Disease In The Columbian Exchange

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Disease and epidemics have challenged the human population for millennia. How has disease in the Columbian Exchange affected the Americas? The question is not if disease was transferred from Europe to the Americas, but rather, what were the effects of those diseases on the Americas. “When the isolation of the New World was broken, when Columbus brought two halves of this planet together, the American Indian met for the first time his most hideous enemy: not the white man nor his black servant, but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath” (Crosby 31). Europe easily began to conquer the Americas in 1492 by having superior materials, using the lack of unity in the Indigenous American groups to their advantage, …show more content…
In addition to diseases that weakened the native peoples, Europeans were able to conquer those native cultures through greater technologies such as steel, firearms, cannons, and horses, differences in beliefs, and new trade goods (Crosby 35). These European advantages enabled the weakened native cultures to be engulfed by European cultures. European people astonished native people in combat and everyday life with their technologies, inducing native cultures to be taken off-guard and more easily defeated. Differences in beliefs also led to European displacement of native cultures. For example, many native cultures believed in passing their ways of life down to future generations through word of mouth, clashing with the Europeans belief in passing down important information through written word. Many cultures native to the Americas were animistic, believing in the value and spirits of the universe, nature, plants, animals, stars, ancestors, and constellations. However, the Europeans believed in one God creating and having dominion over all that the native cultures believed in. These differences in beliefs, among both groups possessing ethnocentrism, led to disagreements where the Europeans triumphed. These differences causing belligerence, amongst disease, granted Europeans domination over …show more content…
“I saw neither sheep nor goats nor any other beast, but I have been here but a short time, half a day; yet if there were any I couldn’t have failed to see them…. There were dogs that never barked…. All the trees were as different from ours as day from night, and so the fruits, the herbage, the rocks, and all things” (Columbus 72-73, 84). Christopher Columbus, upon coming in contact with the New World, immediately saw major differences in plants and animals in the Americas. On Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas in 1493, he brought horses, dogs, pig, cattle, sheep, chickens, and goats (Crosby 75). These populations of imported domesticated animals increased due to few predators, a plethora of grass and roots to feed upon, and miniscule amounts of American diseases that affected them (Crosby 75). Their numbers caused extinction of indigenous plants, animals, and peoples. The imported domesticated animals ate indigenous plants and were predators to native animals. This caused a lack of food for native peoples, allowing for heightened amounts of disease as a result of malnutrition and possible changes in the native peoples’ diet. In addition, native plants were also further on the route to extinction because, as Crosby describes it, “Europeans vastly enhanced their own ability to to
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