The Columbian Exchange

Today we're going to talk about something that you may not have heard of before, but it's pretty easy. This would be the Colombian exchange. That would be Colombian for Christopher Columbus and not for Columbia, the country. As we are all well aware by now, Columbus did not really discover America in 1492, but after his arrival, he set off a system of exchanges that are still affecting us today. After Columbus landed in the West Indies, what he thought was India. The hundreds and eventually thousands of Europeans followed him there to try to make some money for their country. These Europeans brought with them a whole bunch of stuff and they ended up bringing back to the old world to a whole bunch of stuff. And the best way to think about this is to go to the movies. I'll see you there. Thanks. So when you go see a movie, there are three things you pretty much have to have to make it a good viewing experience. First one you always have to have is my personal favorite that would be popcorn. Second thing you always have to have, that would be another delicious choice that would be candy, maybe gummy worms. And the third thing you have to have to make a good movie is pop. Soda pop. Coca-Cola preferably. Popcorn, candy, and soda don't really have a whole lot in common with Columbus so you might think. But if it weren't for Columbus and the Columbian exchange, we would be able to eat those three things together at the movies. This is because popcorn comes from corn. Corn was a plant that only grew in America before Columbus's arrival in 1492. Candy comes is made out of sugar, sugar comes from the sugarcane plant, sugarcane was a plant that Europeans lure familiar with and we're trying to grow in Europe in an Africa and Asia, but sugarcane did not exist in America or the Caribbean before 1492. The last piece to our movie equation is pop, Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola, actually comes from an African plant, the colonna, without the colon up from Africa, we wouldn't have any Coca-Cola today. So popcorn, candy, and Coca-Cola are the best ways to think about the Columbian exhibit. So how did popcorn candy and soda come together to make the Columbian exchange so that we could eat today? Well, first we'll talk about corn and candy. We'll talk about soda a little bit later. When Columbus and all of the Europeans that followed him came to the new world, they brought with them food and supplies. They brought horses. They brought pigs. They brought cows. They brought oranges. They brought wheat. They brought sugarcane. And these were all things that people in the new world had never seen before. Native people had never seen an orange imagined Florida without the oranges. That was brought to the new world by the Europeans. In the new world, Europeans found a whole bunch of food. They had never experienced before. They found potatoes. They found tomatoes and they found corn. Obviously, we need corn to go to the movies to make popcorn. But imagine, Ireland, without the potato, we're going to an Italian restaurant or to Italy without having tomato sauce. Because of the Colombian exchange, all of these things are possible. Good, from the old world, we're transported to the new world. And goods from the new world were transported to the old world. That's the Colombian exchange, but there's still a piece that we're missing. We're missing our Coca-Cola. Let's talk about that. So how does the cold and up come into our picture of the Columbian exchange? Well, one of the reasons why Europeans were so eager to come to the Americas instead of colonies was because they were looking for a way to make money. In Europe at the time, sugar, sugarcane, was something that, of course, everyone had gone in, sugar tastes great. But growing sugar was really difficult. It was not an easy process. It took a lot of time. A lot of water and a lot of labor. So it was really expensive and it was something that only the rich could afford. Sugar was a luxury good. It was too expensive for your average person to afford it. Sugar was kind of like an iPhone. A couple years ago when iPhone's first came out, they were a luxury good. They were really expensive in the sorts of things that probably Paris Hilton and P diddy could afford, but people like you and me. We couldn't get Europeans. Obviously could see that if they could get those iPhones cheap enough, everyone would buy them. Everyone did buy them. And the way to get something cheaper sometimes is to make lots and lots and lots of them. That's what the Europeans wanted to do with sugar. They brought sugarcane with them to the new world, where there was lots and lots of opportunities for them to grow. Sugar as a cash crop. Not food meant for consumption, but food met the ship back home where you could sell it. There was one more thing Europeans brought with them to the new world in addition to wheat, sugarcane, cows and horses. They brought diseases with them. Malaria, smallpox, cholera, mumps, measles, all of these diseases had existed in the old world for thousands of years. However, the new world had never seen diseases like this before. People in the Americas never had a chance to build up any kind of immunity or resistance disease to these diseases. That meant that when the Europeans arrived, millions of native people got sick and died from diseases like malaria and smallpox. In fact, it's estimated that about 90% of native people were killed off within a hundred years of Columbus's arrival. That's a very significant number. There were some Caribbean islands that were so affected by diseases that there were no native people left at all. Uh oh, without native people to work your sugar plantations, what are you gonna do? This brings us to our third piece of our Columbian exchange or a third piece of our movie theater snack. These diseases actually bring us the coconut. Without native populations to supply labor tobacco or sugarcane plantations, European planters were forced to go someplace else to get slaves. They turned to Africa. They captured hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of African people and brought them to the new world as slaves to work on sugar plantations. These Africans had naturally built up some resistance to smallpox. The mumps and measles that native poppy relations didn't have. This meant that they were a good choice for labor. They wouldn't get kicked off by diseases. However, getting them from Africa to the new world was not an easy process. They didn't have airplanes. They didn't have fast ships, so the journey from Africa to the Americas took a really long time. Up to three or four months. While these African slaves were on the ship, they needed food. They needed to be fed. So that they would be healthy when they arrived in the new world. In order to feed these African captives, slave traders generally filled their ships up with African plants and African food to feed the captives. This food included rice, it included. Yams. It included bananas and plantains. And it included one more important thing. The colonna. Now, slave traders in African slaves were not drinking Coca-Cola. In Africa, are on their trip to the new world. But on a ship for months and months at sea, water doesn't tend to taste very good by the end, it goes rancid. One of the solutions that African captives knew to keep water tasting fresh was to put these coconuts into the water. That gave it a slightly better flavor and meant that captive Africans could continue drinking this water through the whole journey to the Americas. Eventually, what would happen is after these slaves were sold to plantation owners, they brought with them some of the leftover coconuts plantains, bananas, to the plantations, and they used these foods to feed themselves while they worked for plantation owners. That's how the Cola nut and Coca-Cola arrived in the new world. Thanks to the Columbian exchange, we now have Coke, popcorn, and candy altogether in one place. We have the colon up from Africa. We have popcorn from the new world, and we have sugarcane from Europe all coming together. Downside to this whole system, and I think the most important downside is that not only did we lose millions of native people to diseases. But that loss of labor ended up creating a slavery system that lasted for hundreds of years. So the question I'm going to leave you with is, are we better off for it or not? You decide.