Positive And Negative Effects Of The Columbian Exchange

Another negative effect of the Columbian Exchange was the disease that it brought to the New World, which was a leading cause of widespread death throughout the area. When the Europeans sailed across the Atlantic, they brought all of the germs that were native to the Old World, such as smallpox and tuberculosis, with them. The Europeans were not affected by this, as they had already developed an immunity to these bacteria. The natives, however, were impacted greatly by the germs that were brought to their homeland, for they had never seen viruses like the ones brought aboard European ships. Diseases spread quickly amongst indigenous peoples, killing, in some places, 100% of a population as they travelled from person to person. Alfred W. Crosby

The exact number of deaths that resulted from the spread of disease is hard to calculate, but it has been “estimated that upwards of 80–95 percent of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100–150 years following 1492” and in just 50 years, the people of the island Hispañola were practically extinct. The island had once had a population estimated between 60,000 and 8 million (The Columbian Exchange: A History…). By wiping out the populations of some places, and seriously harming other populations, the Columbian Exchange has had the negative effect of mass death. Had those diseases not spread from the Old World to the New, lots of the places that were depopulized would likely be thriving even more

The word “exchange” implies that cargo and ideas were brought to both the Old and New Worlds, and a clear example of what was brought back to the Old World is the crops. Crops and animals had evolved and adapted different on these two sides of the Atlantic, so the Exchange brought entirely new species to completely new parts of the world. There was no crop in one hemisphere that was used as a primary source of nutrition in the other before 1492, because there was no way to get it from one place to the other, due to the fact that the route across the Atlantic had yet to be discovered. The Columbian Exchange changed this by offering a passage between the two halves of the world. (Crosby). The crops of corn, potatoes, and beans were foreign to people living in the Old World, while those in the New World did not know what pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats were. These animals quickly gained popularity in the cooking style of the New World and the three aforementioned foods became staples of the Old World diet (Neumann). Many crops from the Americas thrived in the New World, and it was even estimated that “Old World crops … today have more than 26 percent of their total production in the New World” (The Columbian Exchange: A History…). The potato is often