On the Columbian Exchange

I read this book for the first time some four years ago, and I figured that it was about time I re-examine it. Crosby’s work here is astounding—it was ignored at the time for being “not history,” but it very much foresaw the transformation in scholarship that took place in the 1970s and 1980s with the development of environmental history. Crosby’s argument is a big one, but it is now so widely understood and accepted that if you refer to “the Columbian Exchange” in conversation with any historian, they will know exactly what you’re discussing. Crosby’s argument is essentially that both the Old and New Worlds were transformed by more than “mere” colonization or settlement; rather, linkages between the eastern and western hemispheres fundamentally reshaped the biogeography of the planet. Potatoes, maize, syphilis, tomatoes, and tobacco made their way east across the Atlantic, while smallpox, onions, horses, cattle, sheep, and rice made their way west. Diseases ravaged indigenous American populations in particular, although the destruction of Native American societies cannot wholly be attributed to disease (at its most destructive, smallpox caused an approximately 30% mortality rate, much of the rest was killed in war, through famine, or through the level of displacement that came with colonization). At the same time, cuisines were transformed, as well as the economic impact of livestock (both for logistics like transportation and the nutritional value of new food sources).

My two main criticisms of the book are ones that Crosby is familiar with, so it doesn’t make sense for me to spend too much time on them here. The first is that the chapter on syphilis doesn’t really belong. While syphilis was important in early modern Europe, and although it does look like it has its origins in the Americas, the chapter on syphilis is more an attempt to balance Crosby’s discussions of smallpox. As he points out in the preface to the new edition, syphilis was hardly “Moctezuma’s revenge”—if “Moctezuma’s revenge” can be said to exist, it’s through the spread of tobacco throughout the world. My other criticism is the lack of attention given to Africa and Africans by Crosby. While he’s right that African historiography was in its infancy at the time he first published this work, there was already a fair amount of scholarship on the African diaspora, and it’s likely that he could have drawn more upon that.

The contents of this book are now received wisdom and it isn’t strictly necessary to make sense of the transformations brought about by contacts between Europeans and American Indians after Columbus’s expeditions. Nevertheless, if a reader is looking for a starting point to begin reading about environmental history or about the environmental impacts of 1492, they could do much worse than to start here.