THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE AND ITS ECONOMIC POTENTIAL

The social, biological and ecological consequences, for both Europe and America, of what is commonly called ‘the Columbian exchange’—that is, the transfer between the European and American continents of animals, seeds, plants and diseases (and, of course, subdivisions of the human species) not common to them before 1492—constitute a fascinating, complex and important field of study, of great significance for not only historians but also many other groups of disciplinary specialists, including geographers, epidemiologists, pharmacologists, and agronomists. At the human level the unconscious introduction by Spanish settlers to first the Caribbean, and subsequently Central America, Mexico and Peru of common epidemic diseases which normally caused a relatively low mortality rate for Old World residents—principally influenza, measles, smallpox, scarlet fever, rubella, chicken pox, and mumps—had a devastating impact upon native Americans, who had no natural resistance to them. Although the deliberate consequences of the conquest (warfare and overwork), coupled with the less deliberate famine and cultural shock suffered by many Indians in the immediate post-conquest period, also affected the mortality rate for those who became ill, it is now generally accepted by scholars that the massive demographic disaster which afflicted the indigenous population of Spanish America (and, of course, Brazil) in the sixteenth century was a product not of the deliberate killing of Indians by their conquerors (although examples abound of gratuitous violence and cruelty) but of biological factors which few contemporaries understood, and certainly could not control. As Alfred Crosby has eloquently suggested: