Short And Long Term Effects Of The Columbian Exchange

708 Words3 Pages

David Kelly
Mrs. Fox
World History
February 24, 2023

The Columbian Exchange was a triangular trade system that started because of Christopher Columbus’s arrival to the “New World” in 1492 and went from the 1500s to the 1700s. This trading system between the Americas, Europe, and Africa, had large rippling effects on everyone involved. However, while there was a multitude of effects, there were two that were the most prominent and significant of them. These were the impact on currencies and their values and the increase of the slave trade. The slave trade and the change in currency value were the most impactful because of their long-lasting and substantial effects on their respective regions. One of the biggest effects of the Columbian Exchange …show more content…

When the Americas were being taken over in ___, one of the main forms of income that people used to sustain themselves as cash crops. Cash crops were unnecessary crops that were grown for the sake of enjoyment or money. Take, for example, sugar. Sugar is not a necessity but a luxury that is very hard to grow. Because of this and the demand for it and its specificity in how it must be grown, it became popular for Africans to capture other Africans, ship them to the Americas, and more specifically for this task, Brazil, and be worked in a space about ___ square feet. This assumes they survived the journey; less than half of the 12 million Africans who were sent over survived. In exchange, Africans got goods, such as textiles and wine. Each of them worked tirelessly for incredibly long periods. This was because the period that sugar could be picked was short and very tricky to figure out, so it was simpler just to have someone working long periods. Their being in Brazil meant that there was going to be a population shift. More specifically, there was going to be cultural diffusion, as well as more mixed-race people, in South America because of it. This became so widespread that there were over twenty different terms developed for the different mixed races living there. While this wasn’t all Africans, a large portion of them came about because of their presence in South America, and they were mainly there because of trading. The increased slave trade changed the world drastically, making it one of the most prominent results of the Columbian