and the comparatively benign diseases of the Old World turned killer in the New." And Crosby sees just little exaggeration in the words of a German missionary who said in 1699: "Indians die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost" (37). It is not surprising then that the worst and most destructive epidemics among American Indians took place during the first hundred years of contact with the newcomers from Europe and Africa. Crosby argues that the European brutality in treating American Indians was a complementary factor but not the major cause of depopulation in the Americas.

If pathogens Europeans brought in their blood vessels caused perhaps the greatest depopulation in the history of mankind in the Americas, the impact of European attempts to "Europeanize" the flora and fauna was as destructive for the New World's ecosystem. In this matter, as in that of disease," Crosby writes, "the impact of the Old World on the New was so great that we of the twentieth century can only imagine what pre-Columbian America must have been like" (64). While Europeans learnt about and embraced many plants they found among American Indians, they also brought many plants from the Old World. In this endeavor, the European transformation of the New World's agricultural environment was "greatest biological revolution in the Americas since the end of the Pleistocene era" (66). The plants and animals Europeans brought to the New World profoundly changed the ecosystem in the latter, and in some instances animals played a crucial role in facilitating European colonialism in the Americas. For example, in Brazil it was cattle that provided the required amount of meat to laborers producing sugar, gold, and diamonds, and as one historian put it, Crosby quotes, "the contribution of cattle raising to the opening up and conquest of the Brazilian interior would be enough to place it among the most important chapters of its history" (110).