Unit 4.3: Columbian Exchange

African presence in the Americas

African cultures were not completely lost once captives arrived in the Americas. In fact, during the African Diaspora, enslaved Africans returned some aspects of their culture. Languages: With a few exceptions, Africans were not able to trasplant their languages to the Americas. Since captives were taken from myriad African cultural groups, most did not share a common language. They found it difficult, if not impossible to communicate en route. Because of their linguistic isolation in the ships and in the Americas, most Africans lost their languages after a generation. In spite of this forced isolation from their cultures, West Africans managed to combine European colonizers' languages (English, Spanish, French or Portuguese) with sorts of their West African languages and grammatical patterns to create new languages known broadly as creole. Because the Caribbean islands had larger concentration of enslaved Africans than did North America, creole languages dominate there even today. In the United States, which had a smaller percentage of Africans in comparison to the total population, few examples of creole languages exist. Music: Africans brought their music with them. The syncopated rhythms and percussion they used influenced later styles. One reason many African descendants maintained their musical traditions was because enslaved Africans in America used them as a means of survival, singing tines from home to help them endure long workdays as well as to communicate with other slaves such as when planning an escape. They blended European Christian music with their own religious songs known today as Negro spirituals— essential element of African folk music history. Enslaved people also invented the banjo, which is very similar to string instruments found in West Africa. In addition to rice and okra, Africans bright their knowledge of how to prepare these foods. The dish known as gumbo, popular in the southern United States has roots in African cooking. With influences on lnaguage, music, food and much more, African culture has had a profound and lasting impact on life in the Americas.

Environmental and Demographic Impact

Contact between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas brought dramatic changes to both. Most changes resulted from the Columbian Exchnage. In addition though, Europeans used agricultural land more intensively than did American Indians. For example, colonists cut down trees to clear areas for planing crops, and they created large fields that they cultivated year after year. As a result, deforestation and soul depletion became problems in the Americas. In addition, Europeans often lived in more densely populated immunities than did American Indians. This increased the train on water resources and created more concentrated areas of pollution.

Animals and Food

Germ and disease transmissions were only one part of the Columbian Exchange. Another major component of the Exchange was the sharing of new crops and livestock in both directions. Before the Exchange began around 1500, Mesoamerican peoples consumed very little meat. Although contemporary Mexican food sold in the United States is reliant on pork, beef and cheese, the indigenous people of Mexico knew nothing of pigs or cows until Europeans introduced them. These animals, along with the Mediterranean goods such as wheat and grapes were introduced to the Western Hemisphere and eventually became staples of the American diet. Another domesticated animal the Europeans brought to the Americas, the horse, transformed the culture of the American Indians living in the plains region. With the arrival of the horse, Indian could hunt buffalo on horseback so efficiently and over a large region that they had a surplus of food. That efficiency gave them more time for other pursuits such as art and spirituality. However competition and even armed conflict among tribes increased with those having horses having the most power. At the same time, European explorers took back Mesopotamian maize, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, peppers and cacao to their home countries, where people started to grow them. Potatoes became so popular in Europe that they are often thought of being native to certain regions such as Ireland. The introduction of these vegetable crops caused tremendous population growth in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Cash crops and forced labor

People themselves also became part of the exchange. The coerced arrival of enslaved Africans to the Americas brought biological and demographic changes. For example, Africans brought okra and rice with them to the Americas. Tobacco and cacao produced on American plantations with forced labor were sold to consumers in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Even thigh slave traders kidnapped millions of Africans from their homelands, populations actually grew in Africa during the 16th and 17th centuries. That population growth happened because of the nutritious foods that were introduced to the continent. Yams and manioc, for example were brought to Africa from Brazil. While Spain and Spanish America profited from silver, the Portuguese empire focused its endeavors on agriculture. Brazil, the center of the Portuguese empire with its tropical climate and large tracts of land, was perfect for sugarcane cultivation. As disease had decimated the indigenous populations however, there were not enough laborers available to do the cultivation. Moreover, many of the people who were forced to labor in the sugar fields escaped to the uncharted Brazilian jungle. In response, the Portuguese began to import enslaved people from Africa especially from the Kongo Kingdom and cities of the Swahili Coast. Slavery: Sugar's profitability in European markets dramatically increased the number of Africans captured and sold through the transatlantic space trade. Sugar cultivation in Brazil demanded the constant importation of African labor. African laborers were so numerous in Brazil that their descendants became the majority population of the region. Slave importers sent more than 90 percent of slaves to the Caribbean and Soith America only about 6 percent of slaves went to British North America. Until the mid 1800s, more Africans than Europeans went to the Americas. Slaves often died form backbreaking working conditions, poor nutrition, lack of adequate shelter, tropics heat and the diseases that accompanied such heat. Sugar plantations processed so much sugar that they were referred to as engenhos, which means engines in Portuguese. Because of the engenhos' horrible working conditions, plantation owners lost form 5 to 10 percent of their labor force every year. Growing cash crops: the Spanish noticed Portugal's success with plantation agriculture and returned to the Caribbean to pursue cash crop cultivation such as sugar and tobacco. Cash crops are grown for sale rather than subsistence. Soon, sugar eclipsed silver as the main moneylender for the European empires.

Diseases and Population Catastrophe

Until the arrival of Columbus, the peoples of the Western and Eastern Hemishpere had been almost completely isolated from each other. For that reason, the indigenous people of the Americas had no exposure— and therefore no immunity— to the germs and diseases brought by Europeans. Although European horses, gunpowder and meta weapons helped conquer indigenous Americans, disease was responsible for the majority of deaths. Spanish soldiers called conquistadors such as Francisco Pizarro and Hernan Cortes brought smallpox with them. Smallpox pathogens are spread through the respiratory system. When Europeans who were largely immune after millennia of exposure in Afro-Eurasia, had face to face contact with indigenous populations, they infected these populations with the deadly disease. As colonists began to settle in the Americas, so did insects, rays and other disease-carrying animals. Measles, influenza and malaria, in addition to smallpox, killed more than 50 percent of the indigenous population in less than a century. Some American lands lost up to 90 percent of their populations. It was one of the greatest population disasters in human history.