Columbian Exchange Thesis

At the forefront of one the most deeply engrained legacies in modern history,

Christopher Columbus triggered a centuries-long drama of colonization, in which the

Europeans would mould the Western Hemisphere through the profit motive of

entrepreneurial conquistadors and the expansionism of crusading Christianity. Coined by

the historian Alfred W. Crosby, “The Columbian Exchange” represents a series of

affairs followed by the discovery, which would ultimately shape the World as we know it.

The Columbian Exchange itself refers to the transfer of non-native diseases, foods,

animals, and populations between Eurasia and the America’s as well as how the conquest of

“The New World” was overseen in the realm of ecology.

“The migration

Given that the Native Americans had the dangerous privilege of being in

longest isolation from the rest of mankind, the most spectacular period of mortality

among the native populations occurred during the first hundred years of contact with the

Europeans and Africans (Crosby, 1972). The list of infectious diseases brought to the New

World is rather extensive, with main killers including: smallpox, measles, whooping

cough, chicken pox, bubonic plague, typhus, and malaria (Nunn & Qian, 2010).

The Spanish word “Viruelas” appears frequently in the Chronicles of the

sixteenth century, - invariably translated as smallpox, which was commonly

misdiagnosed, as there was a lack of any interest in accurate diagnosis. The early

historians were much more likely to cast their eyes skyward and comment on the

sinfulness that had called down such epidemics as obvious evidence of God’s wrath, than to

describe in any detail the diseases involved (Crosby, 1972). Characterized by high

fever, vomiting, and skin eruptions, smallpox carried off tens of thousands of Indians, but

left the Portuguese unscathed in Brazil in 1562-1563(Crosby, 1972). Due to being

overworked and enraged by the by invulnerability to epidemic disease by the