Columbian Exchange

This exchange of plants and animals transformed European, American, African, and Asian ways of life. Foods that had never been seen before by some peoples became staples. For example, before 1492 no potatoes were grown outside of South America. By the 1800s, Ireland was so dependent on the potato that a shortage lead to the devastating Irish Potato Famine. The first European import, the horse, changed the lives of many Native American tribes on the Great Plains, allowing them to shift to a nomadic lifestyle based on hunting bison on horseback. Tomato sauce, made from New World tomatoes, became an Italian trademark, while coffee and sugarcane from Asia became the main crops of extensive Latin American plantations. Before the Columbian Exchange, there were no orangess in Florida, no bananas in Ecuador, no rubber trees in Africa, no cattle in Texas, no burros in Mexico, and no chocolate in Switzerland. Even the dandelion was brought to America by Europeans for use as an herb. Before regular communication had been established between the two hemispheres, the varieties of domesticated animals and infections diseases were both strikingly larger in the Old World than in the New. This led, in part, to the devastating effects of Old World diseases on Native American populations. (See article: Population history of American indigenous peoples)

Scarcely any society on earth remained unaffected by this global ecological exchange. Since the voyages of Columbus and his successors, no kitchen or garden has ever been the same.

Pre-Columbian distribution of organisms with close ties to humans
Type of organism	Old World list	New World list
Domesticated animals	dog fowl (several species) camel horse donkey pig cattle goat sheep	dog fowl (a few species) llama alpaca guinea pig
Domesticated plants	cotton rice wheat barley oats rye turnip onion cabbage lettuce peach pear sugar	cotton maize (corn) potato sweet potato manioc peanut tomato squash (incl. pumpkin) pineapple papaya avocado chocolate rubber
Infectious diseases	the treponematoses (a category including syphilis) tuberculosis smallpox malaria yellow fever measles cholera typhoid bubonic plague	one or more of the treponematoses (a category including syphilis) tuberculosis (possibly) Chagas' disease

See also