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Q: how did the Colombian exchange and the slave trade effect the economy and people of Europe, Africa, and America?

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Answer 1

"The Colombian Exchange"

Europeans gained more than gold from the New World. Tomatoes, beans, cacao, peanuts and others items made their way to Europe as well, greatly transforming European diets. Amerindians got wheat, grapes, sugar, cattle, horses, and a transformation of the local flora and fauna as European plants and animals overwhelmed native species. Europeans and Africans also brought diseases that ravaged local populations. Smallpox epidemics were soon followed by measles and others, leading to the destruction of about 90 percent of the Amerindian population and leaving the New World wide open to European dominance.

ALSO:

The Slave Trade’s Impact on Africa

Volumes have been written about the cruelty of slavery, the economic impact of slavery on the U.S. economy and the lasting effects of slavery on African Americans. Now comes Harvard University economist Nathan Nunn with this argument: “The African countries that are the poorest today are the ones from which the most slaves were taken.”

Writing in the current issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Nunn describes what he says is “the first empirical examination of the Africa’s slave trades in shaping subsequent economic development.” He painstakingly constructs – from shipping records and other all sorts of other documents — measures of the number of slaves exported from each African country between 1400 and 1900. From 54 different samples of the transatlantic slave trade, he tracks 80,656 slaves from 229 distinct ethnic identities. He also has data on 21,048 slaves shipped across the Indian Ocean, 5,385 slaves who were moved across the Saharan trade and 67 slaves (with 32 different ethnicities) who crossed the Red Sea.

Nunn cautions that the data doesn’t prove that the slave trade caused today’s economic disappointments in Africa; it could be that slaves were drawn from the most unfortunate countries in the first place. But he argues that, in fact, the evidence shows that slaves tended to come from the most developed – not the least developed – parts of Africa. “The data are consistent with historic accounts suggesting that the slave traders impeded the formation of broader ethnic groups, leading to ethnic fractionalization, and that the slave trades resulted in a weakening and underdevelopment of political structures,” Nunn concludes. – David Wessel

Answer 2

The Columbian Exchange has been one of the most significant events in the history of world ecology, agriculture, and culture. The term is used to describe the enormous widespread exchange of plants, animals, foods, human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases, and ideas between the Eastern and Western hemispheres that occurred after 1492. Many new and different goods were exchanged between the two hemispheres of the Earth, and it began a new revolution in the Americas and in Europe. In 1492, Christopher Columbus' first voyage launched an era of large-scale contact between the Old and the New Worlds that resulted in this ecological revolution: hence the name "Columbian" Exchange.

The Columbian Exchange greatly affected almost every society on earth, bringing destructive diseases that depopulated many cultures, and also circulating a wide variety of new crops and livestock that, in the long term, increased rather than diminished the world human population. Maize and potatoes became very important crops in Eurasia by the 18th century. Manioc and the peanut flourished in tropical Southeast Asian and West African soils that otherwise would not produce large yields or support large populations.

This exchange of plants and animals transformed European, American, African, and Asian ways of life.  Of the world's top 26 crops, measured by weight of production, eight originated in the Americas. One third of the crop value within the United States depends on foods that were first grown in the Americas.

New foods became staples of human diets and new growing regions opened up for crops. For example, before AD 1000, potatoes were not grown outside of South America. By the 1840s, Ireland was so dependent on the potato that a diseased crop led to the devastating Irish Potato Famine. One of the first European imports, the horse, changed the lives of many Native American tribes on the Great Plains, allowing them to shift to a nomadic lifestyle based on hunting bison on horseback. Tomato sauce, made from New World tomatoes, became an Italian trademark, while coffee from Africa and sugar cane from Asia became the main crops of extensive Latin American plantations. Also the chili / paprika from South America was introduced in India by the Portuguese and it is today an inseparable part of Indian cuisine.

Before the Columbian Exchange, there were no oranges in Florida, no bananas in Ecuador, no paprika in Hungary, no tomatoes in Italy, no pineapples in Hawaii, no rubber trees in Africa, no cattle in Texas, no burros in Mexico, no chili peppers in Thailand and India, no cigarettes in France and no chocolate in Switzerland. Even the dandelion was brought to America by Europeans for use as an herb.

Before regular communication had been established between the two hemispheres, the varieties of domesticated animals and infectious diseases were strikingly larger in the Old World than in the New. This led, in part, to the devastating effects of Old World diseases on Native American populations. The smallpox epidemics probably resulted in the largest death toll for Native Americans. Scarcely any society on earth remained unaffected by this global ecological exchange.

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