The Columbian Exchange

Assembled from 24 blocks · 2 evidence · 35 related

1. Story
2. The transfer of organisms — crops, livestock, weeds, pathogens and people — between hemispheres that had been biologically separated since the flooding of Beringia, and the organising concept of this Journey since Alfred Crosby named it in 1972. It ran in both directions and it did not run symmetrically. Westward went wheat, barley, sugar cane, coffee, bananas, citrus, and above all the large domesticated animals the Americas lacked: cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and horses, which transformed American landscapes and, in the case of the horse, remade the societies of the Great Plains and the Pampas within a few generations. Eastward went maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, tomatoes, chillies, beans, squash, cacao, tobacco and quinine — a set of crops that, crucially, tolerate ground that Old World staples cannot use, and so added calories rather than merely substituting for them. And westward also went the epidemic diseases of Eurasia, which is the limb of the exchange that killed. The framing's value is that it makes the period legible as biology and not only as politics; its limitation is that "exchange" is a mild word for a transfer in which one side received food and the other received epidemics.
3. Knowledge
4. The Atlantic crossing (Carrera de Indias)
5. The Columbian Exchange
6. Connections
7. Silver
8. The Atlantic crossing (Carrera de Indias)
9. Potato (Solanum tuberosum)
10. Maize (Zea mays)
11. The post-contact population collapse of the Americas
12. Maize appears in Chinese local records
13. A documented consignment of potatoes reaches Europe
14. The Atlantic wind and current system
15. Volta do mar (the return by sea)
16. Seville
17. Casa de Contratación (House of Trade), Seville
18. The Columbian Exchange
19. Columbus makes landfall in the Bahamas
20. The Treaty of Tordesillas divides the ocean
21. The Casa de Contratación is established at Seville
22. Evidence
23. Establishes the biological framing of post-1492 contact — crops, livestock and pathogens moving between hemispheres — used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: this session had no outbound network access (WebFetch blocked by egress policy, WebSearch budget exhausted), so the book was not consulted; the citation is given from the author's knowledge and the work is a standard, widely held title that a curator can verify in any research library catalogue.
24. Supports the reconstruction of pre-contact American population, the scale of post-contact decline, the area of farmland abandoned and the resulting drawdown of atmospheric CO₂. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session — no network access was available. The Journey declaration itself cites this paper as "Quaternary Science Reviews 207, 13", which corroborates the volume but is not independent confirmation. Every figure this pack attributes to it is flagged in the citing object's `missing` list as requiring a check against the paper.