BIOLOGICAL EXCHANGE IMPACT-FOOD
- Europeans tried to recreate familiar eatinghabits but crops (like wheat) couldn’t growin tropics
- Without grapes and wheat–what don’t wehave?
- Started to assimilate local foods (maize/cornand cassava)
BIOLOGICAL EXCHANGE IMPACT–COLONIAL CROPS
- Plantations to take advantage of tropicalgrowing season
- sugar, cotton, rice, indigo, tobacco, coffee
- This drove use of slave labor
“If the Europeans had arrived in the New World andAustralasia with twentieth-century technology in hand,but no animals, they would not have made as great achange as they did by arriving with horses, cattle, pigs,sheep, asses, chickens, cats, and so forth. Because theseanimals are self-replicators, the efficiency and speedwith which they can alter environments, evencontinental environments, are superior to those for anymachine we have thus far devised”
-Alfred Crosby,Ecological Imperialism, p. 173
BIOLOGICAL EXCHANGE IMPACT–ANIMALS
- Europeans tried to recreate familiar eating andcommercial habits
- Let animals loose to procreate: these animals devastatedlocal eco-systems
- Pigs at local plants, cattle/sheep/goats compacted soil
- Many went wild after early years, but cattle on the plainsand cheap pork fed Europeans and slave labor
DISEASE
- Tied to population and climate
- This keeps diseases where the population or theclimate is best: people move, so do diseases
- People who aren’t exposed to certain diseases orhave low genetic variation (from geographicalisolation) are more vulnerable