Meeting of Old and New Worlds By Difan Li

 Meeting of Old and New Worlds

By Difan Li

The discovery of the Americas followed by years of European colonization and conquest brought significant changes to both the Old and New World. From the New World, Europeans brought back exotic animals as well as plants. Crops such as maize, beans, tomatoes, and potatoes became a major part of the European diet, contributing to a population boom in the Old World. Exotic spices and luxuries were also brought back to Europe and were in high demand by the upper classes. Items ranging from gold and silver to pineapples, vanilla, and chocolate were all introduced to European countries. However, diseases were also brought back to Europe, including Syphilis disease.

Many things were brought from the Old World, carried over on European ships. Crops and animals, including wheat, sugar, rice, coffee, and horses, cows, pigs, were introduced to the native people. These goods had both positive and negative impacts. Horses were adopted by the Northern tribes, allowing them to develop into a wide-range hunting society. Sugar cane, which grew well in the American climate led to a “sugar revolution,” where great sugar mills and plantations were built, requiring slave labor from Africa. However, disease had the greatest destructive influence in the New World. Diseases such as smallpox, yellow fever, malaria, measles, bubonic plague, influenza, typhus, diphtheria, scarlet fever, all of which were previously unknown to the Americas, were brought over by Europeans, from the people themselves to the rats aboard the ships. Native Americans had no immunities to the Old World diseases, and the population dropped from the combined factors of enslavement, aggression, and disease, with illness wiping out 90% of the population and its rich culture and histories.

Works Cited

Kennedy, David M, et al. The American Pageant : A History of the Republic. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co, 2006.