How Did The Columbian Exchange Impact Our Lives

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The Columbian Exchange has impacted our daily lives tremendously. Even more so in the past hundred years in the United States, it has helped shape American history into what it is today. The Columbian Exchange brought new people and new animals, and with both of these new diseases. These new people brought new technology from the Old World to the New World where many Amerindian tribes had already settled. One of the diseases brought from the Old World was Smallpox. Many people from the Old World had developed a tolerance for this disease but because it was new to the Amerindians it wiped out huge amounts of them and they didn’t know what it was or how to cure it. The Old World also brought horses, sheep, cattle, and goats. In return, the New World only offered guinea pigs …show more content…

Even though the turkey hasn’t and most likely wont replace chicken and geese. Some of the crops the Old world brought to the New World were wheat, barley, rice, and turnips. In return this time the New World had more crops to offer than animals; the New World had maize, white potatoes, sweet potatoes that hadn’t made it east to Europe as of yet. The cultivation of these crops and the domestication of these animals in both the Old and New worlds have created many opportunities for economical advances which have been taken advantage of by several different people. The domestication of animals has lead to farming and the production of the food we eat everyday. The Columbian Exchange was the foreground for what we now call the food industry in the New world. It helped us go from only turkey, to having beef, lamb and other meats. It also helped us expand our horizons on wheat, grain and how to cultivate the crops and land we already had. Whether we like it or not, the Amerindians that died and suffered from the diseases the Old world brought were for the greater good. I say this because without them, it would have been more people from the New World that would have died later on. Because