Abstract
The Columbian Exchange had profound influences on world agriculture and population growth. The geography of world crop production is very different today than in 1492. There is hardly anywhere in the Old World where Mesoamerican maize is not of great importance, and the Andean potato become an important source of calories in Europe, Southeast Asia, and China. The South American manioc and sweet potato became critical food sources across the entire tropics. Old World wheat and rice are now widely grown across all of the Americas. Mesoamerican chili peppers very quickly became a critical component of Indian, African, and Southeast Asia cuisine. The Mesoamerican guava and the South American papaya are so prevalent across the tropics of the world that it is hard to believe they did not originate there. Not only did the Columbian exchange have a profound impact on world crop distribution, but it also had a great effect on the distribution of the world’s population. There were at least 60 million people in North, Central, and South America before the first European contact in 1492 and by the 1600s probably 56 million had died from diseases brought by the Europeans. This Great Dying and the forced removal of the indigenous people of North America, combined with the influx of migrants from Europe and slaves from Africa, generated a population in the Americas that was largely foreign in origin. While the population of the Americas dropped after the great encounter, the arrival of the American crops in the Old World likely fueled a population boom—between 1750 and 1850, the population of Europe and the world almost doubled.
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Department of Horticulture, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
James F Hancock
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Hancock, J.F. (2022). Five Hundred Years After the Great Encounter. In: World Agriculture Before and After 1492. Springer, Cham. //doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15523-9_10
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DOI: //doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15523-9_10
Published: 12 November 2022
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