What Are The Causes Of The Columbian Exchange

CHAPTER 17&18 OUTLINE STUDY GUIDE
Bryan Marchena
I.
The Columbian Exchange and its Effects

A. Cultural Diversity

1. The peoples of the New World lacked immunity to diseases from the Old World. Smallpox, measles, diphtheria, typhus, influenza, malaria, yellow fever and maybe pulmonary plague caused severe declines in the population of native peoples in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Syphilis was the only significant disease thought to have been transferred from the Americas to Europe.
2. Similar patterns of contagion and mortality may be observed in the English and French colonies in North America. Europeans did not use disease as a tool of empire, but the spread of Old World diseases clearly undermined the ability of
After 1713 Spain’s new Bourbon dynasty undertook a series of administrative reforms including expanded intercolonial trade, new commercial monopolies on certain goods, a stronger navy, and better policing of the trade in contraband goods to the Spanish colonies. These reforms coincided with the eighteenth-century economic expansion that was led by the agricultural and grazing economies of Cuba, the Rio de la Plata, Venezuela, Chile, and Central America.
2. The Bourbon policies were detrimental to the interests of the grazing and agricultural export economies, which were increasingly linked to illegitimate trade with the English, French, and Dutch. The new monopolies aroused opposition from creole elites whose only gain from the reforms was their role as leaders of militias that were intended to counter the threat of war with England.
3. The Bourbon policies were also a factor in the Amerindian uprisings, including that led by the Peruvian Amerindian leader José Gabriel Condorcanqui (Tupac Amaru II). The rebellion was suppressed after more than two years and cost the Spanish colonies over 100,000 lives and enormous amounts of property damage.
4. Brazil also underwent a period of economic expansion and administrative reform in the 1700s. Economic expansion fueled by gold, diamonds, coffee, and cotton underwrote the Pombal reforms, paid for the importation of nearly 2 million African slaves, and underwrote a new wave of British
There were no sizeable states—and no large-scale wars—in the interior of the Bight of Biafra; kidnapping was the main source of people to sell into slavery. African traders who specialized in procuring people for the slave trade did business at inland markets or fairs and brought the slaves to the coast for sale.
2. In the Portuguese-held territory of Angola, Afro-Portuguese caravan merchants brought trade goods to the interior and exchanged them for slaves, whom they transported to the coast for sale to Portuguese middlemen, who then sold the slaves to slave dealers for shipment to Brazil. Many of these slaves were prisoners of war, a byproduct generated by the wars of territorial expansion fought by the federation of Lunda kingdoms.
3. Enslavement has also been linked to environmental crises in the interior of Angola. Droughts forced refugees to flee to kingdoms in better-watered areas, where the kings traded the grown male refugees to slave dealers in exchange for Indian textiles and European goods that they then used to cement old alliances, attract new followers, and build a stronger, larger state.
4. Although the organization of the Atlantic trade varied from place to place, it was always based on a partnership between European traders and a few African political and merchant elites who benefited from the trade while many more Africans suffered from