Columbian Exchange Effects

The Columbian Exchange transferred numerous European aspects to the Americas that would radically alter all of the undeveloped countries that were to be affected. This exchange introduced new plants, animals, culture, people, technology, ideas, diseases, and religions to these newly found countries. Although the countries that engaged in the Columbian Exchange found a profit, they also brought devastation to the native people. The Columbian Exchange adversely affected the New World as with the gross mistreatment of its people and brought the native population to a fraction of what it was previous to this event. The Spanish colonizers quickly realized how much more developed they were in comparison to the natives and could use that to their
advantage. Christopher Columbus noted in his first encounter that “They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all”. As shown the Spaniards saw an easy possibility to enslave the locals to do their bidding. The Spaniards had the natives carry them on their back and forced the Indians to have the Spaniards, “carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays…”, stated by Bartolome de las Casas. The cruel treatment of the natives deteriorated them physically and emotionally to the degree that wives and husband, who hadn’t seen each other in almost a year, las Casas said they’d “... cease to procreate”. The Spaniards had managed to abuse the native people to point that they were so exasperated that they were unable to produce children, reducing the population that was already dying from abuse further. Promoting the depravity dwindled Indian population, Dinesh D’Souza wrote that, “the Indian population fell from between fifteen and twenty million… to a fraction of that 150 years later.” The disease, Smallpox, that afflicted the natives, brought to them by the Spaniards, was attuned the effect of it to “that of the Black Death… of the Old World”, by Geoffrey Cowley. According to Document 6, the Columbian Exchange brought along other diseases, including Influenza, Typhus, Measles, Malaria, Diphtheria, and Whooping Cough. These diseases ravaged the natives, due to their lack of immunity to these foreign diseases. Aside from native people’s lives from being threatened, their culture was also threatened by the Spanish. Spaniards threatened their religion and religious activities by imposing the Christian religion on them and converting them. By converting natives, the Spanish were also pushing toward the removal of the natives practices and ways of living. Because of the Columbian Exchange, natives to the Americas were treated as subhuman, abused, and forced into performing harsh physical labor. This is similar to how slavery was implicated in the United States in the centuries that followed. In the United States, black people were treated as property and tools like the natives in the 16th century were to the Spaniards. Both of the oppressed groups carried out difficult physical tasks to meet their oppressors demands, and received no settlement for their services. They lived underneath the race that held power over them and were forced to service any demand. Although slaves didn’t face Smallpox they suffered from malnutrition, unsanitary conditions, and had cholera, diarrhoea, typhoid, tuberculosis, influenza, and hepatitis caused commonly by their water. Luckily, the African American population was threatened as gravely as the native population. The exchange took a large toll on the people of the New World. It resulted in the heavily diminished population of the New World’s inhabitants, and the tyrannical treatment of a race of people by the Spaniards. The outcome of the Columbian Exchange was a horrific event because of the tragedies it cause upon the indigenous people.