The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492

When Italian explorer and navigator Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean in 1492, the American and European continents—the “New” and “Old” Worlds in the Eurocentric nomenclature that was prominent at the time Crosby wrote this text began to shift toward “biological homogeneity” (3). There are significant contrasts between the flora and fauna of the Old and New Worlds that become more apparent as one reaches South America. These distinctions led the French explorer Jean de Léry to declare the American continents so distinct from the rest of the world in people, animals, and plants that they should be knowns as “the new world” (9).

Yet not all was different; for example, there are palm trees in the Americas and Africa. Europeans pondered why these slight differences existed alongside the major ones they noticed, such as the lack of cattle and horses in the Americas. Though Europeans inherited significant medical and geographical knowledge from the ancient Greeks and Romans, these sources—and the Christian and Aristotelian thinking that shaped them—were unable to “accommodate the New World” (9). The New World “called into question the whole of Christian cosmology” (10). Europeans, thus, faced two options for approaching the Indigenous peoples of the Americas: They could view this newly discovered diversity as natural, or they could condemn Indigenous Americans as evil.