The Columbian Exchange was the term for the exchange of plants, weapons, animals, and diseases between the Old World and the New World. Their meeting with the Native Americans brought greater changes. The Europeans greatly benefitted from it, while the Native Americans were devastated. The Old World traded llamas and the New World brought horses, pigs, cattle, and sheep, they influenced new uses of land. The Europeans gave sugar, rice, wheat, coffee, bananas and grape and received crops such as corn, tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco, cacao, beans and cotton from the Americans. This ensured that they’d never run out of food due to the increase in agricultural sources. The Columbian Exchange also benefitted people economically. Activities such as Texas cattle ranching, Brazilian coffee growing was not possible without the Columbian Exchange. Traditional cuisines also changed …show more content…
Colonization started to change and towns cities grew as business activity increased. New class of wealthier merchants emerged and began to wield more power in their towns. The rural life did not change much, no one felt the impact of colonization and continued as it did. Many years passed before they started to grow the food that they received from the Americans.
The diseases from Europe were mostly spread by air or by physical touch. Smallpox, measles, chicken pox, bubonic plague, scarlet fever and the flu were the most common diseases exchanged. It was considered punishment for a sin to catch a disease, but the Native Americans didn’t have any natural resistance to the diseases so their population decreased from 2 million to 500,000 while the Inca Empire went from 13 million people to 2 million. Europeans needed to labor to cultivate new crops but there weren’t many natives left so they set of to Africa and began importing slaves to America.
Mercantilism was based off of basic