The Columbian Exchange
Discover the Columbian Exchange — the massive transfer of plants, animals, diseases, and peoples between the Old and New Worlds after 1492 that transformed life on every continent.
The Columbian Exchange was the transfer of plants, animals, diseases, peoples, and ideas between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres following Columbus's arrival in the Americas in 1492. It was one of the most consequential events in the history of life on Earth — transforming agriculture, demographics, and ecosystems across every continent.
The Exchange moved in both directions but with profoundly unequal consequences. From the Americas to Europe, Africa, and Asia came crops that would reshape world agriculture: maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao, tobacco, and squash. The potato alone transformed European nutrition, enabling population growth that fueled industrialization. From Europe and Africa to the Americas came wheat, sugar, rice, horses, cattle, pigs, and — most devastatingly — diseases.
The disease component of the Columbian Exchange was catastrophic. Indigenous Americans, having developed in isolation for millennia, had no immunity to Eurasian diseases — smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, malaria. The resulting epidemics killed an estimated 90% of the indigenous population in the centuries following contact — perhaps 50 to 90 million people. This demographic catastrophe was the single most important factor enabling European colonization of the Americas. The labor shortage it created directly drove the Atlantic slave trade, as Europeans forcibly imported millions of Africans to work lands emptied by disease.