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212 PERIOD 2 • The Early Modern World, 1450–1750

®
AP and warrior culture emerged, women lost much of their earlier role as food pro-
DEVELOPMENTS AND ducers. Both environmentally and socially, these changes were revolutionary.
PROCESSES In the other direction, American food crops such as corn, potatoes, and cassava
In what ways was the spread widely in the Eastern Hemisphere, where they provided the nutritional
Columbian exchange a
global phenomenon? foundation for the population growth that became everywhere a hallmark of the
modern era. In Europe, calories derived from corn and potatoes helped push human
AP ® EXAM TIP numbers from some 60 million in 1400 to 390 million in 1900. Those Amerindian
Understand the impact crops later provided cheap and reasonably nutritious food for millions of industrial
of American plants on workers. Potatoes, especially, allowed Ireland’s population to grow enormously and
places in Africa, Asia,
and Europe. then condemned many of the Irish to starvation or emigration when an airborne
fungus, also from the Americas, destroyed the crop in the mid-nineteenth century. In
China, corn, peanuts, and especially sweet potatoes supplemented the traditional rice
and wheat to sustain China’s modern population explosion. By the early twentieth
century, food plants of American origin represented about 20 percent of total
Chinese food production. In Africa, corn took hold quickly and was used as a cheap
food for the enslaved Africans transported and traded across the Atlantic Ocean.
AP ® Beyond food crops, American stimulants such as tobacco and chocolate were
soon used around the world. By the seventeenth century, how-to manuals instructed
CAUSATION
What historical factors Chinese users on smoking techniques, and tobacco had become, in the words of one
made Europeans less enamored Chinese poet, “the gentleman’s companion, it warms my heart and leaves
susceptible to the my mouth feeling like a divine furnace.” Tea from China and coffee from the Islamic
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disease pictured here world also spread globally, contributing to this worldwide biological exchange. Never
than the Indigenous
population? before in human history had such a large-scale and consequential diffusion of plants
and animals operated to remake the
biological environment of the planet.
This enormous network of
communication, migration, trade,
disease, and the transfer of plants and
animals, all generated by European
colonial empires in the Americas,
has been dubbed the Columbian
exchange. It gave rise to something
wholly new in world history: an
interacting Atlantic world that per-
manently connected Europe, Africa,
and North and South America.
But the long-term benefits of this
Atlantic network were very unequally
distributed. The peoples of Africa
and the Americas experienced social
disruption, slavery, disease, and death
Disease and Death among the Aztecs Smallpox, which accompanied the on an almost unimaginable scale,
Spanish to the Americas, devastated native populations. This image, drawn by an while Western Europeans reaped
Aztec artist and contained in the sixteenth-century Florentine Codex, illustrates
the impact of the disease in Mesoamerica. (Peter Newark American Pictures/Bridgeman Images) the greatest rewards. Mountains of
Uncorrected proofs have been used in this sample.
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.

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