Columbian Exchange Dbq

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Recommended: European colonization in the new world

Six centuries ago, the Europeans took their course to discover and eventually conquer what is now North and South America. The question, however, is why was it the Europeans that conquered these lands? Jared Diamond makes a convincing argument in that it has “nothing to do with any personal qualities”. His argument infers that it has everything to do with their location and the technology they already inquired.
Europe’s location relative to the Americas played a great part in the conquest. They are separated by an interesting pattern of winds and currents. A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz states that Christopher Columbus used the very same patterns on his journey to what he thought was Asia. Thinking he was sailing to Asia and, consequently, …show more content…

Europe is located near the Fertile Crescent, an area of fertile land where many crops and livestock thrived. The migration of crops and animals into Europe made the countries into the strong empires they were.
The Fertile Crescent was also marked as the place where steel was first created. Identical to the migration of crops and livestock, steel spread to Europe, advancing their technology. They used steel in the making of weapons like guns and knives.
Europeans not only used physical weapons to conquer the Americas, but they also used disease as a weapon. When the Europeans traveled, they brought along smallpox. They, however, were immune to the infectious disease. Over the course of many generations, the Europeans formed a genetic immunity to the disease but still carried it if infected. The gene was then passed down from generation to generation. The disease is spread mainly by livestock like pigs and sheep. These animals were not native to the Americas. As a result, once they were introduced, the disease was also introduced. The disease wiped out the native empires already standing, making the Europeans able to more easily conquer the natives’

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    Columbian Exchange, which also call the Grand Exchange, is an exchange of animals, crops, pollution (European and African), culture, infectious diseases and ideology between the eastern and western hemisphere in 15th and 16th centuries. Alfred W. Crosby first proposed this concept in his book “ The Columbian Exchange”, which published in 1972.

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    Microbes from Europe introduced new diseases and produced devastating epidemics that swept through the native populations (Nichols 2008). The result from the diseases brought over, such as smallpox, was a demographic catastrophe that killed millions of people, weakened existing societies, and greatly aided the Spanish and Portuguese in their rapid and devastating conquest of the existing American empires (Brinkley 2014). Interaction took place with the arrival of whites and foreigners. The first and perhaps most profound result of this exchange was the imp...

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