#166 Introduction to the Columbian Exchange (Revised)
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 12 October 2024
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In recognition of the holiday(s),* this is a revision of one of the podcast’s earliest episodes, Introduction to the Columbian Exchange. The “Columbian Exchange” refers to the interhemispheric transmission of diseases, food crops, populations, cultures, and technologies in the years after Columbus’s famous First Voyage. The term was invented in 1972 by the famous biological historian Alfred W. Crosby Jr. of the University of Texas at Austin. The original episode focuses on the impact of diseases and crops that moved from one hemisphere to the other following 1492. It is replete with interesting factoids!
The revisions include thoughts on the human consequences, including to the indigenous peoples of the Americans and Africans swept up in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and how we might think about it now.
*I think you know what I’m saying here. To each his own.
Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30th Anniversary Edition
Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650
Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas”
University of Zurich, “Syphilis May Have Spread Through Europe Before Columbus”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 166. |
| 0:11.4 | I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on October 11th, 2024, in Princeton, New Jersey. |
| 0:20.0 | We're telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United |
| 0:23.2 | States from the beginning without intentional presentism. This episode's a revision of one of the |
| 0:30.0 | earliest episodes of the podcast, Introduction to the Columbian Exchange, which originally |
| 0:36.6 | aired on February 12th, 2021. There aren't a huge |
| 0:41.6 | number of substantive changes, and those are mostly at the end when I indulge in a few |
| 0:46.7 | speculations and petty editorializing in the spirit of the holiday, whether in recognition |
| 0:52.6 | of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea or Indigenous |
| 0:55.6 | peoples. In either case, it should be especially fun for people who, like me, love random |
| 1:02.1 | factoids best deployed when shooting the breeze over beers. In 1492, the entire human population of the planet was probably between 450 and 600 million people. |
| 1:17.8 | The gap in the estimate explained in part by the still unresolved controversy over the pre-Columbian population of the Western Hemisphere. |
| 1:33.0 | We do know that by 1500, the population of Europe had not grown on a net basis since 1300. There was plenty of hunger in most places outside of the Western Hemisphere, |
| 1:39.7 | and every reason to believe that humans in the eastern hemisphere had reached something of a limit in |
| 1:44.8 | their capacity to grow or capture calories faster than their requirements for them. |
| 1:51.4 | On the super cool website, our worldendata.org, one can find a graph of obviously estimated human |
| 1:59.6 | population from 10,000 BC to the projected population |
| 2:05.1 | in 2100. Per the weirdly precise figures on that site, which apart from their faux precision, |
| 2:13.1 | look pretty plausible, from Common Era Year 0 to 1500, obviously just after Columbus's first three |
| 2:22.0 | voyages, the world's population grew from 188.24 million people to 461.37 million. The hour, |
| 2:33.0 | world, and data people seem to be low counters regarding the Western |
| 2:37.2 | Hemisphere population. That is a compounded annual growth rate of just under six hundreds of a |
... |
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