Transcript Columbian Exchange - Mr Collett\'s Blog
Absolutism, or an Absolute Monarchy is based on the idea that monarchs have divine rights, and do not need to answer to parliament or their nobility.
Following the Renaissance in Western Europe, two new types of governments evolved: Constitutional State and Absolute Monarchy. These two forms of government would become the model for emerging nations in both North and South America.
Power of the Absolute Monarch Alliance is the Key to Power Perfect Examples: France & Spain Absolutism in Other Parts of Western Europe
© Susan Harrison May 8, 2006 The Columbian Exchange--the exchange of European products to the Americas and vice-versa--invites discussion and evokes controversy to this day.
The Columbian Exchange is one of the most significant results of the Age of Exploration and the First Global Age. Food products, livestock and diseases are but three elements of the Columbian Exchange.
As Columbus "discovered America" and Western Europe discovered the various economic opportunities available in the New World, agricultural exchanges between the two regions led to exchanges of other items. Within decades of Columbus' voyages, the trans Atlantic slave trade had begun and hundreds of thousands of native Americans died of diseases brought to America by Europeans and Africans.
The early Spanish conquistadors brought gunpowder and the horse to America as well as the Catholic Christian Church. Indeed, the conquistadors brought priests with them and established missions such as St. Augustine, San Diego and San Antonio. The Spanish also brought African slaves to work on sugar plantations.
New foods for both Europe and the Americas was a major part of the Columbian Exchange. The Americas provided such new foods as corn, the potato, the tomato, peppers, pumpkins, squash, pineapples, cacao beans (for chocolate) and the sweet potato. Also, such animals as turkeys, provided a new food source for Europeans. Tobacco, an American product, was also carried to Europe.
From Europe, the Americas were introduced to such livestock as cattle, pig and sheep as well as grains such as wheat. African products introduced to the Americas included items originally from Asia were brought to the west by European traders and African slaves. These items included the onion, citrus fruits, bananas, coffee beans, olives, grapes, rice and sugar cane.
More negative items introduced to the Americas were diseases. Smallpox, influenza, malaria, measles, typhus and syphilis were brought to the Americas as a part of the Columbian Exchange. Also, African slavery was introduced by the Spanish as native Americans were decimated by these diseases.
While many elements of the Columbian Exchange can be considered positive--new food supplies, livestock and better diets--negative aspects include diseases which wiped out American populations, the African slave trade and eventual conquest of the Americas by Western European nations.
Western European History Home http://weuropeanhistory.suite101.com/articles.cfm
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels edited by Robert Kerr Suspicious Behavior of the Natives on our Return to Kfira kakooa Bay Theft on Board the Discovery and its Consequences The Pinnace attacked and the Crew obliged to quit her The Cutter of the Discovery stolen Measures taken by Captain Cook for its Recovery Goes on Shore to invite the King on Board The King being stopped by his Wife and the Chiefs a Contest arises News arrives of one of the Chiefs being killed by one of our People Ferment on this Occasion One of the Chiefi threatens Captain Cook and is shot by him General Attack by the Natives Death of Captain Cook Account of the Captain's Services and a Sketch of his Character
Early Colonies During the Age of Exploration
Jamestown
How did the colonists take over so easily?
Native populations of the Americas lacked immunity to the infectious diseases that had ravaged Europe and Asia for centuries. Sparse populations on the Plains, and in the pristine valleys of the Rocky Mountains, prevented a buildup of communicable diseases. The "white man" diseases…measles, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid fever, dysentery, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and after 1832, cholera…were devastating to the American Indian. Lumped together, these diseases did not equal the havoc of smallpox in terms of number of deaths, realignment of tribal alliances, and subsequent changes in Canadian and American Indian Cultures.
African slaves were used on the sugar plantation of the West Indies, and with them came smallpox. The first of these slaves were brought by Columbus. In 1495, fifty-seven to eighty percent of the native population of Santa Domingo and in 1515, two-thirds of the Indians of Puerto Rico were wiped out by smallpox. Ten years after Cortez arrived in Mexico, the native population had been reduced from twenty-five million to six million five hundred thousand the deaths from smallpox above sixty five percent (Bray).
a reduction of seventy-four percent. Even the most conservative estimates place