COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE

A term used to describe a historical process that occurred over several centuries and the legacy of which continues to reverberate to the present day (but which in its ubiquity we take for granted and in terms of its full macrohistorical impact is probably unfathomable). Yet, it was a process whose beginning had a very precise date and place: October 12, 1492, Hispaniola (signifying, to put it differently, the date and place of the inadvertent arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Bahamas). It was a process marked by both triumph and tragedy—involving, over the centuries, a human-engineered planetary interchange of peoples, cultures, and ideas on one hand, and simultaneously on the other, plants, animals, and microorganisms—which was inadvertently inaugurated by the Columbian Project that would link together the three continents of Africa, the Americas, and Eurasia and which may be described as globalization.

Today, because of the Columbian Exchange, hot peppers are grown in China, tomatoes are an integral part of Italian cuisine, chocolate is consumed by the ton in Europe, apples are common in the United States, corn and cassava are staples of many communities in Africa, and we associate beef with Argentina and the music jazz is played worldwide. Crops such as tobacco, cotton, sugar, potatoes, and bananas that would play such a pivotal role in the socio-economic transformation of both Europe and the Americas were part of the Columbian Exchange. Plus, of course, because of the Columbian Exchange, millions of peoples native to the Americas perished from diseases, brought by foreign usurpers of their lands, to which they had no immunity. At the same time, in addition to Native Americans, representatives of virtually every culturally diverse human grouping on this planet (races and ethnicities)—from Arabs to the Chinese, from Europeans to Africans—can be found in the Americas today; heirs to a brutal and violent blood-soaked process of mass-killings, dispossession, colonization, and enslavement that also accompanied the Columbian Exchange. Moreover, the Columbian Exchange sowed the seeds of the industrial revolution (and its corollary industrial capitalism—the successor to merchant capitalism---which among its many social consequences pauperized millions of Europeans, forcing them to migrate to other lands, as the European feudal system was dismantled, often by means of force and violence).