how to start an essay about the columbian exchange

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

How the Columbian Exchange Brought Globalization—And Disease

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: June 6, 2023 | Original: August 25, 2021

Two hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, all seven continents were united in a single massive supercontinent known as Pangaea. After they slowly broke apart and settled into the positions we know today, each continent developed independently from the others over millennia, including the evolution of different species of plants, animals and bacteria.

By 1492, the year Christopher Columbus first made landfall on an island in the Caribbean, the Americas had been almost completely isolated from the Old World (including Europe, Asia and Africa) for some 12,000 years , ever since the melting of sea ice in the Bering Strait erased the land route between Asia and the West coast of North America. But with Columbus’ arrival—and the waves of European exploration, conquest and settlement that followed, the process of global separation would be firmly reversed, with consequences that still reverberate today.

What Was the Columbian Exchange?

The historian Alfred Crosby first used the term “Columbian Exchange” in the 1970s to describe the massive interchange of people, animals, plants and diseases that took place between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres after Columbus’ arrival in the Americas.

On Columbus’ second voyage to the Caribbean in 1493, he brought 17 ships and more than 1,000 men to explore further and expand an earlier settlement on the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). In the holds of their ships were hundreds of domesticated animals including sheep, cows, goats, horses and pigs—none of which could be found in the Americas. (Horses had in fact originated in the Americas and spread to the Old World, but disappeared from their original homeland at some point after the land bridge disappeared, possibly due to disease or the arrival of human populations.)

The Europeans also brought seeds and plant cuttings to grow Old World crops such as wheat, barley, grapes and coffee in the fertile soil they found in the Americas. Staples eaten by indigenous people in America, such as maize (corn), potatoes and beans, as well as flavorful additions like tomatoes, cacao, chili peppers, peanuts, vanilla and pineapple, would soon flourish in Europe and spread throughout the Old World, revolutionizing the traditional diets in many countries .

Disease Spreads Among Indigenous Populations 

Along with the people, plants and animals of the Old World came their diseases. The pigs aboard Columbus’ ships in 1493 immediately spread swine flu, which sickened Columbus and other Europeans and proved deadly to the native Taino population on Hispaniola, who had no prior exposure to the virus. In a retrospective account written in 1542, Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas reported that “There was so much disease, death and misery, that innumerable fathers, mothers and children died … Of the multitudes on this island [Hispaniola] in the year 1494, by 1506 it was thought there were but one third of them left.”

Smallpox arrived on Hispaniola by 1519 and soon spread to mainland Central America and beyond. Along with measles , influenza, chickenpox , bubonic plague , typhus, scarlet fever, pneumonia and malaria, smallpox spelled disaster for Native Americans , who lacked immunity to such diseases. Although the exact impact of Old World diseases on the Indigenous populations of the Americas is impossible to know, historians have estimated that between 80 and 95 percent of them were decimated within the first 100-150 years after 1492.

The impact of disease on Native Americans, combined with the cultivation of lucrative cash crops such as sugarcane, tobacco and cotton in the Americas for export, would have another devastating consequence. To meet the demand for labor, European settlers would turn to the slave trade , which resulted in the forced migration of some 12.5 million Africans between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Syphilis and the Columbian Exchange

When it came to disease, the exchange was rather lopsided—but at least one deadly disease appears to have made the trip from the Americas to Europe. The first known outbreak of venereal syphilis occurred in 1495, among the troops led by France’s King Charles VIII in an invasion of Naples; it soon spread across Europe. Syphilis is now treated effectively with penicillin, but in the late 15th-early 16th centuries, it caused symptoms such as genital ulcers, rashes, tumors, severe pain and dementia, and was often fatal.

According to one theory , the origins of syphilis in Europe can be traced to Columbus and his crew, who were believed to have acquired Treponema pallidum, the bacteria that cause syphilis, from natives of Hispaniola and carried it back to Europe, where some of them later joined Charles’ army. 

A competing theory argues that syphilis existed in the Old World before the late 15th century, but had been lumped in with leprosy or other diseases with similar symptoms. Because syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease, theories involving its origins are always controversial, but more recent evidence —including a genetic link found between syphilis and a tropical disease known as yaws, found in a remote region of Guyana—appears to support the Columbian theory.

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

Module 2: Colliding Cultures (1492-1650)

The columbian exchange, learning objectives.

• Describe the theory of mercantilism and the process of commodification
• Analyze the effects of the Columbian Exchange
• Describe changes to Native American life following European settlement

Commerce in the New World

The economic philosophy of mercantilism shaped European perceptions of wealth from the 1500s to the late 1700s. Mercantilism held that only a limited amount of wealth, as measured in gold and silver bullion, existed in the world. In order to gain power, nations had to amass wealth by mining these precious raw materials from their colonial possessions. During the age of European exploration, nations employed conquest, colonization, and trade as ways to increase their share of the bounty of the New World. Mercantilists did not believe in free trade, arguing instead that the nation should control trade to create wealth. In this view, colonies existed to strengthen the colonizing nation. Mercantilists argued against allowing their nations to trade freely with other nations, because that would mean exchanging bullion for goods.

Spain’s mercantilist ideas guided its economic policy. Every year, enslaved individuals or Native workers loaded shipments of gold and silver aboard Spanish treasure fleets that sailed from its American colonies for Spain. These ships groaned under the sheer weight of bullion, for the Spanish had found huge caches of silver and gold in the New World. In South America, for example, Spaniards discovered rich veins of silver ore in a mountain called Potosí and founded a settlement of the same name there. Throughout the sixteenth century, Potosí was a boomtown, attracting settlers from many nations as well as Native people from many different cultures.

Colonial mercantilism, which was basically a set of protectionist policies designed to benefit the nation, relied on several factors: colonies rich in raw materials, cheap labor, colonial loyalty to the home government, and control of the shipping trade. Under this system, the colonies sent their raw materials, harvested by enslaved or Native workers, back to their mother country. The mother country sent back to the colonies finished materials of all sorts: textiles, tools, clothing. The colonists could purchase these goods only from their mother country; trade with other countries was forbidden.

The 1500s and early 1600s also introduced the process of commodification to the New World. American silver, tobacco, and other items, which were used by Native peoples for ritual purposes, became European commodities with a monetary value that could be bought and sold. Before the arrival of the Spanish, for example, the Inca people of the Andes consumed chicha , a corn beer, for ritual purposes only. When the Spanish discovered chicha, they bought and traded for it, turning it into a commodity instead of a ritual substance. Commodification thus recast Native economies and spurred the process of early commercial capitalism. New World resources, from plants to animal pelts, held the promise of wealth for European imperial powers.

As Europeans traversed the Atlantic, they brought with them plants, animals, and diseases that changed lives and landscapes on both sides of the ocean. These two-way exchanges between the Americas and Europe/Africa are known collectively as the Columbian Exchange .

Figure 1 . With European exploration and settlement of the New World, goods and diseases began crossing the Atlantic Ocean in both directions. This “Columbian Exchange” soon had global implications.

Sugar and Tobacco

Figure 2 . Adriaen van Ostade, a Dutch artist, painted An Apothecary Smoking in an Interior in 1646. The large European market for American tobacco strongly influenced the development of some of the American colonies.

Of all the commodities in the Atlantic World, sugar proved to be the most important. Indeed, sugar carried the same economic importance as oil does today. European rivals raced to create sugar plantations in the Americas and fought wars for control of some of the best sugar production areas. Although refined sugar was available in the Old World, Europe’s harsher climate made sugarcane difficult to grow, and it was not plentiful. Columbus brought sugar to Hispaniola in 1493, and the new crop was growing there by the end of the 1490s. By the first decades of the 1500s, the Spanish were building sugar mills on the island. Over the next century of colonization, Caribbean islands and most other tropical areas became centers of sugar production.

Though of secondary importance to sugar, tobacco achieved great value for Europeans as a cash crop as well. Native peoples had been growing it for medicinal and ritual purposes for centuries before European contact, smoking it in pipes or powdering it to use as snuff. They believed tobacco could improve concentration and enhance wisdom. To some, its use meant achieving an entranced, altered, or divine state—entering a spiritual place.

Tobacco was unknown in Europe before 1492, and it carried a negative stigma at first. The early Spanish explorers considered Natives’ use of tobacco to be proof of their savagery and, because of the fire and smoke produced in the consumption of tobacco, evidence of the Devil’s sway in the New World. Gradually, however, European colonists became accustomed to and even took up the habit of smoking, and they brought it across the Atlantic. As did the Indians, Europeans ascribed medicinal properties to tobacco, claiming that it could cure headaches and skin irritations. Even so, Europeans did not import tobacco in great quantities until the 1590s. At that time, it became the first truly global commodity; English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese colonists all grew it for the world market.

Native peoples also introduced Europeans to chocolate, made from cacao seeds and used by the Aztec in Mesoamerica as currency. Mesoamerican Indians consumed unsweetened chocolate in a drink with chili peppers, vanilla, and a spice called achiote. This chocolate drink— xocolatl —was part of ritual ceremonies like marriage and an everyday item for those who could afford it. Chocolate contains theobromine, a stimulant, which may be why Native people believed it brought them closer to the sacred world.

Spaniards in the New World considered drinking chocolate a vile practice; one called chocolate “the Devil’s vomit.” In time, however, they introduced the beverage to Spain. At first, chocolate was available only in the Spanish court, where the elite mixed it with sugar and other spices. Later, as its availability spread, chocolate gained a reputation as a love potion.

The crossing of the Atlantic by plants like cacao and tobacco illustrates the ways in which the discovery of the New World changed the habits and behaviors of Europeans. Europeans changed the New World in turn, not least by bringing Old World animals to the Americas. On his second voyage, Christopher Columbus brought pigs, horses, cows, and chickens to the islands of the Caribbean. Later explorers followed suit, introducing new animals or reintroducing ones that had died out (like horses). With less vulnerability to disease, these animals often fared better than humans in their new home, thriving both in the wild and in domestication.

Figure 3 . English naturalist Sir Hans Sloane traveled to Jamaica and other Caribbean islands to catalog the flora of the new world.

Plants and Medicines

Just as pharmaceutical companies today scour the natural world for new drugs, Europeans traveled to America to discover new medicines. The task of cataloging the new plants found there helped give birth to the science of botany. Early botanists included the English naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, who traveled to Jamaica in 1687 and there recorded hundreds of new plants. Sloane also helped popularize the drinking of chocolate, made from the cacao bean, in England.

Indians, who possessed a vast understanding of local New World plants and their properties, would have been a rich source of information for those European botanists seeking to find and catalog potentially useful plants. Enslaved Africans, who had a tradition of the use of medicinal plants in their Native land, adapted to their new surroundings by learning the use of New World plants through experimentation or from the Native inhabitants. Native peoples and Africans employed their knowledge effectively within their own communities. One notable example was the use of the peacock flower to induce abortions: Indian and enslaved African women living in oppressive colonial regimes are said to have used this herb to prevent the birth of children into slavery. Europeans distrusted medical knowledge that came from African or Native sources, however, and thus lost the benefit of this source of information.

Europeans encountered New World animals as well. Because European Christians understood the world as a place of warfare between God and Satan, many believed the Americas, which lacked Christianity, were home to the Devil and his minions. The exotic, sometimes bizarre, appearances and habits of animals in the Americas that were previously unknown to Europeans, such as manatees, sloths, and poisonous snakes, confirmed this association. Over time, however, they began to rely more on observation of the natural world than solely on scripture. This shift—from seeing the Bible as the source of all received wisdom to trusting observation or empiricism—is one of the major outcomes of the era of early globalization.

The Introduction of Disease

Figure 4.  This sixteenth-century Aztec drawing shows the suffering of a typical victim of smallpox. Smallpox and other contagious diseases brought by European explorers decimated Indian populations in the Americas.

Perhaps European colonization’s single greatest impact on the North American environment was the introduction of disease. Microbes to which Indigenous inhabitants had no immunity led to death everywhere Europeans settled. Along the New England coast between 1616 and 1618, epidemics claimed the lives of 75 percent of the Native people. In the 1630s, half the Huron and Iroquois around the Great Lakes died of smallpox . As is often the case with disease, the very young and the very old were the most vulnerable and had the highest mortality rates. The loss of the older generation meant the loss of knowledge and tradition, while the death of children only compounded the trauma, creating devastating implications for future generations.

In eastern North America, some Indigenous peoples interpreted death from disease as a hostile act. Some groups, including the Iroquois, engaged in raids or “ mourning wars ,” taking enemy prisoners in order to assuage their grief and replace the departed. In a special ritual, the prisoners were “requickened”—assigned the identity of a dead person—and adopted by the bereaved family to take the place of their dead. As the toll from disease rose, mourning wars intensified and expanded.

This video explains the significance of the Colombian Exchange.

You can view the  transcript for “Columbian Exchange” here (opens in new window) .

Changes to Native American Life

While the Americas remained firmly under the control of Native peoples in the first decades of European settlement, conflict increased as colonization spread and Europeans placed greater demands upon the Native populations, including expecting them to convert to Christianity (either Catholicism or Protestantism). Throughout the seventeenth century, the still-powerful Native peoples and confederacies that retained control of the land waged war against the invading Europeans, achieving a degree of success in their effort to drive the newcomers from the continent.

At the same time, European goods had begun to change Indian life radically. In the 1500s, some of the earliest objects Europeans introduced to Indians were glass beads, copper kettles, and metal utensils. Native people often adapted these items for their own use. For example, some cut up copper kettles and refashioned the metal for other uses, including jewelry that conferred status on the wearer, who was seen as connected to the new European source of raw materials.

European Goods in Native Communities

As European settlements grew throughout the 1600s, European goods flooded Native communities. Soon Native people were using these items for the same purposes as the Europeans. For example, many Native inhabitants abandoned their animal-skin clothing in favor of European textiles. Similarly, clay cookware gave way to metal cooking implements, and Indians found that European flint and steel made starting fires much easier.

Figure 5 . In this 1681 portrait, the Niantic-Narragansett chief Ninigret wears a combination of European and Indian goods. Which elements of each culture are evident in this portrait?

The abundance of European goods gave rise to new artistic objects. For example, iron awls made the creation of shell beads among the Native people of the Eastern Woodlands much easier, and the result was an astonishing increase in the production of wampum, shell beads used in ceremonies and as jewelry and currency. Native peoples had always placed goods in the graves of their departed, and this practice escalated with the arrival of European goods. Archaeologists have found enormous caches of European trade goods in the graves of Indians on the East Coast.

Native weapons changed dramatically as well, creating an arms race among the peoples living in European colonization zones. Indians refashioned European brassware into arrow points and turned axes used for chopping wood into weapons. The most prized piece of European weaponry to obtain was a musket , or light, long-barreled European gun. In order to trade with Europeans for these, Native peoples intensified their harvesting of beaver, commercializing their traditional practice.

The influx of European materials made warfare more lethal and changed traditional patterns of authority among tribes. Formerly weaker groups, if they had access to European metal and weapons, suddenly gained the upper hand against once-dominant groups. The Algonquian, for instance, traded with the French for muskets and gained power against their enemies, the Iroquois. Eventually, Native peoples also used their new weapons against the European colonizers who had provided them.

Interactive

Environmental changes.

The European presence in America spurred countless changes in the environment, setting into motion chains of events that affected native people as well as animals. The popularity of beaver-trimmed hats in Europe, coupled with Indians’ desire for European weapons, led to the overhunting of beaver in the Northeast. Soon, beavers were extinct in New England, New York, and other areas. With their loss came the loss of beaver ponds, which had served as habitats for fish as well as water sources for deer, moose, and other animals. Furthermore, Europeans introduced pigs, which they allowed to forage in forests and other wildlands. Pigs consumed the foods on which deer and other indigenous species depended, resulting in scarcity of the game Native peoples had traditionally hunted.

European ideas about owning land as private property clashed with Natives tribes’ understanding of land use. Indigenous peoples did not believe in private ownership of land; instead, they viewed land as a resource to be held in common for the benefit of the group. The European idea of usufruct —the right to common land use and enjoyment—comes close to the Native understanding, but colonists did not practice usufruct widely in America. Colonizers established fields, fences, and other means of demarcating private property. Native peoples who moved seasonally to take advantage of natural resources now found areas off limits, claimed by colonizers because of their insistence on private-property rights.

Review Questions

• How did European muskets change life for Native peoples in the Americas? Show Answer European guns started an arms race among Indian groups. Tribes with ties to Europeans had a distinct advantage in wars with other tribes because muskets were so much more effective than bows and arrows. Guns changed the balance of power among different groups and tribes and made combat more deadly.
• Compare and contrast European and Indian views on property. Show Answer Indians didn’t have any concept of owning personal property and believed that land should be held in common, for use by a group. They used land as they needed, often moving from area to area to follow food sources at different times of year. Europeans saw land as something individuals could own, and they used fences and other markers to define their property.

Columbian Exchange:  the movement of plants, animals, and diseases across the Atlantic due to European exploration of the Americas

commodification:  the transformation of something—for example, an item of ritual significance—into a commodity with monetary value

mercantilism: the protectionist economic principle that nations should control trade with their colonies to ensure a favorable balance of trade

mourning wars: raids or wars that tribes waged in eastern North America in order to replace members lost to smallpox and other diseases

musket:  a light, long-barreled European gun

smallpox: a disease that Europeans accidentally brought to the New World, killing millions of Indians, who had no immunity to the disease

sugarcane: one of the primary crops of the Americas, which required a tremendous amount of labor to cultivate

usufruct: a European right to common land use and enjoyment that was not widely practiced in the Americas

• Modification, adaptation, and original content. Authored by : Sarah Franklin for Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Indigenous Lands Interactive. Authored by : Lillian Wills for Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• US History. Authored by : P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Paul Vickery, and Sylvie Waskiewicz. Provided by : OpenStax College. Located at : https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/3-4-the-impact-of-colonization . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11740/latest/
• Columbian Exchange. Provided by : NBC News Learn. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=5FpPpn086eI&feature=emb_logo . License : Other . License Terms : Standard YouTube License

• Columbian Exchange

Written by: Mark Christensen, Assumption College

By the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain causes of the Columbian Exchange and its effect on Europe and the Americas during the period after 1492

Suggested Sequencing

This narrative should be assigned to students at the beginning of their study of chapter 1, alongside the First Contacts Narrative.

When European settlers sailed for distant places during the Renaissance, they carried a variety of items, visible and invisible. Upon arriving in the Caribbean in 1492, Christopher Columbus and his crew brought with them several different trading goods. Yet they also carried unseen biological organisms. And so did every European, African, and Native American who wittingly or unwittingly took part in the Columbian Exchange – the transfer of plants, animals, humans, cultures, germs, and ideas between the Americas and the Old World. The result was a biological and ideological mixing unprecedented in the history of the planet, and one that forever shaped the cultures that participated.

For tens of millions of years, the earth’s people and animals developed in relative isolation from one another. Geographic obstacles such as oceans, rainforests, and mountains prevented the interaction of different species of animals and plants and their spread to other regions. The first settlers of the Americas, who probably crossed the Bering Strait’s ice bridge that connected modern-day Russia and Alaska thousands of years ago, brought plants, animals, and germs with them from Eurasia. However, scholars have speculated that the frigid climate of Siberia (the likely origin of the Native Americans) limited the variety of species. And although the Vikings made contact with the Americas around 1000, their impact was limited.

A large variety of new flora and fauna was introduced to the New World and the Old World in the Columbian Exchange. New World crops included maize (corn), chiles, tobacco, white and sweet potatoes, peanuts, tomatoes, papaya, pineapples, squash, pumpkins, and avocados. New World cultures domesticated only a few animals, including some small-dog species, guinea pigs, llamas, and a few species of fowl. Such animals were domesticated largely for their use as food and not as beasts of burden. For their part, Old World inhabitants were busily cultivating onions, lettuce, rye, barley, rice, oats, turnips, olives, pears, peaches, citrus fruits, sugarcane, and wheat. They too domesticated animals for their use as food, including pigs, sheep, cattle, fowl, and goats. However, cows also served as beasts of burden, along with horses and donkeys. Domesticated dogs were also used for hunting and recreation.

The lack of domesticated animals not only hampered Native Americans development of labor-saving technologies, it also limited their exposure to disease organisms and thus their immunity to illness. Europeans, however, had long been exposed to the various diseases carried by animals, as well as others often shared through living in close quarters in cities, including measles, cholera, bubonic plague, typhoid, influenza, and smallpox.

Europeans had also traveled great distances for centuries and had been introduced to many of the world’s diseases, most notably bubonic plague during the Black Death. They thus gained immunity to most diseases as advances in ship technology enabled them to travel even farther during the Renaissance. The inhabitants of the New World did not have the same travel capabilities and lived on isolated continents where they did not encounter many diseases.

All this changed with Columbus’s first voyage in 1492. When he returned to Spain a year later, Columbus brought with him six Taino natives as well as a few species of birds and plants. The Columbian exchange was underway. On his second voyage, Columbus brought wheat, radishes, melons, and chickpeas to the Caribbean. His travels opened an Atlantic highway between the New and Old Worlds that never closed and only expanded as the exchange of goods increased exponentially year after year. Although Europeans exported their wheat bread, olive oil, and wine in the first years after contact, soon wheat and other goods were being grown in the Americas too. Indeed, wheat remains an important staple in North and South America.

With European exploration and settlement of the New World, goods, animals, and diseases began crossing the Atlantic Ocean in both directions. This “Columbian Exchange” soon had global implications. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)

Horses, cattle, goats, chickens, sheep, and pigs likewise made their New World debut in the early years of contact, to forever shape its landscapes and cultures. On the lusher grasslands of the Americas, imported populations of horses, cattle, and sheep exploded in the absence of natural predators for these animals in the New World. In central Mexico, native farmers who had never needed fences complained about the roaming livestock that frequently damaged their crops. The Mapuche of Chile integrated the horse into their culture so well that they became an insurmountable force opposing the Spaniards. The introduction of horses also changed the way Native Americans hunted buffalo on the Great Plains and made them formidable warriors against other tribes.

The Atlantic highway was not one way, and certainly the New World influenced the Old World. For example, the higher caloric value of potatoes and corn brought from the Americas improved the diet of peasants throughout Europe, as did squash, pumpkins, and tomatoes. This, is turn, led to a net population increase in Europe. Tobacco helped sustain the economy of the first permanent English colony in Jamestown when smoking was introduced and became wildly popular in Europe. Chocolate also enjoyed widespread popularity throughout Europe, where elites frequently enjoyed it served hot as a beverage. A few diseases were also shared with Europeans, including bacterial infections such as syphilis, which Spanish troops from the New World spread across European populations when their nation went to war in Italy and elsewhere.

By contrast, Old World diseases wreaked havoc on native populations. Aztec drawings known as codices show Native Americans dying from the telltale symptoms of smallpox. With no previous exposure and no immunities, the Native American population probably declined by as much as 90 percent in the 150 years after Columbus’s first voyage. The Spanish and other Europeans had no way of knowing they carried deadly microbes with them, but diseases such as measles, influenza, typhus, malaria, diphtheria, whooping cough, and, above all, smallpox were perhaps the most destructive force in the conquest of the New World.

Contact and conquest also led to the blending of ideas and culture. European priests and friars preached Christianity to the Native Americans, who in turn adopted and adapted its beliefs. For instance, the Catholic celebration of All Souls and All Saints Day was blended with an Aztec festival honoring the dead; the resulting Day of the Dead festivities combined elements of Spanish Catholicism and Native American beliefs to create something new. The influence of Christianity was long-lasting; Latin America became overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.

People also blended in this Columbian Exchange. The Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans in the New World procreated, resulting in offspring of mixed race.

Races in the Spanish colonies were separated by legal and social restrictions. In the mid-eighteenth century, casta paintings such as these showed the popular fascination with categorizing individuals of mixed ethnicities.

Throughout the colonial period, native cultures influenced Spanish settlers, producing amestizo identity. Mestizos took pride in both their pre-Columbian and their Spanish heritage and created images such as the Virgin of Guadalupe – a brown-skinned, Latin American Mary who differed from her lighter-skinned European predecessors. The Virgin of Guadalupe became the patron saint of the Americas and the most popular among Catholic saints in general. Above all, she remains an enduring example and evidence of the Columbian Exchange.

Watch this BRI Homework Help video on the Columbian Exchange for a review of the main ideas in this essay.

Review Questions

1. The global transfer of plants, animals, disease, and food between the Eastern and Western hemispheres during the colonization of the Americas is called the

• Middle Passage
• Triangular Trade
• Interhemisphere Exchange

2. Which of the following provides evidence of the cultural blending that occurred as a result of the Columbian Exchange?

• The adoption of Aztec holidays into Spanish Catholicism
• The willingness of the Spanish to learn native languages
• The refusal of the Aztecs to adopt Christianity
• Spanish priests’ encouragement to worship the Virgin of Guadalupe

3. Which item originated in the New World?

4. How did the Columbian Exchange affect Europe?

• Domesticated animals from the New World greatly improved the productivity of European farms.
• Europeans suffered massive causalities form New World diseases such as syphilis.
• The higher caloric value of potatoes and corn improved the European diet.
• Domesticated animals from the New World wreaked havoc in Europe, where they had no natural predators.

5. How did the Columbian Exchange affect the Americas?

• Domesticated animals from the Old World greatly improved the productivity of Native Americans’ farms.
• Native Americans suffered massive causalities from Old World diseases such as smallpox.
• The higher caloric value of crops such as potatoes and corn improved Native Americans’ diets.
• Native Americans learned to domesticate animals thanks to interactions with Europeans.

6. Which item originated in the Old World?

Free Response Questions

• Compare the effects of the Columbian Exchange on North America and Europe.
• Explain why historian Alfred Crosby has described the Columbian Exchange as “Ecological imperialism.”

AP Practice Questions

“The Columbian Exchange has included man, and he has changed the Old and New Worlds sometimes inadvertently, sometimes intentionally, often brutally. It is possible that he and the plants and animals he brings with him have caused the extinction of more species of life forms in the last four hundred years than the usual processes of evolution might kill off in a million. . . . The Columbian Exchange has left us with not a richer but a more impoverished genetic pool. We, all of the life on this planet, are the less for Columbus, and the impoverishment will increase.”

Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492

1. Which of the following most directly supports Crosby’s argument?

• Population gain in Europe due to New World crops such as the potato
• Population decline in North America due to diseases such as smallpox
• Mass migration of Europeans to North America in the sixteenth century, displacing Native American groups
• Overgrazing by animals introduced by Europeans

2. A historian seeking to discredit Crosby’s argument might use what evidence?

• The immediate and widespread adoption of Christianity in the New World
• Native Americans’ struggles with Europeans for dominance in the New World
• Native American groups’ failed adoption of European technologies
• A net population gain over time due to increased availability of high-caloric foods native to the New World

Primary Sources

Bartholomew Gosnold’s Exploration of Cape Cod: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6617

Suggested Resources

Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 . New York: Praeger, 2003.

Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Mann, Charles C. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York: Vintage, 2012.

McNeill, William. Plagues and Peoples . New York: Anchor, 1977.

Related Content

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

Alfred W. Crosby on the Columbian Exchange

The historian discusses the ecological impact of Columbus’ landing in 1492 on both the Old World and the New World

Megan Gambino

Senior Editor

In 1972, Alfred W. Crosby wrote a book called The Columbian Exchange . In it, the historian tells the story of Columbus’s landing in 1492 through the ecological ramifications it had on the New World.

At the time of publication, Crosby’s approach to history, through biology, was novel. “For historians Crosby framed a new subject,” wrote J.R. McNeil, a professor at Georgetown University, in a foreword to the book’s 30th anniversary edition. Today, The Columbian Exchange is considered a founding text in the field of environmental history.

I recently spoke with the retired professor about “Columbian Exchange”—a term that has worked its way into historians’ vernacular—and the impacts of some of the living organisms that transferred between continents, beginning in the 15th century.

You coined the term “Columbian Exchange.” Can you define it?

In 1491, the world was in many of its aspects and characteristics a minimum of two worlds—the New World, of the Americas, and the Old World, consisting of Eurasia and Africa. Columbus brought them together, and almost immediately and continually ever since, we have had an exchange of native plants, animals and diseases moving back and forth across the oceans between the two worlds. A great deal of the economic, social, political history of the world is involved in the exchange of living organisms between the two worlds.

When you wrote The Columbian Exchange , this was a new idea—telling history from an ecological perspective. Why hadn’t this approach been taken before?

Sometimes the more obvious a thing is the more difficult it is to see it. I am 80 years old, and for the first 40 or 50 years of my life, the Columbian Exchange simply didn’t figure into history courses even at the finest universities. We were thinking politically and ideologically, but very rarely were historians thinking ecologically, biologically.

What made you want to write the book?

I was a young American historian teaching undergraduates. I tell you, after about ten years of muttering about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, you really need some invigoration from other sources. Then, I fell upon it, starting with smallpox.

Smallpox was enormously important until quite modern times, until the middle of the 20th century at the latest. So I was chasing it down, and I found myself reading the original accounts of the European settlements in Mexico, Peru or Cuba in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. I kept coming across smallpox just blowing people away. So I thought there must be something else going on here, and there was—and I suppose still is.

How did you go about your research?

It was really quite easy. You just have to be prepared somehow or other to notice the obvious. You don’t have to read the original accounts in Spanish or Portuguese. There are excellent English translations dating back for generations. Practically all of them will get into a page or two or ten about the decimation of American Indians, or a page about how important maize is when all European crops fail, and things like that. I really didn’t realize that I was starting a revolution in historiography when I got into this subject.

So, how were the idea and the book received at first?

That is kind of interesting. I had a great deal of trouble getting it published. Now, the ideas are not particularly startling anymore, but they were at the time. Publisher after publisher read it, and it didn’t make a significant impression. Finally, I said, “the hell with this.” I gave it up. And a little publisher in New England wrote me and asked me if I would let them have a try at it, which I did. It came out in 1972, and it has been in print ever since. It has really caused a stir.

What crops do you consider part of the Columbian Exchange?

There was very little sharing of the main characters in our two New World and Old World systems of agriculture. So practically any crop you name was exclusive to one side of the ocean and carried across. I am thinking about the enormous ones that support whole civilizations. Rice is, of course, Old World. Wheat is Old World. Maize, or corn, is New World.

The story of wheat is the story of Old World civilization. Thousands of years ago, it was first cultivated in the Middle East, and it has been a staple for humanity ever since. It is one of Europe’s greatest gifts to the Americas.

Maize was the most important grain of the American Indians in 1491, and it is one of the most important grain sources in the world right now. It is a standard crop of people not only throughout the Americas, but also southern Europe. It is a staple for the Chinese. It is a staple in Indonesia, throughout large areas of Africa. If suddenly American Indian crops would not grow in all of the world, it would be an ecological tragedy. It would be the slaughter of a very large portion of the human race.

Maize, potatoes and other crops are important not only because they are nourishing, but because they have different requirements of soil and weather and prosper in conditions that are different from other plants.

What ideas about domesticating animals traveled across the ocean?

American Indians were very, very roughly speaking the equal of Old World farmers of crops. But American Indians were inferior to the Old World raisers of animals. The horse, cattle, sheep and goat are all of Old World origin. The only American domesticated animals of any kind were the alpaca and the llama.

One of the early advantages of the Spanish over the Mexican Aztecs, for instance, was that the Spanish had the horse. It took the American Indians a little while to adopt the horse and become equals on the field of battle.

You talk about the horse being an advantage in war. What other impacts did the adoption of domesticated horses have on the Americas?

Horses not only helped in war but in peace. The invaders had more pulling power—not only horses but also oxen and donkeys. When you consider the great buildings of the Old World, starting with the Egyptians and running up through the ages, people in almost all cases had access to thousands of very strong animals to help them. If you needed to move a ton of whatever in the Old World, you got yourself an animal to help you. When you turn to the Americas and look at temples, you realize people built these. If you need to move a ton in the New World, you just got a bunch of friends and told everybody to pull at the same time.

What diseases are included in the Columbian Exchange?

The Old World invaders came in with a raft of infectious diseases. Not that the New World didn’t have any at all, but it did not have the numbers that were brought in from the Old World. Smallpox was a standard infection in Europe and most of the Old World in 1491. It took hold in areas of the New World in the early part of the next century and killed a lot of American Indians, starting with the Aztecs and the people of Mexico and Peru. One wonders how a few hundred Spaniards managed to conquer these giant Indian empires. You go back and read the records and you discover that the army and, just generally speaking, the people of the Indian empires were just decimated by such diseases as smallpox, malaria, all kinds of infectious diseases.

Get the latest History stories in your inbox?

Click to visit our Privacy Statement .

Megan Gambino | | READ MORE

Megan Gambino is a senior web editor for Smithsonian magazine.

The Columbian Exchange

• De Las Casas and the Conquistadors
• Early Visual Representations of the New World
• Failed European Colonies in the New World
• Successful European Colonies in the New World
• A Model of Christian Charity
• Benjamin Franklin’s Satire of Witch Hunting
• The American Revolution as Civil War
• Patrick Henry and “Give Me Liberty!”
• Lexington & Concord: Tipping Point of the Revolution
• Abigail Adams and “Remember the Ladies”
• Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” 1776
• Citizen Leadership in the Young Republic
• After Shays’ Rebellion
• James Madison Debates a Bill of Rights
• America, the Creeks, and Other Southeastern Tribes
• America and the Six Nations: Native Americans After the Revolution
• The Revolution of 1800
• Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase
• The Expansion of Democracy During the Jacksonian Era
• The Religious Roots of Abolition
• Individualism in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”
• Aylmer’s Motivation in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”
• Thoreau’s Critique of Democracy in “Civil Disobedience”
• Hester’s A: The Red Badge of Wisdom
• “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
• The Cult of Domesticity
• The Family Life of the Enslaved
• A Pro-Slavery Argument, 1857
• The Underground Railroad
• The Enslaved and the Civil War
• Women, Temperance, and Domesticity
• “The Chinese Question from a Chinese Standpoint,” 1873
• “To Build a Fire”: An Environmentalist Interpretation
• Progressivism in the Factory
• Progressivism in the Home
• The “Aeroplane” as a Symbol of Modernism
• The “Phenomenon of Lindbergh”
• The Radio as New Technology: Blessing or Curse? A 1929 Debate
• The Marshall Plan Speech: Rhetoric and Diplomacy
• NSC 68: America’s Cold War Blueprint
• The Moral Vision of Atticus Finch

Copyright National Humanities Center, 2015

Lesson Contents

Teacher’s note.

• Text Analysis & Close Reading Questions

Follow-Up Assignment

• Student Version PDF

In what ways did the arrival of Europeans to America bring about unforeseen and unintended consequences for the people and environments of both the New World and the Old?

Understanding.

The Columbian Exchange — the interchange of plants, animals, disease, and technology sparked by Columbus’s voyages to the New World — marked a critical point in history. It allowed ecologies and cultures that had previously been separated by oceans to mix in new and unpredictable ways. It was an interconnected web of events with immediate and extended consequences that could neither be predicted nor controlled.

Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Text Complexity

Grade 9–10 complexity band.

For more information on text complexity see these resources from achievethecore.org .

In the Text Analysis section, Tier 2 vocabulary words are defined in pop-ups, and Tier 3 words are explained in brackets.

Click here for standards and skills for this lesson.

Common Core State Standards

• ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.1 (cite evidence to analyze specifically and by inference)
• ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.2 (determine a central idea and its development)

Advanced Placement US History

• Key Concept 1.2 (IIA) (introduction of crops and animals not found in the Americas)

In this lesson students will explore a description of the Columbian Exchange written by Charles C. Mann as part of the introduction to his book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created . In three excerpts students will examine elements of the Exchange — an overview, a specific biological example of unintended consequences, and finally an example of unintended human costs of the Columbian Exchange. Each excerpt is accompanied by close reading questions for students to complete. The text analysis is accompanied by three interactive exercises to aid in student understanding. The first interactive allows students to explore vocabulary in context; the second encourages students to review the textual analysis; and the third explores the use of diction, simile, and appeal to authority.

This lesson focuses upon the Columbian Exchange as an interwoven process with unforeseen consequences. Charles Mann expands upon the earlier theories of Alfred W. Crosby, who explored the idea of the Columbian Exchange in 1972 (for a general essay on the Columbian Exchange written by Crosby, including suggestions for class discussions, click here ). Although Mann details the effects of tobacco, the potato, corn, malaria, yellow fever, the rubber industry, and other elements of the Exchange in both the Eastern and Western hemispheres fully in 1493 , this lesson focuses specifically upon some effects of the Exchange in Hispaniola. The follow-up assignment allows students to extend the effects of the Exchange into the African slave trade. The author uses Colon, the Spanish spelling for Columbus, throughout, and that spelling has been retained in the excerpts for this lesson.

This lesson is divided into two parts, both accessible below. The teacher’s guide includes a background note, the text analysis with responses to the close reading questions, access to the interactive exercises, and a follow-up assignment. The student’s version, an interactive worksheet that can be e-mailed, contains all of the above except the responses to the close reading questions, and the follow-up assignment.

Teacher’s Guide

Background questions.

• What kind of text are we dealing with?
• When was it written?
• Who wrote it?
• For what audience was it intended?
• For what purpose was it written?

When Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola (the island including the modern countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) during his first voyage in 1492, he and his men did not realize the lasting effects their voyage would have on both the New World and the Old at that time and in the years to come. The Columbian Exchange is the term given to the transfer of plants, animals, disease, and technology between the Old World from which Columbus came and the New World which he found. Some exchanges were purposeful — the explorers intentionally brought animals and food — but others were accidental. In this lesson you will read about this Exchange from a description written by Charles C. Mann, a writer specializing in scientific topics. This lesson uses excerpts from a book entitled 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created in which Mann describes the effects, both intended and unintended, of the Columbian Exchange. Mann wrote 1493 to explore the Columbian Exchange as a process which is still going on today.

This lesson draws from the introduction in Mann’s book. There are three excerpts, each with close reading questions. The first excerpt is a general overview of the Exchange — while it does not include all parts of the Exchange, you will see examples of how animals and plants from one part of the world replaced those in another part of the world. In excerpt two you will explore a specific example of unintended consequences of the Columbian Exchange, when settlers thought they were simply bringing in an enjoyable food, but they wound up with an invasive pest. Finally, in excerpt three you can see the devastating effects of the Columbian Exchange upon the Taino Indians, the residents of Hispaniola before Columbus arrived. In some of the excerpts you will see Columbus spelled as Colon — this is the Spanish spelling and is used by the author.

Text Analysis

Close reading questions.

1. Why do you believe Columbus brought cattle, sheep or horses with him? They were part of the European culture. They would help in farming (cattle and sheep) and communication, transportation, and war (horses). The Spanish intended to start a colony and would need the animals.

2. What would the Taino culture have been like without cattle or horses? There would have been communication only by human messenger and fields planted by hand. There would have been no quick communication (by horse) or plowed fields or pastures (no cattle, so they were not possible or necessary) and only a few, small paths, no real roads (the only transportation was by foot).

3. What is the thesis statement of paragraph 1? How does Mann develop that thesis? Cite evidence from the text. The thesis is “Colon and his crew did not voyage alone.” Mann develops that thesis by giving examples to prove his point, including earthworms, cockroaches, African Grasses, rats, and other animals and plants.

4. How did the introduction of cattle and sheep affect plant life on Hispaniola? New grasses for grazing choked out native species.

5. Why is it important that alien grasses, trees, and other plants choked out native vegetation in Hispaniola? Choking out native grasses reduced the biodiversity (the number of distinct life forms) of Hispaniola. Ecosystems that are more biodiverse (they have more distinct life forms) are more productive and are more resistant to diseases.

6. What can be the effect of introducing a new predator into an environment, such as the Indian mongoose in Hispaniola? Give an example. It can render another species extinct, which may itself have unintended consequences. For instance, the food source for the Dominican snake may have increased in population which may have led to other effects.

7. How does Mann show that the Columbian Exchange is still ongoing? He relates how, in 2004, the orange groves have become prey of the lime swallowtail butterflies.

8. In the second paragraph of this excerpt, Mann implies his thesis but does not actually state it. What is the implied thesis of paragraph 2? How does he imply the thesis? Mann implies that the Columbian Exchange can have negative results. He gives examples, citing grasses that were choked out, trees that were replaced with other types of trees, and animals driven toward extinction. In this excerpt, Mann offers an overview of the Columbian Exchange with examples.

…Colon [Columbus] and his crew did not voyage alone. They were accompanied by a menagerie of insects, plants, mammals, and microorganisms. Beginning with La Isabela [Colon’s first settlement], European expeditions brought cattle, sheep, and horses, along with crops like sugar cane (originally from New Guinea), wheat (from the Middle East), bananas (from Africa), and coffee (also from Africa). Equally important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitchhiked along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; rats of every description — all of them poured from the hulls of Colon’s vessels and those that followed, rushing like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before.

Movqvites (Mosquito), “Histoire Naturelle des Indes,” ca. 1586

9. According to the author and his sources, what unintended import came in to Hispaniola with plantains? With the plantains came scale insects.

10. How does the author define scale insects? They are small creatures with tough, waxy coats that suck the juices from plant roots and stems.

11. Define “ecological release.” Ecological release is when an invasive species is introduced into an environment with no natural predators and subsequently the population explodes.

12. Using the example of scale insects as evidence, why are natural predators important to an ecosystem? They help to regulate the population of a species and keep an ecosystem in balance.

13. What was the unintended effect of this import, scale insects, according to Wilson? Why did they have this effect? The scale insects sucked juices from plants and stems. They had no natural enemies, so their populations grew greatly. The scale insects became a food source for fire ants. With a virtually unlimited food source, the fire ant population grew greatly. The fire ants invaded settlers’ homes. This proved to be dangerous to the settlers.

14. Mann begins the second paragraph in this excerpt with “So far this is informed speculation.” What effect does this admission have on our perception of Mann as an author? It reminds the reader that Mann is approaching his topic from a scientific perspective, being careful to alert readers to what is proven and what is not. This helps to establish him as a writer we can trust.

15. What document from the 1500s seems to confirm this unintended effect? Bartolome de Las Casas wrote of a sudden infestation of fire ants in 1518 and 1519.

16. What was the unintended effect to settlers of the introduction of plantains to Hispaniola? Although they had plantains to eat, they also had to deal with fire ants. As a result, they abandoned their homes.

17. How does Mann combine 16th and 20th century evidence? He uses 20th century science to explain a 16th century eye-witness account. Here Mann gives a specific example of unintended consequences.

Natives and newcomers interacted in unexpected ways, creating biological bedlam . When Spanish colonists imported African plantains [a tropical plant that resembles a banana] in 1516, the Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson has proposed, they also imported scale insects, small creatures with tough, waxy coats that suck the juices from plant roots and stems. About a dozen banana-infesting scale insects are known in Africa. In Hispaniola, Wilson argued, these insects had no natural enemies. In consequence, their numbers must have exploded — a phenomenon known to science as “ecological release.” This spread of scale insects would have dismayed the island’s European banana farmers but delighted one of its native species: the tropical fire ant Solenopsis geminata . S. geminata is fond of dining on scale insects’ sugary excrement; to ensure the flow, the ants will attack anything that disturbs them. A big increase in scale insects would have led to a big increase in fire ants.

18. What is the thesis of this excerpt? Mann asserts that “the most dramatic impact of the Columbian Exchange was on humankind itself.”

19. What evidence does Mann use to develop this thesis? He uses Columbus’s original account, 16th century official Spanish documents, and estimates by modern historians.

20. Why did the Spanish conduct a census of the Indians on Hispaniola in 1514? What did the census find regarding the Taino population? The Spanish conducted a census in order to count the Taino so that they could be assigned to Spanish settlers as laborers. This was part of the encomienda system, whereby a Spanish settler was given a plantation as well as the labor of all the Indians who lived on that plantation. The census-takers found that there were few Taino left, perhaps only about 26,000.

21. According to the author, what two factors caused this change in population? Which cause was the most influential? The two causes were Spanish cruelty and the introduction of diseases by the Columbian Exchange. The most influential was the introduction of disease.

22. The third sentence in paragraph 2 of this excerpt uses a rhetorical device called asyndeton. Asyndeton is a list of items with conjunctions omitted and can be used to imply that there are more items that could be added to the list. What types of items does the author list using asyndeton? What is the effect? The author lists diseases, both viruses and bacteria. The effect is a “piling up”, implying that more diseases were brought to Hispaniola as well, but the author may not have the space in the sentence to list them. In fact, other diseases were introduced by the Columbian Exchange, including malaria, yellow fever, whooping cough, chicken pox, the bubonic plague, and leprosy.

23. Why was the introduction of these diseases so devastating for the Taino and not the Spanish explorers? The Taino had never been exposed to these diseases before and therefore had no natural immunity to stop or control the spread of the disease. The Spanish did have some natural immunity, since the diseases were present in Europe at that time.

24. What is the effect of Mann including the information about the first recorded epidemic, which occurred within one year of Columbus’s arrival? He reminds the reader that the devastating effects of diseases brought by the Exchange happened almost immediately for the Taino. This conveys the seriousness of the Exchange as well as the power of the diseases in a population with no natural immunity.

From the human perspective, the most dramatic impact of the Columbian Exchange was on humankind itself. Spanish accounts suggest that Hispaniola had a large native population: Colón, for instance, casually described the Taino as “innumerable, for I believe there to be millions upon millions of them.” Las Casas claimed the population to be “more than three million.” Modern researchers have not nailed down the number; estimates range from 60,000 to almost 8,000,000. A careful study in 2003 argued that the true figure was “a few hundred thousand.” No matter what the original number, though, the European impact was horrific . In 1514, twenty-two years after Colon’s first voyage, the Spanish government counted up the Indians on Hispaniola for the purpose of allocating them among colonists as laborers. Census agents fanned the across the island but found only 26,000 Taino. Thirty-four years later, according to one scholarly Spanish resident, fewer than 500 Taino were alive….

Spanish cruelty played its part in the calamity , but its larger cause was the Columbian Exchange. Before Colon none of the epidemic diseases common in Europe and Asia existed in the Americas. The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and bacterial meningitis — by a quirk of evolutionary history, all were unknown in the Western Hemisphere. Shipped across the ocean from Europe these maladies consumed Hispaniola’s native population with stunning rapacity . The first recorded epidemic, perhaps due to swine flu, was in 1493….

Joan Vinckeboons, “Map of the islands of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico,” 1639(?)

Mann describes in excerpt three a major change in Taino population on Hispaniola and the effects of this change on the Taino population and the Spanish. But another group was also affected — enslaved Africans. The Spanish used the encomienda system in Hispaniola, whereby conquistadors were given large plantations as well as the Indian slave labor of all who lived on the plantation. Through this system the Spanish moved quickly to enslave Indians, even though the official mission of the Spanish was to Christianize them. In response to pressure from the Catholic Church, in 1542 King Carlos V banned Indian slavery, opening the way for African slaves. Mann writes,

By 1501, seven years after La Isabella’s founding, so many Africans [as slaves] had come to Hispaniola that the alarmed Spanish king and queen instructed the island’s governor not to allow any more to land [but]…the colonists saw that the Africans appeared immune to disease, didn’t have local social networks that would help them escape, and possessed useful skills — many African societies were well known for their ironworking and horsemanship. Slave ships bellied up to the docks of Santo Domingo in ever-greater numbers. The slaves were not as easily controlled as the colonists had hoped [and]…. No longer were Africans slipped into the Americas by the handful. The rise of sugar production [sugar production is very labor intensive] in Mexico and the concurrent rise in Brazil opened the floodgates. Between 1550 and 1650…slave ships ferried across about 650,000 Africans, with the total split more or less equally between Spanish and Portuguese America…. Soon they [Africans] were more ubiquitous [existing everywhere] in the Americas than Europeans, with results the latter never expected. (Mann, p.387–388)

What do you believe might have been some of the “results the latter [the Europeans] never expected”? In what ways can New World slavery be said to be related to the Columbian Exchange? Discuss the possible unintended consequences with your classmates. Use specific examples as evidence.

Vocabulary Pop-Ups

• menagerie : collection of wild or unusual animals
• alien : foreign, hostile
• depredation : ravages
• bedlam : wild confusion
• entomologist : insect expert
• phenomenon : observable event or fact
• dismayed : alarmed
• speculation : thoughtful opinion
• culprit : villain
• horrific : causing horror
• fanned : spread out
• calamity : great disaster
• quirk : peculiar action
• maladies : chronic diseases
• rapacity : fierce hunger
• Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Vintage Books, 2012).
• Bouttats, Pieter Balthazar, 1666–1755, engraver. : El almirante Christoral Colon descubre la Isla Española, iy haze poner una Cruz, etc. / P. B. Bouttats fec., Aqua forti. [1728] Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3a10998/?co=cph (accessed September 15, 2014).
• Histoire Naturelle des Indes , Illustrated manuscript. ca. 1586. Bequest of Clara S. Peck, 1983 MA 3900 (fol. 71v–72) The Morgan Library and Museum, New York. http://www.themorgan.org/collection/Histoire-Naturelle-des-Indes/72
• Vinckeboons, Joan. Map of the islands of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Map. [1639?] Pen-and-ink and watercolor. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C. 20540-4650 USA http://www.loc.gov/item/2003623402/ (accessed September 15, 2014)
• De insulis nuper in mari Indico repertis [Christopher Columbus discovering America]. Woodcut, 1494. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA Illus. in Incun. 1494 .V47 Vollbehr Coll [Rare Book RR] http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3g04806/?co=cph (accessed September 29, 2014).
• Christopher Columbus leaving Spain to go to America. London : J. Edwards, 1800? 1 print : engraving. Illus. in: America, part 4 / Theodore de Bry, 1528-1598, ed., 1800?, plate VIII. Library of Congress Miscellaneous Items in High Demand Collection http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/90715316/ (accessed September 29, 2014).
• Christophe Colomb parmi les Indiens / lith. de Turgis. Paris : Vve. Turgis, [between 1850 and 1900]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/93504854/ (accessed September 29, 2014).
• Histoire Naturelle des Indes , Illustrated manuscript. ca. 1586. Bequest of Clara S. Peck, 1983 MA 3900 (fol. 11v–12) The Morgan Library and Museum, New York. http://www.themorgan.org/collection/Histoire-Naturelle-des-Indes/12

National Humanities Center | 7 T.W. Alexander Drive, P.O. Box 12256 | Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709

Phone: (919) 549-0661 | Fax: (919) 990-8535 | nationalhumanitiescenter.org

Copyright 2010–2023 National Humanities Center. All rights reserved.

The Columbian Exchange

40 pages • 1 hour read

The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 is one of the first environmental histories and was published in 1972. It has remained in print since and was reissued in 2003 as a special 30th anniversary edition with a new preface and foreword. This study guide refers to the 2003 Praeger edition of the book.

Crosby earned his Ph.D. in history at Boston University and was a professor of geography, history, and American studies at the University of Texas. Crosby was a civil rights activist and supported the United Farm Workers Union. His books are published in 12 languages; among the most recognized are Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 and America’s Forgotten Pandemic : The Influenza of 1918 . His 2018 New York Times obituary referred to him as the “father of environmental history.”

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

• 7,600+ In-Depth Study Guides
• 4,850+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
• Downloadable PDFs

Content Warning: This book uses terminology such as Old World and New World , which is Eurocentric and inaccurate. It also consistently uses “Indian” to refer to Indigenous people, although the author identifies this terminology as inaccurate in the preface. This guide uses “Indian” only in quoting Crosby’s language. This guide also discusses the enslavement of African and Indigenous people.

Plot Summary

The SuperSummary difference

• 8x more resources than SparkNotes and CliffsNotes combined
• Study Guides you won ' t find anywhere else
• 100+ new titles every month

Alfred W. Crosby, Jr.’s The Columbian Exchange concerns the long-term biological impact of contact between the Americas and Europe, as well as Africa and Asia. Human both purposely and accidentally transformed the globe through this exchange of plants, animals, human beings, and diseases. Using scientific data and primary sources (documents written during the period under study), Crosby argues that while the Columbian Exchange had some short-term positive effects on the world, its overall impact is destructive.

Crosby begins by explaining the differences between the Americas and the rest of the world. These contrasts were the result of millennia of geographical isolation. Humans migrated to the Americas across the Bering land bridge thousands of years ago. Once this bridge was submerged again, inhabitants of the Americas developed in isolation. When Europeans later encountered the American continents, they were hard-pressed to explain the contrasts between this region and their own—such as the noticeable differences in flora, fauna, and humans’ physical appearances—due to their era’s Christian worldview that God created all life at once. While some put forth new theories of multiple creation, the church deemed these perspectives blasphemous and justified the subordination of Indigenous peoples to papal—and, thus, European—rule by claiming they were part of God’s singular creation.

The conquest of the Americas was not due to superior European technology but was the result of a different kind of warfare: biological. Europeans transported numerous diseases across the Atlantic that did not exist in North and South America because of the region’s isolation. Indigenous peoples, thus, had no natural immunity to these illnesses, such as smallpox, which killed them swiftly and in vast numbers. The origin of syphilis is debated, but some scientists claim that it probably originated in the Americas and was brought back to the Continent by Europeans; however, it was not as devastating to European populations as Europeans’ diseases were to the Americas. It did, however, cause fear and potentially strain social relationships.

Europeans brought new crops and livestock to the Americas that transformed and sometimes damaged the landscape. Wheat, olives, and grapevines were staple Spanish crops, for example, but Spanish colonists initially had difficulty growing them in new climates. However, they soon found zones of the Americas that could support their growth. Nevertheless, survival also necessitated that Europeans embrace the cultivation of indigenous crops such as maize, manioc, and potatoes. These American crops soon found their way to Europe, Africa, and Asia, where farmers embraced them, especially when people realized that they could complement rather than compete with what they already grew. This crop diversification caused massive global population growth from the early modern period into the modern era. European demographic growth led to a steady flow of emigrants to European colonies around the world, including the Americas, which further displaced Indigenous peoples from their lands. Likewise, the introduction of European livestock like cattle and horses also displaced Indigenous populations and intruded on their farmlands, negatively impacting the amount of plant food they could produce and further harming Indigenous groups. The arrival of European plants and animals in the North and South American continents also contributed to environmental degradation and ecological disruption from which the land never recovered. Crosby concludes that the Columbian Exchange harmed and continues to harm the world and its people.

Don't Miss Out!

Access Study Guide Now

Related Titles

By Alfred W. Crosby

Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900

Alfred W. Crosby

Featured Collections

Anthropology

View Collection

Colonialism & Postcolonialism

Globalization

Required Reading Lists

Science & Nature

The Columbian Exchange Explained

Apush topic 1.4: the columbian exchange.

The Columbian Exchange is one of the most featured topics in the AP® space, with relevance to all the AP® history courses (United States, European, and World History), as well as AP® Human Geography. Although each course examines the Columbian Exchange from a different angle, the major features of this expansion of global trade have the same relevance to all subjects, so although this Columbian Exchange Study Guide from Marco Learning is targeted toward AP® U.S. History students, it could prove useful beyond that course.

WHY WE HAVE FRENCH FRIES

The Columbian Exchange was a massive exchange of crops, animals, people, diseases, goods, and ideas between the Old World (Africa, Asia, and Europe) and the New World (the Americas), which greatly altered people’s lives on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The explosion of global trade then occurred as a result transformed goods that had either been unknown (or known as rare luxuries) into everyday items available even to people of all social classes. The arrival of new crops on both sides of the Atlantic resulted in more varied diets and new patterns of consumption. Before the Columbian Exchange, there were no French fries, and the idea of a marinara sauce was foreign to Italy, as both the tomato and the potato were still confined to the New World, hidden from European kitchens. At the same time, there were crops, such as sugar and coffee, that were known in the Old World, but very rare and expensive. Once these crops found fertile soil in the New World, they became widely available. The increased demand for coffee and sugar-fueled the rise in the African Slave Trade, which resulted in the involuntary movement of millions of Africans to the New World. The non-edible tobacco plant also made a profound impact, as Europeans embraced the habit of smoking the novel substance, as Native Americans had been doing for hundreds of years

The impact of the Columbian Exchange on the populations of Europe and the Americas was drastically different. In Europe, the introduction of the potato resulted in a population increase due to the ease of growing the calorie-rich crop on European soil. However, the native population in the New World experienced a catastrophic decline due to a lack of immunity to European diseases, such as smallpox.

It is important to note that the Columbian Exchange was not entirely one-sided, as new goods from Europe altered American Indian lives, as well. Europeans brought horses with them, which diffused over North America over the course of the next two centuries made native tribes more mobile – especially in the Great Plains, where they were put to good use by migratory bison hunters. Natives also procured firearms, which helped them in the hunt but also made inter-tribal warfare more deadly and devastating.

One of the most significant exchanges that took place across the Atlantic was the intangible exchange of ideas. Europeans arrived in the New World with the intent of spreading Christianity to new lands outside of Europe. This was especially a priority for the Spanish and French monarchies, which actively encouraged the presence of Catholic priests in the New World to evangelize natives. Capitalism – an economic system based on private ownership and the profit motive – was an idea in development in Europe in the fifteenth century. Not only did the idea of capitalism arrive in the New World to greet a native population completely unfamiliar with it, but an increase in global trade and precious metals resulting from the Columbian Exchange accelerated the development of capitalism in Europe.

The best way to get better at something is by practicing.

That’s why it’s so important that you take practice tests to help you get better at the AP U.S. History Exam. Only then can you expect to get a good score—and even improve your score.

Download your free AP U.S. History practice test HERE .

Download your printable study guides for all the apush topics here ..

Please read Marco Learning’s Terms and Conditions, click to agree, and submit to continue to your content.

Please read Marco Learning’s Terms and Conditions, click to agree, and submit at the bottom of the window.

MARCO LEARNING TERMS OF USE

Last Modified: 1/24/2023

Acceptance of the Terms of Use

These terms of use are entered into by and between You and Marco Learning LLC (“ Company “, “ we “, or “ us “). The following terms and conditions (these “ Terms of Use “), govern your access to and use of Marco Learning , including any content, functionality, and services offered on or through Marco Learning (the “ Website “), whether as a guest or a registered user.

Please read the Terms of Use carefully before you start to use the Website. By using the Website or by clicking to accept or agree to the Terms of Use when this option is made available to you, you accept and agree to be bound and abide by these Terms of Use. You may not order or obtain products or services from this website if you (i) do not agree to these Terms of Use, or (ii) are prohibited from accessing or using this Website or any of this Website’s contents, goods or services by applicable law . If you do not want to agree to these Terms of Use, you must not access or use the Website.

This Website is offered and available to users who are 13 years of age or older, and reside in the United States or any of its territories or possessions. Any user under the age of 18 must (a) review the Terms of Use with a parent or legal guardian to ensure the parent or legal guardian acknowledges and agrees to these Terms of Use, and (b) not access the Website if his or her parent or legal guardian does not agree to these Terms of Use. By using this Website, you represent and warrant that you meet all of the foregoing eligibility requirements. If you do not meet all of these requirements, you must not access or use the Website.

Changes to the Terms of Use

We may revise and update these Terms of Use from time to time in our sole discretion. All changes are effective immediately when we post them, and apply to all access to and use of the Website thereafter.

These Terms of Use are an integral part of the Website Terms of Use that apply generally to the use of our Website. Your continued use of the Website following the posting of revised Terms of Use means that you accept and agree to the changes. You are expected to check this page each time you access this Website so you are aware of any changes, as they are binding on you.

Accessing the Website and Account Security

We reserve the right to withdraw or amend this Website, and any service or material we provide on the Website, in our sole discretion without notice. We will not be liable if for any reason all or any part of the Website is unavailable at any time or for any period. From time to time, we may restrict access to some parts of the Website, or the entire Website, to users, including registered users.

You are responsible for (i) making all arrangements necessary for you to have access to the Website, and (ii) ensuring that all persons who access the Website through your internet connection are aware of these Terms of Use and comply with them.

To access the Website or some of the resources it offers, you may be asked to provide certain registration details or other information. It is a condition of your use of the Website that all the information you provide on the Website is correct, current, and complete. You agree that all information you provide to register with this Website or otherwise, including but not limited to through the use of any interactive features on the Website, is governed by our Marco Learning Privacy Policy , and you consent to all actions we take with respect to your information consistent with our Privacy Policy.

If you choose, or are provided with, a user name, password, or any other piece of information as part of our security procedures, you must treat such information as confidential, and you must not disclose it to any other person or entity. You also acknowledge that your account is personal to you and agree not to provide any other person with access to this Website or portions of it using your user name, password, or other security information. You agree to notify us immediately of any unauthorized access to or use of your user name or password or any other breach of security. You also agree to ensure that you exit from your account at the end of each session. You should use particular caution when accessing your account from a public or shared computer so that others are not able to view or record your password or other personal information.

We have the right to disable any user name, password, or other identifier, whether chosen by you or provided by us, at any time in our sole discretion for any or no reason, including if, in our opinion, you have violated any provision of these Terms of Use.

Intellectual Property Rights

The Website and its entire contents, features, and functionality (including but not limited to all information, software, text, displays, images, graphics, video, other visuals, and audio, and the design, selection, and arrangement thereof) are owned by the Company, its licensors, or other providers of such material and are protected by United States and international copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, and other intellectual property or proprietary rights laws. Your use of the Website does not grant to you ownership of any content, software, code, date or materials you may access on the Website.

These Terms of Use permit you to use the Website for your personal, non-commercial use only. You must not reproduce, distribute, modify, create derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, republish, download, store, or transmit any of the material on our Website, except as follows:

• Your computer may temporarily store copies of such materials in RAM incidental to your accessing and viewing those materials.
• You may store files that are automatically cached by your Web browser for display enhancement purposes.
• You may print or download one copy of a reasonable number of pages of the Website for your own personal, non-commercial use and not for further reproduction, publication, or distribution.
• If we provide desktop, mobile, or other applications for download, you may download a single copy to your computer or mobile device solely for your own personal, non-commercial use, provided you agree to be bound by our end user license agreement for such applications.
• If we provide social media features with certain content, you may take such actions as are enabled by such features.

You must not:

• Modify copies of any materials from this site.
• Use any illustrations, photographs, video or audio sequences, or any graphics separately from the accompanying text.
• Delete or alter any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary rights notices from copies of materials from this site.

You must not access or use for any commercial purposes any part of the Website or any services or materials available through the Website.

If you wish to make any use of material on the Website other than that set out in this section, please contact us

If you print, copy, modify, download, or otherwise use or provide any other person with access to any part of the Website in breach of the Terms of Use, your right to use the Website will stop immediately and you must, at our option, return or destroy any copies of the materials you have made. No right, title, or interest in or to the Website or any content on the Website is transferred to you, and all rights not expressly granted are reserved by the Company. Any use of the Website not expressly permitted by these Terms of Use is a breach of these Terms of Use and may violate copyright, trademark, and other laws.

Trademarks, logos, service marks, trade names, and all related names, logos, product and service names, designs, and slogans are trademarks of the Company or its affiliates or licensors (collectively, the “ Trademarks ”). You must not use such Trademarks without the prior written permission of the Company. All other names, logos, product and service names, designs, and slogans on this Website are the trademarks of their respective owners.

Prohibited Uses

You may use the Website only for lawful purposes and in accordance with these Terms of Use. You agree not to use the Website:

• In any way that violates any applicable federal, state, local, or international law or regulation (including, without limitation, any laws regarding the export of data or software to and from the US or other countries).
• For the purpose of exploiting, harming, or attempting to exploit or harm minors in any way by exposing them to inappropriate content, asking for personally identifiable information, or otherwise.
• To send, knowingly receive, upload, download, use, or re-use any material that does not comply with the Content Standards set out in these Terms of Use.
• To transmit, or procure the sending of, any advertising or promotional material, including any “junk mail”, “chain letter”, “spam”, or any other similar solicitation.
• To impersonate or attempt to impersonate the Company, a Company employee, another user, or any other person or entity (including, without limitation, by using email addresses or screen names associated with any of the foregoing).
• To engage in any other conduct that restricts or inhibits anyone’s use or enjoyment of the Website, or which, as determined by us, may harm the Company or users of the Website or expose them to liability.

Additionally, you agree not to:

• Use the Website in any manner that could disable, overburden, damage, or impair the site or interfere with any other party’s use of the Website, including their ability to engage in real time activities through the Website.
• Use any robot, spider, or other automatic device, process, or means to access the Website for any purpose, including monitoring or copying any of the material on the Website.
• Use any manual process to monitor or copy any of the material on the Website or for any other unauthorized purpose without our prior written consent.
• Use any device, software, or routine that interferes with the proper working of the Website.
• Introduce any viruses, Trojan horses, worms, logic bombs, or other material that is malicious or technologically harmful.
• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to, interfere with, damage, or disrupt any parts of the Website, the server on which the Website is stored, or any server, computer, or database connected to the Website.
• Attack the Website via a denial-of-service attack or a distributed denial-of-service attack.
• Otherwise attempt to interfere with the proper working of the Website.

If you use, or assist another person in using the Website in any unauthorized way, you agree that you will pay us an additional $50 per hour for any time we spend to investigate and correct such use, plus any third party costs of investigation we incur (with a minimum $300 charge). You agree that we may charge any credit card number provided for your account for such amounts. You further agree that you will not dispute such a charge and that we retain the right to collect any additional actual costs.

User Contributions

The Website may contain message boards, chat rooms, personal web pages or profiles, forums, bulletin boards, and other interactive features (collectively, “ Interactive Services “) that allow users to post, submit, publish, display, or transmit to other users or other persons (hereinafter, “ post “) content or materials (collectively, “ User Contributions “) on or through the Website.

All User Contributions must comply with the Content Standards set out in these Terms of Use.

Any User Contribution you post to the site will be considered non-confidential and non-proprietary. By providing any User Contribution on the Website, you grant us and our affiliates and service providers, and each of their and our respective licensees, successors, and assigns the right to use, reproduce, modify, perform, display, distribute, and otherwise disclose to third parties any such material for any purpose.

You represent and warrant that:

• You own or control all rights in and to the User Contributions and have the right to grant the license granted above to us and our affiliates and service providers, and each of their and our respective licensees, successors, and assigns.
• All of your User Contributions do and will comply with these Terms of Use.

You understand and acknowledge that you are responsible for any User Contributions you submit or contribute, and you, not the Company, have full responsibility for such content, including its legality, reliability, accuracy, and appropriateness.

For any academic source materials such as textbooks and workbooks which you submit to us in connection with our online tutoring services, you represent and warrant that you are entitled to upload such materials under the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law. In addition, if you request that our system display a representation of a page or problem from a textbook or workbook, you represent and warrant that you are in proper legal possession of such textbook or workbook and that your instruction to our system to display a page or problem from your textbook or workbook is made for the sole purpose of facilitating your tutoring session, as “fair use” under copyright law.

You agree that we may record all or any part of any live online classes and tutoring sessions (including voice chat communications) for quality control and other purposes. You agree that we own all transcripts and recordings of such sessions and that these Terms of Use will be deemed an irrevocable assignment of rights in all such transcripts and recordings to us.

We are not responsible or liable to any third party for the content or accuracy of any User Contributions posted by you or any other user of the Website.

Monitoring and Enforcement: Termination

We have the right to:

• Remove or refuse to post any User Contributions for any or no reason in our sole discretion.
• Take any action with respect to any User Contribution that we deem necessary or appropriate in our sole discretion, including if we believe that such User Contribution violates the Terms of Use, including the Content Standards, infringes any intellectual property right or other right of any person or entity, threatens the personal safety of users of the Website or the public, or could create liability for the Company.
• Disclose your identity or other information about you to any third party who claims that material posted by you violates their rights, including their intellectual property rights or their right to privacy.
• Take appropriate legal action, including without limitation, referral to law enforcement, for any illegal or unauthorized use of the Website.
• Terminate or suspend your access to all or part of the Website for any or no reason, including without limitation, any violation of these Terms of Use.

Without limiting the foregoing, we have the right to cooperate fully with any law enforcement authorities or court order requesting or directing us to disclose the identity or other information of anyone posting any materials on or through the Website. YOU WAIVE AND HOLD HARMLESS THE COMPANY AND ITS AFFILIATES, LICENSEES, AND SERVICE PROVIDERS FROM ANY CLAIMS RESULTING FROM ANY ACTION TAKEN BY ANY OF THE FOREGOING PARTIES DURING, OR TAKEN AS A CONSEQUENCE OF, INVESTIGATIONS BY EITHER SUCH PARTIES OR LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES.

However, we do not undertake to review material before it is posted on the Website, and cannot ensure prompt removal of objectionable material after it has been posted. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any action or inaction regarding transmissions, communications, or content provided by any user or third party. We have no liability or responsibility to anyone for performance or nonperformance of the activities described in this section.

Content Standards

These content standards apply to any and all User Contributions and use of Interactive Services. User Contributions must in their entirety comply with all applicable federal, state, local, and international laws and regulations. Without limiting the foregoing, User Contributions must not:

• Contain any material that is defamatory, obscene, indecent, abusive, offensive, harassing, violent, hateful, inflammatory, or otherwise objectionable.
• Promote sexually explicit or pornographic material, violence, or discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age.
• Infringe any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, or other intellectual property or other rights of any other person.
• Violate the legal rights (including the rights of publicity and privacy) of others or contain any material that could give rise to any civil or criminal liability under applicable laws or regulations or that otherwise may be in conflict with these Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy .
• Be likely to deceive any person.
• Promote any illegal activity, or advocate, promote, or assist any unlawful act.
• Cause annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety or be likely to upset, embarrass, alarm, or annoy any other person.
• Impersonate any person, or misrepresent your identity or affiliation with any person or organization.
• Involve commercial activities or sales, such as contests, sweepstakes, and other sales promotions, barter, or advertising.
• Give the impression that they emanate from or are endorsed by us or any other person or entity, if this is not the case.

(collectively, the “ Content Standards ”)

Copyright Infringement

If you believe that any User Contributions violate your copyright, please contact us  and provide the following information:

• An electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright interest;
• A description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed;
• A description of where the material you claim is infringing is located on the website (and such description must reasonably sufficient to enable us to find the alleged infringing material);
• Your address, telephone number and email address;
• A written statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
• A statement by you, made under the penalty of perjury, that the above information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner’s behalf.

We may terminate the accounts of any infringers.

Reliance on Information Posted

From time to time, we may make third party opinions, advice, statements, offers, or other third party information or content available on the Website or from tutors under tutoring services (collectively, “Third Party Content”). All Third Party Content is the responsibility of the respective authors thereof and should not necessarily be relied upon. Such third party authors are solely responsible for such content. WE DO NOT (I) GUARANTEE THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS OR USEFULNESS OF ANY THIRD PARTY CONTENT ON THE SITE OR ANY VERIFICATION SERVICES DONE ON OUR TUTORS OR INSTRUCTORS, OR (II) ADOPT, ENDORSE OR ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OR RELIABILITY OF ANY OPINION, ADVICE, OR STATEMENT MADE BY ANY TUTOR OR INSTRUCTOR OR ANY PARTY THAT APPEARS ON THE WEBSITE. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WILL WE BE RESPONSBILE OR LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE RESULTING FROM YOUR RELIANCE ON INFORMATION OR OTHER CONENT POSTED ON OR AVAILBLE FROM THE WEBSITE.

Changes to the Website

We may update the content on this Website from time to time, but its content is not necessarily complete or up-to-date. Any of the material on the Website may be out of date at any given time, and we are under no obligation to update such material.

Information About You and Your Visits to the Website

All information we collect on this Website is subject to our Privacy Policy . By using the Website, you consent to all actions taken by us with respect to your information in compliance with the Privacy Policy.

Online Purchases and Other Terms and Conditions

All purchases through our site or other transactions for the sale of services and information formed through the Website or resulting from visits made by you are governed by our Terms of Sale, which are hereby incorporated into these Terms of Use.

Additional terms and conditions may also apply to specific portions, services, or features of the Website. All such additional terms and conditions are hereby incorporated by this reference into these Terms of Use.

Linking to the Website and Social Media Features

You may link to our homepage, provided you do so in a way that is fair and legal and does not damage our reputation or take advantage of it, but you must not establish a link in such a way as to suggest any form of association, approval, or endorsement on our part without our express written consent.

This Website may provide certain social media features that enable you to:

• Link from your own or certain third-party websites to certain content on this Website.
• Send emails or other communications with certain content, or links to certain content, on this Website.
• Cause limited portions of content on this Website to be displayed or appear to be displayed on your own or certain third-party websites.

You may use these features solely as they are provided by us, and solely with respect to the content they are displayed with and otherwise in accordance with any additional terms and conditions we provide with respect to such features. Subject to the foregoing, you must not:

• Establish a link from any website that is not owned by you.
• Cause the Website or portions of it to be displayed on, or appear to be displayed by, any other site, for example, framing, deep linking, or in-line linking.
• Link to any part of the Website other than the homepage.
• Otherwise take any action with respect to the materials on this Website that is inconsistent with any other provision of these Terms of Use.

The website from which you are linking, or on which you make certain content accessible, must comply in all respects with the Content Standards set out in these Terms of Use.

You agree to cooperate with us in causing any unauthorized framing or linking immediately to stop. We reserve the right to withdraw linking permission without notice.

We may disable all or any social media features and any links at any time without notice in our discretion.

Links from the Website

If the Website contains links to other sites and resources provided by third parties (“ Linked Sites ”), these links are provided for your convenience only. This includes links contained in advertisements, including banner advertisements and sponsored links. You acknowledge and agree that we have no control over the contents, products, services, advertising or other materials which may be provided by or through those Linked sites or resources, and accept no responsibility for them or for any loss or damage that may arise from your use of them. If you decide to access any of the third-party websites linked to this Website, you do so entirely at your own risk and subject to the terms and conditions of use for such websites.

You agree that if you include a link from any other website to the Website, such link will open in a new browser window and will link to the full version of an HTML formatted page of this Website. You are not permitted to link directly to any image hosted on the Website or our products or services, such as using an “in-line” linking method to cause the image hosted by us to be displayed on another website. You agree not to download or use images hosted on this Website or another website, for any purpose, including, without limitation, posting such images on another website. You agree not to link from any other website to this Website in any manner such that the Website, or any page of the Website, is “framed,” surrounded or obfuscated by any third party content, materials or branding. We reserve all of our rights under the law to insist that any link to the Website be discontinued, and to revoke your right to link to the Website from any other website at any time upon written notice to you.

Geographic Restrictions

The owner of the Website is based in the state of New Jersey in the United States. We provide this Website for use only by persons located in the United States. We make no claims that the Website or any of its content is accessible or appropriate outside of the United States. Access to the Website may not be legal by certain persons or in certain countries. If you access the Website from outside the United States, you do so on your own initiative and are responsible for compliance with local laws.

Disclaimer of Warranties

You understand that we cannot and do not guarantee or warrant that files available for downloading from the internet or the Website will be free of viruses or other destructive code. You are responsible for implementing sufficient procedures and checkpoints to satisfy your particular requirements for anti-virus protection and accuracy of data input and output, and for maintaining a means external to our site for any reconstruction of any lost data. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PROVIDED BY LAW, WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE CAUSED BY A DISTRIBUTED DENIAL-OF-SERVICE ATTACK, VIRUSES, OR OTHER TECHNOLOGICALLY HARMFUL MATERIAL THAT MAY INFECT YOUR COMPUTER EQUIPMENT, COMPUTER PROGRAMS, DATA, OR OTHER PROPRIETARY MATERIAL DUE TO YOUR USE OF THE WEBSITE OR ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH THE WEBSITE OR TO YOUR DOWNLOADING OF ANY MATERIAL POSTED ON IT, OR ON ANY WEBSITE LINKED TO IT.

YOUR USE OF THE WEBSITE, ITS CONTENT, AND ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH THE WEBSITE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. THE WEBSITE, ITS CONTENT, AND ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH THE WEBSITE ARE PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS, WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. NEITHER THE COMPANY NOR ANY PERSON ASSOCIATED WITH THE COMPANY MAKES ANY WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION WITH RESPECT TO THE COMPLETENESS, SECURITY, RELIABILITY, QUALITY, ACCURACY, OR AVAILABILITY OF THE WEBSITE. WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, NEITHER THE COMPANY NOR ANYONE ASSOCIATED WITH THE COMPANY REPRESENTS OR WARRANTS THAT THE WEBSITE, ITS CONTENT, OR ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH THE WEBSITE WILL BE ACCURATE, RELIABLE, ERROR-FREE, OR UNINTERRUPTED, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, THAT OUR SITE OR THE SERVER THAT MAKES IT AVAILABLE ARE FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS, OR THAT THE WEBSITE OR ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH THE WEBSITE WILL OTHERWISE MEET YOUR NEEDS OR EXPECTATIONS.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PROVIDED BY LAW, THE COMPANY HEREBY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND FITNESS FOR PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

THE FOREGOING DOES NOT AFFECT ANY WARRANTIES THAT CANNOT BE EXCLUDED OR LIMITED UNDER APPLICABLE LAW.

Limitation on Liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PROVIDED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL THE COMPANY, ITS AFFILIATES, OR THEIR LICENSORS, SERVICE PROVIDERS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, OFFICERS, OR DIRECTORS BE LIABLE FOR DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, UNDER ANY LEGAL THEORY, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR USE, OR INABILITY TO USE, THE WEBSITE, ANY WEBSITES LINKED TO IT, ANY CONTENT ON THE WEBSITE OR SUCH OTHER WEBSITES, INCLUDING ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PERSONAL INJURY, PAIN AND SUFFERING, EMOTIONAL DISTRESS, LOSS OF REVENUE, LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF BUSINESS OR ANTICIPATED SAVINGS, LOSS OF USE, LOSS OF GOODWILL, LOSS OF DATA, AND WHETHER CAUSED BY TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), BREACH OF CONTRACT, OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF FORESEEABLE.

THE FOREGOING DOES NOT AFFECT ANY LIABILITY THAT CANNOT BE EXCLUDED OR LIMITED UNDER APPLICABLE LAW.

Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the Company, its affiliates, licensors, and service providers, and its and their respective officers, directors, employees, contractors, agents, licensors, suppliers, successors, and assigns from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, judgments, awards, losses, costs, expenses, or fees (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of or relating to your violation of these Terms of Use or your use of the Website, including, but not limited to, your User Contributions, any use of the Website’s content, services, and products other than as expressly authorized in these Terms of Use or your use of any information obtained from the Website.

Governing Law and Jurisdiction

All matters relating to the Website and these Terms of Use and any dispute or claim arising therefrom or related thereto (in each case, including non-contractual disputes or claims), shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the internal laws of the State of New Jersey without giving effect to any choice or conflict of law provision or rule (whether of the State of New Jersey or any other jurisdiction).

Any legal suit, action, or proceeding arising out of, or related to, these Terms of Use or the Website shall be instituted exclusively in the federal courts of the United States or the courts of the State of New Jersey in each case located in the County of Monmouth although we retain the right to bring any suit, action, or proceeding against you for breach of these Terms of Use in your country of residence or any other relevant country. You waive any and all objections to the exercise of jurisdiction over you by such courts and to venue in such courts. You may not under any circumstances commence or maintain against us any class action, class arbitration, or other representative action or proceeding.

Arbitration

By using this Website, you agree, at Company’s sole discretion, that it may require you to submit any disputes arising from the use of these Terms of Use or the Website, including disputes arising from or concerning their interpretation, violation, invalidity, non-performance, or termination, to final and binding arbitration under the Rules of Arbitration of the American Arbitration Association applying New Jersey law. In doing so, YOU GIVE UP YOUR RIGHT TO GO TO COURT to assert or defend any claims between you and us. YOU ALSO GIVE UP YOUR RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION OR OTHER CLASS PROCEEDING. Your rights may be determined by a NEUTRAL ARBITRATOR, NOT A JUDGE OR JURY. You are entitled to a fair hearing before the arbitrator. The arbitrator can grant any relief that a court can, but you should note that arbitration proceedings are usually simpler and more streamlined than trials and other judicial proceedings. Decisions by the arbitrator are enforceable in court and may be overturned by a court only for very limited reasons.

Any proceeding to enforce this arbitration provision, including any proceeding to confirm, modify, or vacate an arbitration award, may be commenced in any court of competent jurisdiction. In the event that this arbitration provision is for any reason held to be unenforceable, any litigation against Company must be commenced only in the federal or state courts located in Monmouth County, New Jersey. You hereby irrevocably consent to the jurisdiction of those courts for such purposes.

Limitation on Time to File Claims

ANY CAUSE OF ACTION OR CLAIM YOU MAY HAVE ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OF USE OR THE WEBSITE MUST BE COMMENCED WITHIN ONE (1) YEAR AFTER THE CAUSE OF ACTION ACCRUES, OTHERWISE, SUCH CAUSE OF ACTION OR CLAIM IS PERMANENTLY BARRED.

Waiver and Severability

No waiver by the Company of any term or condition set out in these Terms of Use shall be deemed a further or continuing waiver of such term or condition or a waiver of any other term or condition, and any failure of the Company to assert a right or provision under these Terms of Use shall not constitute a waiver of such right or provision.

If any provision of these Terms of Use is held by a court or other tribunal of competent jurisdiction to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable for any reason, such provision shall be eliminated or limited to the minimum extent such that the remaining provisions of the Terms of Use will continue in full force and effect.

Entire Agreement

The Terms of Use, our Privacy Policy, and Terms of Sale constitute the sole and entire agreement between you and Marco Learning LLC regarding the Website and supersede all prior and contemporaneous understandings, agreements, representations, and warranties, both written and oral, regarding the Website.

Communications and Miscellaneous

If you provide us your email address, you agree and consent to receive email messages from us. These emails may be transaction or relationship communications relating to the products or services we offer, such as administrative notices and service announcements or changes, or emails containing commercial offers, promotions or special offers from us.

Your Comments and Concerns

This website is operated by Marco Learning LLC, a New Jersey limited liability company with an address of 113 Monmouth Road, Suite 1, Wrightstown, New Jersey 08562.

Please contact us   for all other feedback, comments, requests for technical support, and other communications relating to the Website.

Cookie Policy

Our website uses cookies to understand content and feature usage to drive site improvements over time. To learn more, review our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy .

The Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange—the transfer of plants, animals, diseases, and ideas set in motion by European voyages across the Atlantic—marked a dramatic change in global history. Exploring this critical turning point will help students understand both the immediate and gradual consequences of the first truly global network.

In this three-day Columbian Exchange lesson plan, students will learn how new routes of exchange and the interconnection of previously isolated continents changed the world forever.

Columbian Exchange Three-Day Lesson Plan

Teaching this lesson will take approximately 50-150 minutes (one to three 50-min class periods) and will address the following objectives:

• Use the historical thinking practice of sourcing to evaluate differing perspectives of European and Indigenous American interactions.
• Assess the impact of the Columbian Exchange on communities, networks, and the environment in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas.

Lesson Length: 100-150 minutes (three 50-min class periods)

Lesson Objectives

• Asses the impact of the Columbian Exchange on communities, networks, and the environment in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas.

Lesson Description: Of course, there were complex networks of exchange in the Americas long before Columbus arrived. Yet, after the connection between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia began in the late fifteenth century, the first global network emerged. Students will learn how the exchange of goods, ideas, diseases, and people forever altered the complexity of life on Earth. The Columbian Exchange had a massive impact on the demography of the world, and students will analyze the complexity of this exchange through primary and secondary source analysis and informal writing.

Note to teachers: This lesson plan offers a suggested pathway to support the lesson objectives listed above. Based on the needs and objectives of your classroom, you may choose to substitute with the resources listed in “Additional Materials.”

The Columbian Exchange created a global network that would forever alter the world’s people, plants, and animals.

Students are introduced to the Columbian Exchange by exploring how the transfer of goods, people, disease, and ideas marked the beginning of a period of rapid cultural change. This was a network of exchange that covered almost the entire world and moved new plants and animals to new places, transforming societies and environments around the world.

• Note: If you’re tight on time, you could skip right to the Quick Opener, which should only take a couple minutes. But if you’re going to use both, use the Interactive Opener first, as the video will reveal the answers otherwise!
• Quick Opener: Columbian Exchange Intro Video : Kick off this topic by playing this one-minute video for your class. You may want to pause at points to encourage students to examine the maps, or to discuss their initial thoughts on the positives and negatives of this exchange. Finally, give your students time at the end of the video to consider how the Columbian Exchange has impacted their lives.
• Read: “ The Columbian Exchange ”: For better or for worse, Christopher Columbus’s arrival in North America led to a system of exchange that fundamentally altered the environment, economic systems, and culture across the world. For additional teaching support, including key idea reading questions, click here (log-in required).
• Activity: World Zone Café : How did the Columbian Exchange impact the food we eat? In this activity, students will create a menu that features both pre- and post-Columbian Exchange items.
• Assessment: Three-Sentence Essay Exit Ticket: To review key concepts from the materials, students will write a three-sentence summary of what they learned. Then, they’ll pair with a partner to share their summary and have an opportunity to revise before turning it in.

Additional Materials:

• Watch: “ The Columbian Exchange: Crash Course World History #23 ”
• Read “ Crops that Grew the World ”
• Read: “ Investigating the Consequences of the Columbian Exchange ”
• Activity: Columbian Exchange Timeline
• Activity: Our Interconnected World  

The Columbian Exchange transformed communities across the world. Not only foods, but also people moved as a result of this exchange—and not always willingly. Millions of Africans and Europeans ended up in the Americas, a large proportion of them enslaved or otherwise unfree. In the Americas, European conquest permanently altered life for Indigenous communities.

• Opener: What Do I Know? What Do I Want to Find Out?: In this quick warm-up activity, students have five minutes to preview the materials for the day and write one sentence describing what they think they already know about the material and one question they have. You may also choose to have a quick class discussion based on student responses.
• Read: “ Transatlantic Migration Patterns ”: Starting in the late fifteenth century, the population of the Americas changed rapidly. People moved across the Atlantic for multiple reasons, both voluntarily and involuntarily. For additional teaching support, including key idea reading questions, click here (log-in required).
• Read: Amonute – Graphic Biography : Though the facts of her life are disputed, Amonute was an important figure in the relationship between the Powhatan people and English settlers in Virginia. For additional teaching support, including key idea reading questions, click here (log-in required).
• Assessment: Quick Quiz: In this quick assessment activity, students will write two to three quiz questions they feel capture the most important information from the day. They’ll pair with a partner and take their quiz, then discuss with the class what made a good question, and why.
• Read: “ The Disastrous Effects of Increased Global Interaction ”
• Read: “When Humans Become Inhumane”
• Read: “The Transatlantic Slave Trade”
• Activity: Quick Sourcing – Accounts of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
• Read: “ Primary Sources: Accounts of the Transatlantic Slave Trade”
• Read: “Religious Syncretism in Colonial Mexico City”
• Activity: Causation – Migration

These additional materials support extended learning objectives, including:

• Assess the impact of the Columbian Exchange and transatlantic migrations on communities in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas.
• Evaluate the connection between the Columbian Exchange, the transatlantic slave trade, and the plantation system.

In 1491, no one living in Europe, Asia, or Africa knew that there were humans in the Americas, and no one in the Americas knew there were humans in Afro-Eurasia. Today, students will use primary source documents to examine different perspectives of the same historical event to create deeper insight into the effects of interconnection. Then, they’ll synthesize their learning from the lesson and respond to a writing prompt.

• Opener: A Different View : Whether in poetry, or history, it’s pretty amazing how a change in perspective can give you an entirely different view.
• Skills Activity: Sourcing - Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire : These sixteenth-century primary source documents describe the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Why did they do it? How did Indigenous peoples respond?
• Assessment: Writing Assessment: Students will use all the information they’ve learned over the past three days to write a paragraph response to the prompt: How did the Columbian Exchange create lasting change to communities, exchange networks, and the environment in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas?
• Activity: Columbian Exchange Infographic
• Read: “European Colonies in the Americas”
• Read: “Survey of Transoceanic Empires, 1450 to 1750”
• Watch: Colonization and Resistance
• Read: “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz – Graphic Biography”

Take a closer look

Supporting materials or full lesson we’ve got you covered..

Take a deep dive into our free, middle- and high school-level Columbian Exchange materials. Check out the articles, videos, and activities to support an existing lesson, or use our three-day Columbian Exchange lesson plan to explore the global consequences of this momentous event.

EXPLORE OER PROJECT LESSON PLANS

OER Project courses and lessons create curious, creative, and connected students. Our free, online resources are designed to support teachers and power amazing classrooms. Explore more of our lesson plans on a variety of topics in social studies!

Enjoying the Columbian Exchange Lesson Plan? Check out more of what we have to offer.

Big History Project

A course that asks big questions about our Universe, our planet, life, and humanity.

• Covers Big Bang to present
• Adapts for grades 6-10
• More than 50 lesson plans across 10 units
• 62 videos, 117 texts, 40 activities

World History Project

Three courses to meet your needs: Origins to Present, 1200 to Present, and 1750 to Present.

• Aligned to the vast majority of world-history state standards
• Designed for high school
• More than 30 lessons
• More than 60 videos, 180 texts, 180 activities

World History Project AP®

Designed for AP ® World History: Modern students.

• Aligned to the AP ® World History: Modern CED
• 53 videos, 233 texts, 228 activities

Access OER Project

Join OER Project to get instant access to all of our courses and materials for free with absolutely zero hidden catches.

• From the Directors
• Mission & History
• Advisory Council
• Newsletters & Brochure
• Corporate Responsibility Initiative
• Corporations, Government and Public Policy
• Digital Assets Policy Project
• Education Policy Program
• Financial Sector Program
• GrowthPolicy
• Corporate Responsibility and Citizenship Hub
• Harvard Electricity Policy Group
• Harvard Environmental Economics Program
• Harvard Kennedy School Healthcare Policy Program
• Harvard Project on Climate Agreements
• Kansai Keizai Doyukai Program
• Regulatory Policy Program
• Rising Chinese Economic Power
• Sustainability Science Program
• Seminars & Conferences
• Annual Robert Glauber Lecture
• Working Papers and Reports
• Funding & Prizes
• Other Opportunities

The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas

In this section, related publications, the economic constitution of the united states, measuring what is top of mind, paul tucker/andrew metrick: putting the lender of last resort at the center of financial stability.

The Columbian Exchange : History, Culture, and Agriculture

This essay about the Columbian Exchange explores the extensive interactions between the Old and New Worlds that transformed global civilization starting in the late 15th century. It details the agricultural impacts, cultural integrations, and the onset of global trade that came from these exchanges. The narrative also addresses the darker aspects of this period, such as disease introduction and exploitation of indigenous populations, highlighting both the cooperative and conflict-ridden aspects of human history.

How it works

Embarking on a historical journey, we uncover the vast saga of the Columbian Exchange, a complex network of transcontinental interactions that fundamentally altered the trajectory of human civilization. Initiated with the encounters between the Old World and the New World in the late 15th century, this era marked a fusion of destinies where lines of history, culture, and agriculture intertwined, producing a vibrant mosaic of diversity and transformation.

Central to this narrative, the Columbian Exchange was essentially a vast orchestration of transglobal exchanges, enabling the spread of crops, animals, and ideas across continents.

New World crops like maize, potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers traveled across the ocean to nourish and transform diets in Europe and beyond, while Old World staples such as wheat, rice, and sugarcane were introduced to new soils, altering landscapes and eating habits across the Americas. This agricultural exchange wove a complex web of food diversity that continues to sustain populations globally.

Yet, this era of exchange was not without its profound challenges. The arrival of Europeans brought with them diseases like smallpox, measles, and influenza, which devastated indigenous populations in the Americas, altering demographic and historical courses with tragic consequences that resonate to this day.

The Columbian Exchange also acted as a catalyst for cultural integration, merging European exploration with the rich cultures of the Americas. This cultural melding enriched both worlds, birthing new artistic forms, musical innovations, and spiritual practices that defied the confines of geography.

Additionally, this period ushered in an unprecedented era of global commerce, knitting together disparate parts of the world through elaborate trade networks. While precious metals, spices, and textiles circulated, enriching nations and fostering economic growth, the era was also marked by deep-seated exploitation and disparities as European powers imposed their dominance on indigenous peoples and environments.

In summary, the Columbian Exchange serves as a powerful illustration of humanity’s capacity for both profound cooperation and profound conflict. It reshaped global history, culture, and agriculture in ways that are still evident today. Moreover, it reminds us of our complicated history and the continuous need to strive for a world that is fair and sustainable for all.

Cite this page

The Columbian Exchange : History, Culture, And Agriculture. (2024, Apr 22). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/the-columbian-exchange-history-culture-and-agriculture/

"The Columbian Exchange : History, Culture, And Agriculture." PapersOwl.com , 22 Apr 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/the-columbian-exchange-history-culture-and-agriculture/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Columbian Exchange : History, Culture, And Agriculture . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-columbian-exchange-history-culture-and-agriculture/ [Accessed: 11 May. 2024]

"The Columbian Exchange : History, Culture, And Agriculture." PapersOwl.com, Apr 22, 2024. Accessed May 11, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/the-columbian-exchange-history-culture-and-agriculture/

"The Columbian Exchange : History, Culture, And Agriculture," PapersOwl.com , 22-Apr-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-columbian-exchange-history-culture-and-agriculture/. [Accessed: 11-May-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Columbian Exchange : History, Culture, And Agriculture . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-columbian-exchange-history-culture-and-agriculture/ [Accessed: 11-May-2024]

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs.

Our writers will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

Please check your inbox.

You can order an original essay written according to your instructions.

Trusted by over 1 million students worldwide

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

Home — Essay Samples — History — The Columbian Exchange — The Columbian Exchange And The Transatlantic Slave Trade In Colonial America

The Columbian Exchange and The Transatlantic Slave Trade in Colonial America

• Categories: Atlantic Slave Trade The Columbian Exchange

About this sample

Words: 1067 |

Published: Oct 25, 2021

Words: 1067 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

• Expert in: History

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

1 pages / 279 words

2 pages / 891 words

1 pages / 451 words

5 pages / 2291 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on The Columbian Exchange

The following composition states and supports the idea that the Columbian Exchange resulted in more positive effects rather than negatives in the scope of foods and diseases between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas because of the [...]

The Columbian Exchange, which occurred following the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492, facilitated the widespread transfer of plants, animals, diseases, and culture between the Eastern and Western [...]

The Columbian Exchange, which began with Christopher Columbus' first voyage to the Americas in 1492, was a transformative event in global history. It involved the widespread exchange of plants, animals, culture, and human [...]

The Columbian Exchange refers to the widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, and ideas between the New World and the Old World following Christopher Columbus' voyage in 1492. While the [...]

In the past, European nations ventured to the Americas in pursuit of empire-building and the accumulation of power. This era witnessed fierce competition among European powers, each striving to assert its dominance and enhance [...]

By the late 18th century, tensions in Colonial America were running high. Despite colonists coming to America to start anew and to escape from under British rule, the British Parliament still maintained a strong foothold over [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• Share full article

Advertisement

Watching the Protests From Israel

The israeli writer ari shavit discusses the tensions between the demands of campus activists and how israelis see the war..

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

I’ve been watching, as I imagine so many of you have, as the campus protests over Israel over what’s happening in Gaza have exploded across the news.

Clashes and arrests at colleges across the country. Demonstrations are now coming to a head.

Tonight, at University of Texas, Austin, police, one by one, detaining pro-Palestinian protesters.

In Oregon at Portland State University—

Atlanta’s Emory University—

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill—

The Fordham University’s Manhattan campus—

Texas State University and the University of Washington—

And on Long Island, students and police clashed at a protest at Stony Brook University today. An encampment was set up—

I’ve been watching police go in and clear encampments in the place I went to college at UCLA.

I’m here in New York. What is happening at Columbia has been all over the news.

More than 100 people were arrested after the school asked police to remove student protesters.

And I found it hard myself to know what to think. One reason is that protests of this size are never one thing. On the one hand, you really do hear at them people just shouting antisemitic poison.

Go back to Poland!

And on the other hand, you can go to one of them and attend a beautiful Passover seder inside the Columbian encampment.

[SINGING IN HEBREW]

And trying to think about what to make of it, whether this is a thing to cover, whether it is a distraction from the thing to cover, and I think the place I came to is that I wanted to keep an eye on power here. Who has the power to change the reality in Israel and in Gaza right now? I think there’s an implicit default in people’s thinking to some deus ex machina, some outside player, maybe America or the U.N., who can come impose some new reality.

That’s not how this works, though. Really, it’s Israel and it’s Hamas. Hamas could release the hostages. Israel could end its war or change its policies. And I think if you are listening to the protesters, the students, the idea that they really have is they’re going to influence Israel.

They want their universities to divest from Israel. They’re using media coverage to try to push Joe Biden to change his policies towards Israel. But what that means, then, is that the effectiveness of these protests in the end relies on some engagement, some sense of Israeli politics and culture.

And so I wondered, how are these campus protests being received in Israel? What are Israelis seeing? What do they make of it? When I think about Israel, I always think about this book written in 2013 by Ari Shavit, who’s a longtime political reporter there, called “My Promised Land.”

And I recommend this book to everybody. I think it is the single best book on what Israel is because it is a book that is better able than any other to hold both the idealism and violence at its heart, to take seriously both the way it was a miracle for some and a tragedy for others, to make you feel the work that went into it— this was not just given to the Israelis— and on the other hand, the dispossession that was required by it.

It’s a book that does something that not that much on this subject does, which is hold contradiction without trying to resolve it. And so I wanted to talk to Shavit, as somebody who understands Israel very deeply, about the protest movement, about the increasing tensions with Jews in the diaspora and Jews in Israel, and about Israeli politics itself, and where it goes from here, and what happens if it actually doesn’t really go anywhere from here. As always, my email, [email protected].

Ari Shavit, welcome to the show.

So good to be with you. Thank you.

So when you look at the campus protests sweeping America about Israel, what do you see?

I am deeply saddened. I’ll tell you what I don’t see. I don’t see Gandhi-like marches. I don’t see Martin Luther King kind of demonstrations. I don’t see an understanding of the profound tragedy that we are trapped in.

So if people were there marching, talking about the hostages, and talking about the 1,200 people who were slaughtered on Oct. 7, then I would deeply, deeply respect their anger, but when you see that it’s all one-sided, and when you see that it goes from legitimate criticism of Israel to a kind of obsession with hating it, then I wonder. It makes me — beyond the sadness, it scares me.

I think there is justified criticism. There is understandable criticism. And then there is vicious criticism bordering on anti-Semitism. When America was in Vietnam, there were justified anti-war marches all over. They never doubted the legitimacy of America, of the United States of America. When France was in Algeria, in Indochina, there was criticism of the entire global left. No one said that the French Republic is illegitimate.

In a way, I’m glad you brought up the Vietnam marches because I think the thing you just said there is flatly wrong. The Vietnam marches, which were right in their moral direction, were full of people who questioned the fundamental legitimacy of America, full of people who were calling for victory over and the deaths of our soldiers, full of people who did not march with love, who were not Gandhi, who were not Martin Luther King Jr. Of course, they also had marches where there literally was Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the difficult things about reading a mass protest movement is that it is never one thing. It is never, or very rarely, perfectly on message, perfectly respectable, perfectly managed. If it were, it often would not get very much coverage. And so let me agree with you that there are things at these marches that are repugnant.

And I, frankly, have very little patience myself for the way this conversation ends up endlessly circling this question of, does Israel have the right to exist? Israel exists, but many of the people at these marches do not hate Israel for being Israel. They certainly do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. These Jewish students, as I understand them— and I’ve spoken to some of them— they feel they have to choose between their political values and any kind of solidarity with the state of Israel. What do you say to them?

I would ask them, and ask even you, to make a distinction between the Israeli government, between the Israeli prime minister, and between the Israeli people and the Israeli project. I am as angry at Prime Minister Netanyahu as you are or as the young demonstrators are because Mr. Netanyahu is endangering the lives of my children.

I’m angry at the Israeli extreme right, just as you are or the young demonstrators are, because they are tainting and threatening the dream that my grand-grandparents dreamt and my grandparents and parents fulfilled in the most miraculous way.

But there is a distinction between that and the Israeli project, the Israeli state, because at the end, look, when I listened to some of this discourse, people are talking that Israel is a colonizing nation. We have been the ultimate other of white Europe for 1,500 years. We never knew where we’ll sleep next year. We will never know what will happen to us. And then we became white Europe’s ultimate victim.

So we ran away from white Europe. We were not sent by white Europe. How can you totally attack the right of a homeless people to have a home? We are not part of imperialism. We are a small persecuted people that somehow saved itself at the last moment.

And in order to prevent the death of a people, they transferred them from one continent and several continents. They revived the language. They built a society, created a state, a nation. It’s an incredible, incredible human endeavor. You don’t have to be Jewish or pro-Israeli to see that.

And when I look around, where are we compared to Australia, Canada, New Zealand — or you folks? When I see that distortion, I find it difficult to deal with, difficult, because the distortion is so extreme.

So, true— and I wrote about it, and I’m willing to talk about it— we have sinned. We made mistakes. We are in a tragedy. But to totally overlook the justice at the heart of this project and to just see the flaws and the problems, I find that a distortion.

It was interesting to me that you kept coming back to the word “distortion” here, because the word you used in your book is “contradiction.” I was looking at my notes from “My Promised Land.” I have— and you should take this as a compliment— 188 highlights in that book. It’s a lot of highlights.

Thank you very much.

I want to read you one of them, and I want to hear how it sounds to you right now. You write, “Zionism skated on thin ice. On the one hand, it was a national liberation movement, but on the other, it was a colonialist enterprise. It intended to save the lives of one people by the dispossession of another. In its first 50 years, Zionism was aware of this complexity and acted accordingly.

It was very careful not to be associated with colonialism and tried not to cause unnecessary hardship. It made sure it was a democratic, progressive, and enlightened movement, collaborating with the world’s forces of progress. With great sophistication, Zionism handled the contradiction at its core.”

I’m curious how that paragraph that you wrote sounds to you now because the thing that people are picking up on, what you’re calling the distortion, is they’re seeing one side of it has now taken over. And maybe they’re right.

It’s a wonderful question. When my great-grandparents came to Palestine, to Eretz Yisrael, they understood that we have to make it clear to ourselves and to others that we are not another colonial project, that we are not like others. And they understood that while they have a particular mission, saving the Jewish people from death, not just oppression, they have a universal mission.

The idea of the kibbutz, for example, was this combination, that on the one hand, you want to settle the land. You want to build a national project, but simultaneously, you want to contribute to the world. You have a message. By the way, that’s my understanding of Judaism. It’s not just about national entity and national existence and definitely not about power. You need the inspirational part. You need the moral dimension.

David Ben-Gurion and these people understood that. Now, we had the right to try to throw a nuclear bomb over Germany. We did exactly opposite. We signed agreements with Germany in 1952 to help us build the country. They were so much into this balance that we experienced what we experienced, but we will build. Our revenge will be to live, to bring children, to bring life. We came to death, we are surrounded by death, but we choose life. That’s the Israel I love and admire.

Sadly, decades later, we surrendered to the victimhood ethos, and we used the Holocaust, which is a horrible event, and we became more and more— we lost that balance of fighting for ourselves while seeing the others. And then we find ourselves in a place where extreme right-wing Israelis help extreme left people in America lead us all into this kind of distortion.

There is a separation that gets made there in your answer, but here, constantly, when I heard Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s speech about Israel, he was making the separation between the government and the people.

And I wonder about this, because Netanyahu has won again and again and again and again. If you are 18 and you are in college right now, he has been prime minister of Israel for almost your entire life, the vast majority of it. He has been chosen. His coalitions have been chosen. The movement right has been chosen.

And so I wonder whether there is this separation. Because when I even think of Donald Trump, he represents something. He did not just take over in a hostile boardroom maneuver. He appealed to people, and they wanted him, and they want him again, many of them.

And there is something in Netanyahu that is wanted. Now, maybe he is seen as incompetent. Maybe he is seen as a failure. But it is not clear that what has turned Israelis against him is the right-wing project so much and the callousness of it, so much as the fact that he did a terrible job managing security. Defend this cut to me.

So let’s make a distinction here, if I may, between previous years and Oct. 7 and afterwards. So if you look at the last few years or the Netanyahu decade, what you’ve seen is a terrible failure of the center left— and by the way, of the international community as well.

Because basically what happened, we asked our people— I as an active in the peace movement at the time, we asked our people to accept the two-state solution idea, the peace idea. Time after time, they voted for it. They voted for Rabin. They voted for Barack. We went to the Camp David Peace Summit in 2000— it failed. We went to the Annapolis summit in 2007— it failed. We even had a process under President Barack and John Kerry in 2014, and it failed.

We never came back to our people, saying, true, the old peace process failed. We’ve learned from the mistakes, and therefore, we offer something new and realistic that addresses the harsh realities of the Middle East. I’ll say here in brackets, my life has been— my public life— has been about the struggle between liberal and moral values and the brutality of the historic reality I live in.

So the center-left and the international community have not delivered anything to deal with the legitimate fears and concerns of Israelis, who tried the two-state solution so many times, and it failed. It caused terrible suffering for the Palestinians, it caused terrible suffering for Israelis. And then comes Netanyahu and uses these fears. So historically, in a sense, I would say, Netanyahu is not only the sin, he’s the punishment, for the failure of the center-left to bring a realistic vision.

Israelis have not become evil and crazy and racist. We have that minority in us, but it’s not the majority. The main problem is fear that was not addressed and the failure of the old peace process.

Now let’s talk about after Oct. 7. I want you to understand— and I think it’s so important— Israelis are seeing a different war than the one that Americans see. You see one war film, horror film, and we see, at home, another war film, horror film. Israelis are stuck in Oct. 7 while the world has forgot Oct. 7, nearly forgot Oct. 7.

So Israelis are totally traumatized, are totally traumatized. Each one of us knows someone who was murdered, who was kidnapped, who was terribly wounded. My wife sees terrorists coming into our garden, and it’s all over. We experienced real fear.

Now, it’s not just Jewish neurosis. It’s not just in our minds. I want to compare it to 9/11. What we experienced, number wise, it’s like 10 times or 15 times worse than 9/11. But it’s an ongoing 9/11. Imagine a 9/11 where, afterwards, Al Qaeda keeps 133— 250 at the beginning— hostages, a bit combined the Iran hostage crisis of ‘79 with Al Qaeda of 2001.

And think of the fact that the ongoing 9/11, you would have had Al Qaeda in Mexico and Iran in Canada. It’s a nightmare. It’s surreal. So if you want Israelis to replace Netanyahu, to move away from the extreme right, you have to address their fears and their legitimate fears. Once we address this, we can demand of Israelis to have much more empathy and generosity and really try peace in a new way, in a realistic way, to stop this terrible tragedy.

Let me say first that I agree with everything you just said about both the psychology and the geography of this. I often try to say to people who see it as obvious that Israel’s response has gone way too far, which I do believe, by the way, it has gone way too far, I do say, look, imagine that 9/11 was conducted by an Al Qaeda that ruled Canada and what we would have done in response. I said this over and over and over again in the podcast I did after 10/7— there is no country that would permit that kind of incursion and massacre and not respond with overwhelming force.

At the same time, I want to connect this back to what you were just saying about the peace process because one thing that I think Israelis completely disregard now is that in the background, long before 10/7, they had let themselves become the villains.

When you say that Israelis feel we tried peace, and it was not responded to, I think there’s a lot of truth to that. How much everybody tried, that there are contested narratives of these peace processes, that’s all true as well. But I do think that there were honest attempts to try to find some equilibrium that was not this. I would say that went until about 2008.

And then what happened— and I think this is the much more dominant narrative for people who have followed this and are younger here— is peace was abandoned, and the settlements kept getting built. And so it wasn’t just that the peace process failed, and then went into a state of dormancy— it was that the peace process failed, and then it was made more and more impossible year by year, that there was an active effort, the laying down of concrete, the paving of roads, the erection of buildings, to make it impossible to imagine that trade of land.

And so there’s both the genuine problem you are pointing to, the question of how can anyone in Israel feel safe if Hamas exists in Gaza, but there’s also this other question, which is, how can Israel be safe? How can it exist? How can people here support it if it allows itself to settle into this role as the occupier?

So first of all, the short answer is, if you want the Israelis to change— and I think they should— or we should— the first thing is not to hold maps of the entire land between the river and the sea, all Palestinian, and basically say that I and my daughter and my wife and my two sons have to leave and go back to Poland because this is right now what is said in campuses.

So if you want Israelis to take the risk again— and I think we must and I’ll get into that— the international community, led by America, has to hug and support democratic Israel. Beyond that, I agree. I wouldn’t use the word “villain” the way you use. But with everything else you said, I agree. So I wouldn’t say Israel is a villain, but obviously, there are Israeli villains. Just like there are American villains and European villains, there are Israeli villains.

I think it is too complex— I just want to say that I think this is a way too complex to say anybody is a villain. I’m saying that for many people, Israel came to appear the villain.

They were the stronger player.

Oh, well. The strong, we’ll get into the strong. So you know what? Let’s get to the stronger. First of all, talking of distortions, one of the great distortions here that it’s not only about Israel, is that you assume that the weak is just, and the strong is wrong.

That’s a profoundly morally flawed statement because if I’ll parachute to you into Europe of 1944 and early 1945, the Germans were very weak, and the Allies were bombing them in Dresden and other places. So if you follow that logic, that distorted logic, you’ll be pro-Nazi. So I ask everybody to get out of this. This is something that happened in our intellectual world in the last 20, 30 years. And it’s a distortion not only regarding Israel.

Point number two, Israel is not that strong. The flaw of Israel itself, they became arrogant and cocky. People did not understand how vulnerable Israel is. Regarding the Palestinians, we are stronger. But there is a larger context here. What is threatened now is the entire free world and world order. You have a Chinese, Russian, Iranian axis attacking everything we believe in, everything we believe in. We have to see the larger context. We cannot be blind.

Ezra, this is the most intimidating Jewish moment in our lifetime. It’s one of the most painful Palestinian moments in our lifetime. And it’s one of the most dangerous global moments in our lifetime. We have to wake up. This is a mega, mega, mega event. What happened on Oct. 7 was an attack on the Jewish state and the democratic state, on the Jewish people, and in many ways, on the postwar world order.

There is much, I think, that people outside Israel do not see clearly about Israel. There are things people inside Israel, I think, do not see clearly about Israel, and one of them is strength. And so one of the things that I see again and again is this effort to, then, create a much larger set of enemies to justify a deep and very understandable— I come from Jewish history, too— a deep and understandable feeling of vulnerability, of weakness, of always being on the precipice.

But I’m in America, and so what I understand, I think, better than Israelis do is what the American politics are at least right now. Iran was never going to be a threat to Israel in this war, because as soon as it began, America moved battleships into place to make very clear that if Iran joined, it would be annihilated.

When there was an attack that led to the killing of a major Iranian commander, Iran launched a drone strike that it understood— everybody understood— back and forth, this was well calibrated to be shot down. Israel did a calibrated response. Israel and Iran have been in a very calibrated series of just enough in a way to maintain their domestic politics on both sides.

The danger for Israel, which is much stronger than I think you give it credit for, in part because it is backed by the strongest military the world has ever known— it is using American bombs now. It is backed by American warships now.

And when you say that the world needs to hug Israel, it is true that protesters on college campuses are unfurling maps in which Israel does not exist. It is also true the actual president of the United States of America has wrapped Israel in a very, very, very tight hug. He has then been spat on again and again and again by Benjamin Netanyahu, which I think we probably share a view on how that’s gone.

But what would make Israel weak is the loss of that support. What would make Israel actually vulnerable is if the politics that is emerging now among young Americans becomes a dominant politics of America when they move into power, which is how things typically work.

There is this paradoxical way in which the insistence upon vulnerability and what vulnerability makes possible practical or necessary is, in the long run, it seems to me, the thing that could create real vulnerability, a sort of unwillingness to recognize how much support for Israel in the long run and the strength will depend on whether it is seen as a moral nation by the generation that is going to take power here, and that when they look at it, do not see that anymore and also do not see anybody trying to prove that to them.

So you’re preaching to the converted, but let me try to explain. First of all, let’s begin with President Biden because not enough Israelis express enough gratitude to the United States generally and specifically to President Biden.

So let me try to do my bit. I think that what President Biden did in the first three days, in the first three weeks, in the first three months of this war, was incredible. It was a heroic, realistic act of leadership, not in spite of his age, but because of his age, because he has the World War II at his background and he has the Cold War in his bones.

Now, I totally agree. And look, Ezra, I’ve been reading you. You’ve been reading me, I’ve been reading you. What you write about the three generations and their attitude to Israel is totally, totally true. I was speaking to some, in some lecture I gave in Cambridge, to some young students who were confused about Israel and the conflict.

And the older one among them came to me, and she said to me, Ari, listen, I had Rabin. I had the Oslo process. I had an Israel I could identify with and look up to. What the younger Jewish kids in the diaspora have been experiencing in the last 20 years that they are asked to defend a nation with whose values they cannot identify.

I’m not one who’s using the external threats, the Chinese, Russian and Iranian dimension, in order to run away from the Palestinian issue, not at all. Israel has to deal in a much more courageous and generous way with the Palestinian issue. And Israel is guilty of the fact that in the last 15 years, we ignored it, and it became like the elephant in the room. And then we saw what happened.

But while our commitment, our responsibility, our mission is to deal with the Palestinian issue, you have to remember that Israel is not France, not America, and not China. Israel is a small, intimidated nation. So I ask all people of good faith and decency to look at the larger picture. I’m not asking it as an excuse to ignore the Palestinian issue, in no way.

There’s this language you hear that you’re using— I’m certain I’ve used it. It’s not a criticism of the Palestinian issue. But I want to make this more direct. Palestinians, right? I mean, we talk about a battle for Israel’s soul, but the battle happening right now is in Gaza. The question right now is whether or not Israel will enter Rafah.

And one of the things that makes it hard to support what Israel is doing for me, is, I don’t believe the war aims. If you could prove to me that if you went into Rafah, this place where more than half of Gazans are now huddled, you would somehow, with the same intelligence community that could not predict 10/7, figure out exactly who is a Hamas fighter and who is a Hamas commander, and remove them, kill them, imprison them, whatever it is. And as such, then, Hamas or something like it could not reconstitute itself, and some other more moderate leadership would emerge, and negotiations for some kind of stabilization could begin— fine.

But I genuinely do not understand what the theory of this is. You talked about how traumatized Israelis are. And they are. And every single person here who forgets that or does not take it seriously has walled themselves off from understanding the issue. Everything you say about that is right, and it actually infuriates me.

But do Palestinians not feel this grief? Are they not being traumatized right now? Not just the loss of life and the loss of children in particular, but the loss of homes of livelihoods. How do Israelis imagine a people as traumatized now as the Palestinians are, not them as an issue, but them as people? What security emerges from this?

So, again, whether it’s good or bad, I actually agree with you. Mr. Sinwar is an evil genius. And Israel walked right into his trap.

The head of Hamas.

Exactly. What’s the Sinwar genius? He put Israel in a kind of lose-lose situation. Mr. Sinwar is not only willing, but he wants to sacrifice the civilian population of Gaza in order to change the minds of the hearts of the civilian population of the United States of America and turn it against Israel. And he’s using the hostages in order to break the spirit of Israeli society.

So Mr. Sinwar understands what, sadly, our generals did not understand, which is war is not only a military operation, it’s not only about tanks and planes, that if you win the war in Khan Younis, but you lose it in Harvard Square, you lost the war. You lost the war. This is exactly what Sinwar wanted.

And sadly, the way the war was waged on our side— and I think we had to do it, and we had to defend ourselves, and we had the right to defend ourselves. But we should have been much more sophisticated. It should have been clear to any person watching television or TikTok or whatever in the United States that we are fighting Hamas, we are not fighting the Palestinians. And right now, the opposite has happened.

So definitely, I oppose the Rafah. Going into Rafah is exactly what Sinwar wants. If Israel will make that mistake, it will be a decisive, tragic mistake. Mr. Netanyahu, all his life, was a Churchill wannabe. He wanted to be Churchill. Here, he has an amazing tragic opportunity to be Churchill.

But what did Churchill do? Basically, two things. One, national unity, and two, he went to America. He went to Washington. He talked to F.D.R. He convinced F.D.R. to stand by Britain. This is what we should have done.

So I’m totally with you. We should not go into Rafah. We should find a way to end the Gaza war once all the hostages are back. We have to prevent a regional war, and we have to understand what kind of danger we all face.

Here, I’m going to ask you not to speak as you, but as a reporter and as somebody who knows the Israeli political and military establishments, because this is a place where putting it all on Netanyahu is simply not true. Benny Gantz, who is the likeliest next leader of Israel, he agrees that somehow, this war is going to achieve the goals. He agrees that they should go into Rafah.

If you look at the interview that Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, just gave to one of my colleagues, he agrees this war needs to be continued. Benny Morris, the revisionist historian who has done so much to increase our understanding of the expulsion of Arabs during Israel’s war that created the state, he agrees they need to go into Rafah.

So there is a wide agreement over anything you might call, from the right to the center-left, that they need to go in Rafah, that somehow this will make Israel safer, that Hamas can be sufficiently degraded. Why do they think something so many of us seem to think is not true, which is that what Hamas is, is not an idea, not an expression of rage that will find its way out, but a military unit?

So the good news is that quite a number of leading Israeli strategists, ex-generals, serious people have been saying in the last week or two what I just told you. They said going into Rafah would be to walk into a Sinwar trap. It’s a strategic trap, and we should not go into it. So on this issue, I’m not totally lonely. I think there are other people who think— look, don’t get me wrong. I think that eventually, Hamas has to be crushed.

Look, Hamas is threatening the lives of Israelis and the liberty of Palestinians. And we all have to unite in eradicating Hamas and liberate the Palestinians. I want Gaza to be Dubai by 2040, 2050. That’s the future of Gaza. We need to bring in a coalition of moderate Arabs and moderate Palestinians. We need a Marshall Plan for Gaza.

We need to turn it to something that every young person in Gaza who is suffering so much today will have a future, will have hope, definitely food and water. But much more than that, Gaza has to be an amazing project of the international community led by the moderate and rich Arabs, who have the resources, the capability, and who know how to deal with radical religious sentiments.

So we have to do that. But we’ll have to defeat Hamas. But I’m saying right now, this thing went so wrong. There is so much suffering. There is no hope. There is no breakthrough. We have to find a way to stop the fighting, again, once all the hostages are back. All the hostages have to be back. I want every Palestinian to feel that he has more freedom, more prosperity, more hope every year while Israel’s security is not in danger.

But this gets to something that you said a few minutes ago, which is the world cannot understand what Israel will or will not do. It cannot influence what Israel will or will not do until the trauma and the fear and the grief of Israelis is taken seriously, and that if you want to be a protest movement, if you want to be a politician, if you want to be a stakeholder that is somehow influencing Israel, you have to start there. And I believe you are right, but that is also true for Palestinians.

And what I hear is this sort of jumping, right, to this sort of world where there’s nothing like Hamas. There’s an international coalition. Somehow, so much money has been poured into Gaza that maybe Israel allowed this, which seems unlikely to me, but that it now looks like Dubai.

But before you get to any of that, you have somehow done something to take seriously the trauma, the grief, the anger, the fury, the loss of Palestinians. I mean, one thing your book does very well, is, I think force people to reckon, not with 1967 and the Six-Day War, but 1948 and the violence and the loss and the expulsions of that war, how they still shape the region, how they still shape how everybody sees each other. This one is fresher, right? This is happening right now.

You are right to demand the world take your grief seriously. You are right to demand they take your fear seriously. But what does it mean to take the grief and fear of Palestinians seriously? Because that is not something not just something I don’t see Israelis doing, but I don’t see anybody even discussing that it needs to happen. And if it doesn’t happen, then I don’t understand how you think you will ever live in peace or even live in security.

Once again, I totally agree. And I really— sorry for using psychological terms or emotional terms—

No, I think we need those here.

I think the conflict, this conflict, is about history, identity, and soul and feelings and humiliation and anger and fear. This is about if you— and again, part of the failure of previous peace processes, that they had an economic dimension, strategic dimension— they never dealt with the deeper identity issues, and you have to deal with them.

Look, I understand why Palestinians would hate me because of the conflict, the tragedy of the conflict. But Palestinian leadership, Yasir Arafat, and such people, the moderates, did not care enough about Palestinians. There was the old, almost ancient stink song, I hope the Russians love their children, too. And the Russians did love their children, too. And that’s why the first Cold War ended the way it ended.

But the problem that we don’t have enough constructive forces in the Palestinian leadership who would care about their own people. There are two terrible metaphors in the tragedy of the conflict in recent years. One was suicide bombing. What was suicide bombing, which were horrible 20 years ago, 25 years ago? Suicide bombing is when your hate for your enemy is stronger than your love for yourself.

And now we have the tunnels. Now we have the tunnels. Rather than build skyscrapers of hope in Gaza, everything went into these dark, evil tunnels. Each one of us has to cure his own society from the poison and all the toxic materials of the conflict that had poisoned all of us. We’re all poisoned, OK? We’re all poisoned. We need now a process of detox that helps both Israelis and Palestinians at the same time to move forward to something that is more constructive, which you now see in the Middle East, which was not the case before.

My Palestinian hero is Salam Fayyad. Salam Fayyad is the one Palestinian leader who really tried to do nation building. So, obviously, had his grievances regarding us, and I understand it, but he tried to build something. We need out of this chaos and mess and tragedy. We need Salam Fayyad attitude combined with an MBZ attitude.

Look, the good news in the Middle East is that the first time in a century, we have Arab modernity that works and is successful. And the Emirates are like the symbol and the example for that. Because what the United Emirates are all about, it’s about moving forward, solution, not going back to the past, not getting into victimhood, but building things. So if we will have M.B.Z.-like forces, supporting Salam Fayyad-like Palestinians, I think we can begin to move forward from the agony and suffering into something that is more promising.

You say if there was something like Salam Fayyad, who was a former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, you would see a willing Israeli partner, but I had Salam Fayyad on this show a couple of months back, and people should go listen to it. And here was somebody who was doing everything you’re saying should be done, and frankly, at a better time in Israeli politics than this one.

And he had built up a lot more economic capacity within the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, where he was governing. He had built up profound security cooperation. He had exiled and expelled much of Hamas. He had made the West Bank far safer. And what he says happened is he could not get the Israelis to work with him, that they would not stop their incursions. They would not loosen the restrictions. They would not make it easier for him to build.

Salam Fayyad had all kinds of problems, but he will tell you— he told me— that, really, his biggest one was that Israel wouldn’t hold up its end of the bargain. And so there is this truth that at many points, Israel has not had a partner who could deliver peace or even maybe wanted to deliver peace.

It is also true that there have been points when the Palestinians, or at least some Palestinians, have not had an Israeli partner to deliver peace because some Israelis don’t want it. Because they want the West Bank. Because they want control. Because they want Hamas and the Palestinian Authority split because they don’t want international support shifting to the Palestinians. So there is this tension between the call for someone like Salam Fayyad and then the actual historical experience of the actual living Salam Fayyad.

So after expressing my admiration for Salam Fayyad, I don’t want to do polemics regarding him. I really admire him, and I really want him back. I really think that he and people like him are an essential part of the solution, but I’ll say two things. One, Salam Fayyad had terrible problems with corruption in the Palestinian Authority, including by Mr. Abbas, who’s leading it. They wanted him out.

The second element that I want to remind you that while Salam Fayyad was in power, we had the prime minister in Israel by the name of Ehud Olmert, who went to the Annapolis Peace Summit with George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice and offered 100% of the territory back with some territorial exchange. Ehud Olmert made the most generous, some Israelis feel, reckless offer to the Palestinians, and it was rejected.

So after it was rejected, Netanyahu was elected. Israelis became— again, they are not profoundly more right-wing, but they are more skeptical, more fearful, more— it’s more difficult to bring them. We need to find a way to get out of this vicious circle. And again, don’t get me wrong— in the last 10 years, extreme right-wing Israeli governments and with a lot of influence of the settler parties and the extreme right, Israel was not there. But the reason they were elected was the failure of over 15 years, we tried the old peace, and it failed.

One thing threaded through your book is an appreciation of tragedy and a willingness to cede your own story, Israel’s story, the story of the Palestinians is a story of tragedy. And part of tragedy is timing, that there are moments where an opening exists for something else, and they’re missed. And then there’s a moment on the other side, and it’s missed.

And something I think that that history should teach us, or force us to reckon with, is that there’s not going to be perfection here. There are not going to be perfect leaders on either side. There’s not a Palestinian Authority free of corruption. Frankly, there’s not even right now a Palestinian Authority with legitimacy. There is not going to be an Israeli polity that moves from where it is now all the way to where you are or farther than that.

And so there is this question to me of what happens if this is where we are, if the Palestinians hate Israelis even more than ever after this, whenever the after this is, if Israelis are even more terrified of the security risk of what would happen to them if you had a Palestinian state that had sufficient self-determination to become strong, because a stronger and richer and freer such a state became, the more could one day exact revenge. I think that is how a lot of people think. So what if we don’t get perfect leaders? What if we don’t even get very good leaders, which is, I think, the recent history of this conflict? What then?

Look, we are all fearful now. The worst can happen. Ezra, remember my words. The worst may happen. What Oct. 7 and whatever happened since taught us is that it’s a make or break moment. If we will let things just deteriorated, horrible, horrible, horrible things might happen in the Middle East within a few years. So it’s a moral responsibility upon all of us to get to work and to create a different path and find a different path, so we can prevent catastrophe and actually bring back some hope.

Look, human life is a tragedy. We all die. We all die. We forget that some of the time, but we all die. And you make the most of the path of the road that you have on this good Earth. So we have to take this tragedy and act in a sensible, rational, pragmatic manner in order to bring it to a better place.

There’s this 1948 essay by the philosopher Hannah Arendt called “To Save the Jewish Homeland.” And the thing she’s describing — I’ve been thinking about this essay, which people can and should read online. And there’s a lot in here. But the thing she’s discussing is that there had been a cacophony of views about Israel, about Zionism, in the Jewish community. And then came the war, the fighting, the founding. And that collapsed into unanimity.

And she thought that the unanimity was very dangerous because what was needed at the founding of Israel was to take seriously the insights of the people who thought this could go very, very badly. And she says later in that essay that if you get the Israel of pure Zionism, the Israel pure confidence, that what you will end up getting is an Israel that ends up diverging from the interests of the Jewish diaspora.

The Jewish diaspora is deeply liberal. The Jewish diaspora is exilic Judaism, as people say it. It is the Judaism of being the stranger, the Judaism of being a refugee. My friend, Spencer Ackerman, the national security reporter, said at the beginning of this war something that I keep thinking about, that he cannot think of a less Jewish thing than to make another person a refugee.

And then there is what Israel is as a state, which it has made many people refugees, but it also has the interests of a state, and states change everybody, not just Jewish people. They make you very quickly forget the lessons of being a refugee. And that wedge of values, that is the thing that I think people are beginning to recognize and people in Israel are underemphasizing how dangerous it is for them.

I couldn’t agree more. So if I may, I’ll tell you, when I wrote “My Promised Land,” the chapter I loved writing most was the chapter about the 1950s because what Israel did in its first decade of existence is the most heroic and breathtaking enterprise one can imagine. 650,000 Jews absorbed one million refugees— no, one million immigrants, of which half were, or many of them were, Holocaust survivors and other refugees from the Arab world. It’s as if America today would absorb 500 million immigrants. I understand you have a slight problem with 7 million.

So it was an incredible, incredible achievement, but what’s so impressive about it that those people who came out of Auschwitz with numbers on their arms, with nightmares at night, they never surrendered to victimhood. They never saw themselves as victims. They didn’t hate. And for me, the beauty of being Jewish, of the Jewish tradition— I’m a non-observant Jew, but I’m a very passionate Jew. The beauty is that we are a universal tribe. We are a tribe, but with a universal mission and universal commitment.

And what happened in recent decades that Israel went into the tribal, the particular, while diaspora Jews, non-orthodox, went into the universal. And again, I think we should meet again at this universal tribalism, at this beauty of a tribe being proud of our heritage, of who we are. We have rights like any others, and we should not be ashamed of ourselves. We should be proud of ourselves, but at the same time, having universal values at the core of our existence, whether in Israel or in the diaspora.

But do people in the other political movements in Israel— I understand that they think that outside Israel, we’re naive; that outside Israel, we don’t understand— and this is probably true— what it feels like to live inside this kind of danger.

But do they actually understand that if they demand that the price of supporting Israel is to give up on universalism, to give up on all these other commitments that are core to the values of at least most Western Jews— I mean, you can see what our politics are. Some people will choose Israel. I mean, there is some evidence in fact. Post 10/7— and I understand this myself— like, it has forced me to deeply reengage with Israel. There is some people who will choose Israel.

They will say, push comes to shove, the particularism is dominant in me. There are many who won’t. And you can say a lot about what is happening on campuses, and you can say a lot about what is happening at the protests.

I got an email the other day from a grad student at Columbia, and he said something to me that I’ve been hearing from a lot of students, which is that he doesn’t feel the protests are antisemitic, though they do attract anti-Semites. What he does feel is that he is being asked to choose between a kind of thoroughgoing anti-Zionism, right? A Zionism that believes Israel to be a stain that must be erased, and being a sort of social progressive on his campus in good standing. And I don’t know what choice he’ll make. I don’t know what choice a lot of people make. But do people in Israel— this is my question as a Jew living in America. Do people in Israel, the kind of people in leadership in Israel, the Benny Gantz’s of the world, do they understand that if that is the choice ultimately, that a lot of people are going to choose their politics over a country they don’t live in?

That they don’t have this memory of it as a refuge or a miracle— they have a memory of it as something that makes their day-to-day defense of who they are difficult. Because that seems to me to be what’s happening to a lot of college students right now. I don’t know what they will choose, but it appears to me to be a more significant threat to the relationship between the diaspora and Israel than people in Israel really seem to realize.

I said before, and I’ll repeat it for once, you have justified criticism of Israel because there is wrongdoing. You have understandable criticism of Israel because some things that are actually justified, but it’s difficult to understand when you don’t get the complexity. There is the vicious criticism of Israel, and there’s anti-Semitism.

And I’ll tell you where I see the line crossed. When people deny the Jewish people’s right for self-determination and when people deny the Jewish people’s right for self-defense, that’s when vicious criticism becomes anti-Semitism. That’s the new anti-Semitism. Just the way that my great, great, great grandfather was treated in his shtetl in Eastern Europe as the odd person, as the other, as the one who is not like the others, this is the way the Jewish people is treated now by many— not all, but was treated by many.

And I say no. When you come to judge Israel, you should criticize many things, but take a universal standard. You want to criticize the way we wage war? Compare it to the way America waged war in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places.

Look, I want to say I agree with you. I agree with you. And I think this point is fair. But the wedge being driven, the thing I want to push you to answer to, or at least think about here, the wedge being driven between Jewish students in Israel is not should Israel exist, do the Jewish people have a right to self-determination, but if Israel exists like this, if it is this Israel, if it keeps going down this path, is it really consistent with who you believe yourself to be to support it?

That there could be a self-determining Israel that you could support, yes, absolutely, but for a lot of us, frankly, for me, that’s not been around for 15 years. It’s easy to rebut the anti-Semite, but that’s not the thing that is going to wedge these Jews, these young Jews from Israel. The thing that is going to wedge them from Israel is actual things happening in Israel, the things that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and, frankly, Netanyahu actually say.

And so I don’t know. I worry sometimes people are— they have managed to convince themselves that if they can argue down the anti-Semites, they have solved the problem. But I think they are distracting themselves from the problem with the anti-Semites.

I don’t want this situation where it seems that Israel is in conflict with liberal America. This is unbearable for me. This is unbearable. So I think that the extreme right in Israel that speaks in the names of nationalism is destroying the nation state of the Jewish people. I think that some in the extreme right who speak in the name of Zionism endanger the Zionist project. And some in the extreme right who speak in the name of Judaism are betraying half the Jewish people.

How can extreme right and extreme Orthodox people speak in the name of Judaism and actually send away half or more than half of the Jewish people? We live in a free world, thank God. Still, I cannot expect any Jewish youngster, any young man or young girl, to stick to their Judaism and stick to their commitment to a Jewish state when that state turns its back on their values altogether. That doesn’t fly. It doesn’t work.

And I say it’s not only non-democratic and non-liberal— it’s non-Jewish. Look, talking about the Jewish mission of this time, we need to build a non-extremist Jewish coalition in the diaspora and Israel to fight the dark forces. Look, we are having a fight for— it’s a battle for Israel’s soul. It’s a real battle for Israel’s soul. We have dark forces. They are not the majority. They took over the government. They are not the majority, but they are there.

And in order to fight them, we all have to be much better than we were. We have to be much more courageous and smart politically. But we need a kind of great Jewish coalition for that. So let’s take this grave danger that we are now all aware of and deal with it.

Again, in my admiration to the Herzls and the Weizmanns and the Ben-Gurions, is, when they thought a terrible threat, they rose to the challenge. And they changed reality in an amazing way. Chaim Weizmann, one of the Zionist leaders, used to say, you don’t have to be crazy to be a Zionist, but it helps. They were a bunch of dreamers. They dealt with an impossible reality.

Today, there is so much more that we have in Israel, and you have in the diaspora. We still have more resources, more power, more energy. But we have to address this danger. And it’s a double danger. It’s a danger from without, the attacks of the anti-Semites in America and Europe and elsewhere, and the dangers of the radicals in the Middle East, and the danger from within, of losing our soul. We must not lose our soul. We have to win the battle for Israel’s soul.

I think that’s the place to end. Always our final question— what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

One of the things we need today is not only victims, but heroes, democratic heroes. So the three books about heroes that I appreciate, one is about Rosalind Franklin. And Rosalind Franklin was a scientist, happened to be a Jewish British scientist. She contributed dramatically to the discovery of the D.N.A. code. And she was intellectually dispossessed. They took away her life’s work, and she died brokenhearted at the age of 38.

And what I see in her is scientific heroism, feminist heroism. She is also family. She was my mother’s second cousin. And then a book, a biography, actually brought her resurrection, in a way. And today, she is so appreciated. So I find an element of hope in that.

The second book that I really have been reading in the year before Oct. 7 when we had all this internal struggle in Israel was Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters” about Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement. The book is beautifully written and very comprehensive, but what Martin Luther King brings us is the best of what happened in the postwar era. I think that all oppressed people in the Middle East or elsewhere, I think it’s an inspiration to fight for their rights, but within the context of universal values and the peaceful struggle.

And my third one is Truman. Truman is so dear to my heart because first of all, he was like the unlikely hero, the surprising hero. The fact that you come from the people and you serve the people, and you don’t forget that you are one of them, I find endearing.

He enabled the world of Rosalind Franklin and the world of Martin Luther King because he created the postwar, World War II order, that gave humanity its best 70, 80 years. And I really, really hope we will find the Harry Truman of our time who will deal with the amazing challenges we will face and lead us to a hopeful future.

Ari Shavit, thank you very much.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon and Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Kristin Lin. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.

The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

• May 10, 2024   •   1:02:30 This Is a Very Weird Moment in the History of Drug Laws
• May 7, 2024   •   1:04:33 Watching the Protests From Israel
• April 30, 2024   •   1:03:00 Cows Are Just an Environmental Disaster
• April 26, 2024 Salman Rushdie Is Not Who You Think He Is
• April 23, 2024   •   56:06 This Conversation Made Me a Sharper Editor
• April 16, 2024   •   49:17 A $1.7 Million Toilet and Liberalism’s Failure to Build
• April 12, 2024   •   1:33:07 What if Dario Amodei Is Right About A.I.?
• April 5, 2024   •   1:25:33 Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It?
• April 2, 2024   •   1:14:31 How Should I Be Using A.I. Right Now?
• March 29, 2024   •   1:18:30 The Rise of ‘Middle-Finger Politics’
• March 22, 2024   •   1:08:32 The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals
• March 19, 2024   •   1:03:11 Birthrates Are Plummeting Worldwide. Why?

Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

Ultimately, the Gaza war protests sweeping campuses are about influencing Israeli politics. The protesters want to use economic divestment, American pressure and policy, and a broad sense of international outrage to change the decisions being made by Israeli leaders.

So I wanted to know what it’s like to watch these protests from Israel. What are Israelis seeing? What do they make of them?

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App , Apple , Spotify , Amazon Music , YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts .]

Ari Shavit is an Israeli journalist and the author of “ My Promised Land ,” the best book I’ve read about Israeli identity and history. “Israelis are seeing a different war than the one that Americans see,” he tells me. “You see one war film, horror film, and we see at home another war film.”

This is a conversation about trying to push divergent perspectives into relationship with each other: On the protests, on Israel, on Gaza, on Benjamin Netanyahu, on what it means to take societal trauma and fear seriously, on Jewish values, and more.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App , Apple , Spotify , Google or wherever you get your podcasts . View a list of book recommendations from our guests here .

(A full transcript of this episode is available here .)

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon and Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Kristin Lin. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Lydia Polgreen, Dalit Shalom and Sonia Herrero.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .