What Are The Effects Of The Columbian Exchange

The exchange between living organisms from the west to the non western world started with Christopher Columbus. In 1492 he set sail in order to reach China or Japan through the Atlantic Ocean. However, he landed in North America and created a connection between the Americas and Afroeurasia. “Historians conventionally call this period the early modern era. We use this term to signal the magnitude of changes taking place between 1450 and 1750” (Dunn 452). The Columbian Exchange is responsible for a majority of the living organisms which were transferred through the transoceanic passages. The exchange opened the world to a global economy for the first time. The arrival of Europeans to America brought diseases never seen before to the native
With such an influx of Europeans to the Americas, land was taken over but there were not enough people to man the farms which were to grow the crops. The needed workforce had millions of African slaves brought to the Americas. However, the brutal journey to the new world killed many on the way due to the horrendous conditions aboard the boat. A majority of slaves were brought to the Caribbean islands or Brazil. Africans were sold or traded as slaves by their own people for profit or personal gain. The Africans would capture other Africans and trade them to the Europeans. Slaves were seen as personal property. Once in America the slaves were sold and bought to slave owners. Most slaves worked as agricultural laborers on farm lands. These farms suddenly had the demand for crops such as sugar and now the farm owners (plantation owners) had the labor to harvest the land. Slaves often would reproduce and the slave owners of the parents had the right to do with the new baby as they pleased. They could either sell the kid to somebody else or use the kid as a labored slave. This powerful notion shows that people believes slavery was Hereditary and that one could be born into slavery based on their
Slaves were the cheapest form of labor a company owner could ask for which was one of the benefits of slavery. One of the drawbacks of slavery is that it brought brutality to society. The cruelty went from rapping the slaves to whipping them in order to dehumanize them.
The Spanish ruled part of Latin America and used the goods and crops sold out of there by implementing high taxes. These taxes were the revenue for the Spanish Crown to do with what they pleased. There was also the Patriarchy. This meant that women had little to any rights such as voting or owning land. They were essentially owned by their husbands. The Catholic Church also had much power over the Latin world. With new people coming to the new world, it brought with them a more diverse pool to breed from. This lead to large amounts of cultural blending between Peninsulares, African Slaves, Native Americans and the Creoles. The mixture of all these different peoples caused levels of social hierarchy. It also lead to much cultural diversity from new food to