40 pages • 1 hour read
Alfred W. CrosbyThe Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
Alfred W. CrosbyNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr.
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr. was an American historian who was instrumental to the development of the field of environmental history. His work employs interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on the methods and findings of not only fellow historians but also of archeologists, anthropologists, biologists, and ecologists. The Columbian Exchange established this field of study in the early 1970s and paved the way for future historians to study the relationship between humans and their biological and ecological environments as they assess the social, political, cultural, and economic consequences of those interactions.
His next book, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (1986), focused on European colonization and imperialism in regions of the world beyond the North and South American continents. Both books provided explanations as to why Europeans were successful in their quests to establish powerful global empires that ushered in an era of inequality that continues to the present day. Though he acknowledges the significance of other factors such as technology in European conquest, he identifies environmental factors as the primary reasons for these empires’ triumph.
The US Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s inspired Crosby’s worldview and his work as a historian. He began to think globally. It also fostered his interest in the intersection between biology and history: “I fled from ideological interpretations of history and went in search of the basics, life and death” (xxi). He rejected the disciplinary norms in which he was trained in the 1950s. For his predecessors, “American history was political before all else and came in four-year presidential compartments occasionally illuminated by wars […]” (xx). Those who won looked much like the white male historians who wrote about these wars. Crosby rejected this form of history that centered on the accomplishments of white men, primarily in the political realms. His work on the Columbian Exchange shows that European progress came at a great cost to Indigenous Americans and the globe. In fact, he does not see this stereotypical progress as a triumph at all. Rather, European colonization of the Americas ushered in an era of inequality and ecological devastation.
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was an Italian navigator who approached the Spanish crown during the late 1400s to request funding to support a mission in which he planned to sale from Europe directly to Asia by travelling west across the Atlantic Ocean. Other navigators of the day, particularly the Portuguese, focused their efforts on traveling to Asia by skirting the African continent and then sailing east across the Indian Ocean. Europeans were interested in sailing to Asia so that they could gain direct access to valuable natural resources, such as spices, that they imported through Islamic traders. These Muslim merchants transported goods from the East to the West and sold them to Europeans in bustling marketplaces, such as the city of Cairo in Egypt. Europeans wanted to cut these intermediaries out of the profitable trade in Eastern goods.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain did not have a great deal of confidence in Columbus’s plan, but they gave him a small fleet of three ships and promised to make him an admiral and viceroy of Spain, should he take possession in their names of anything he found. In 1492, Columbus and his crew inadvertently landed in the Caribbean, introducing Europeans to continents with which they previously had no contact; the Vikings’ prior arrival to Canada was not widely known at that time. In total, Columbus made four trips of exploration across the Atlantic and became governor of the Spanish colonists on the island of Hispaniola. However, the Spanish soon stripped him of his governorship due to his brutal treatment of those he governed. He returned to Spain in chains and was put on trial for his tyrannical behavior, but the court acquitted him.
Columbus is a controversial figure today. Some celebrate him on Columbus Day for his “discovery” of the Americas and mistakenly believe that he found the US, though he explored the Caribbean and never landed in North America. There is increasing resistance to the idea of a holiday named for him. Indigenous rights groups protest the celebration of Columbus because of the brutality with which he treated Indigenous peoples and the ecological devastation his voyages initiated. In Spanish-American countries and US Latinx communities, it is increasingly common to celebrate Día de la raza (literally, the Day of the Race) on October 12, honoring the Indigenous peoples and cultures that were impacted by the Spanish conquest.
Columbus died in Spain in 1506, always contending that he landed somewhere in Asia, despite his contemporaries’ asserting that he had landed in a “New World.” His expeditions led other European explorers to travel to the Americas, bringing with them a host of diseases against which Indigenous peoples had no natural immunity. This led to the exchange of a variety of flora and fauna between Europe and the Americas. His missions, thus, transformed the continents forever.
There is speculation that were it not for Columbus’s four voyages across the Atlantic in the late 1400s, Europe and the American continents may have remained isolated from one another for many more years. However, European Renaissance-era advances in technology, such as ship-building and navigation, led to rapid exploration; by 1500, Portuguese and Florentine explorers reached Brazil and Venezuela. Though historians credit Columbus with launching this exchange, it is the European colonists, the crews on his ships, and the subsequent conquistadors and their men who carried out the ecological transfer of materials between the Continents.
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