Impact of the Columbian Exchange DBQ
With the discovery of the New World in 1492, a new chapter of world history began, one that was shaped and forever changed by the Columbian Exchange, a mass bacterial, economic, and plant interchange between the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia that greatly impacted the New World.
The Columbian exchange proved instrumental in the devastating bacterial transfer that decimated the native New World peoples in the 15th and 16th centuries. Although some deaths were admittedly caused by the deliberate torture and destruction inflicted upon the Natives by the Europeans, Dinesh D'Souza stressed the significant impact that disease had on the Old World’s death toll. The Europeans unknowingly infected millions with the deadly measles and smallpox pathogens. The consequential catastrophic genocide was a result of the natives’ complete lack of immunity to foreign bacteria. As D'Souza’s analysis of the transfer is called “The Crimes of Christopher Columbus”, he likely believes that the Old World wreaked such destructive havoc
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All of the documents provided are either created by European explorers or modern historians with a third-person perspective. To further enrich the evidence provided and to offer up a variety of new pieces of information, a first-person account of a native New World inhabitant who saw what life was like both before after European exploration would be ideal.
It can be concluded that the Columbian exchange had many positive and negative effects on the inhabitants of both the Old and New Worlds from c. 1550 - c. 1700. In Columbus’s first voyage, the New World was seen as astoundingly pure and nearly magical (document 1). However, as a result of the extensive exchanges that took place between the Old and New Worlds, the Americas were impacted by the mass transfer of bacteria, economic practices and