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Chapter 4 • Political Transformations, 1450–1750 211

In central Mexico, heartland of the Aztec Empire and the center of Spanish colonial
rule in the area, severe drought in the five years after 1639 sent the price of maize
skyrocketing, left granaries empty and many people without water, and prompted
an unsuccessful plot to declare Mexico’s independence from Spain. Continuing
drought years in the decades that followed witnessed repeated public processions of
the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Catholic representation of the Virgin Mary,
who had gained a reputation for producing rain. The Caribbean region during
the 1640s experienced the opposite condition — torrential rains that accompanied
more frequent El Niño weather patterns — which provided ideal conditions for the
breeding of mosquitoes that carried both yellow fever and malaria. A Maya chroni-
cle for 1648 noted, “There was bloody vomit and we began to die.” 9
Like the Great Dying, the General Crisis reminds us that climate often plays
an important role in shaping human history. But it also reminds us that human
activity — the importation of deadly diseases to the Americas, in this case — also
helped shape the climate, and that this has been true long before our current
climate crisis.

The Columbian Exchange
In sharply diminishing the population of the Americas, the Great Dying, together with
the impact of the Little Ice Age, created an acute labor shortage and certainly did make
room for immigrant newcomers, both colonizing Europeans and enslaved Africans. Over
the several centuries of the colonial era and beyond, various combinations of Indig-
enous, European, and African peoples created entirely new societies in the Americas,
largely replacing the many and varied cultures that had flourished before 1492.
To those colonial societies, free Europeans and enslaved Africans brought not AP ® EXAM TIP
only their germs and their people but also their plants and animals. European crops Be sure you understand
such as wheat, barley, rye, sugarcane, grapes, and many garden vegetables and fruits, the definition of the
as well as numerous weeds, took hold in the Americas, where they transformed the Columbian exchange and
landscape and made possible a recognizably European diet and way of life. African its global economic,
environmental, and
contributions to the diet of the Americas included African varieties of rice, castor cultural effects.
beans, black-eyed peas, okra, sesame, watermelons, and yams. Accompanying the ®
introduction of these new food crops was widespread deforestation, as the land AP
was burned, logged, and turned into fields and pastures by Europeans, often using CAUSATION
How did the Columbian
enslaved labor. In what is now the United States, some 90 percent of the old growth exchange transform
forests have been destroyed since 1600. societies in the
Even more revolutionary were the newcomers’ animals — horses, pigs, cattle, Americas?
goats, sheep — all of which were new to the Americas and multiplied spectacularly
in an environment largely free of natural predators. These domesticated animals
made possible the ranching economies and cowboy cultures of both North and
South America. Horses also transformed many Native American societies, partic-
ularly in the North American West, as settled farming peoples such as the Pawnee
abandoned their fields to hunt bison from horseback. As a male-dominated hunting
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