HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

The exchange not only brought gains but also losses. European contact enabled the transmission of diseases to previously isolated communities, which caused devastation far exceeding that of even the Black Death in 14th-century Europe. Europeans brought deadly viruses and bacteria, such as smallpox, measles, typhus, and cholera, for which Native Americans had no immunity. On their return home, European sailors brought syphilis to Europe. Although less deadly, the disease was known to have caused great social disruption throughout the Old World.

The effects of the Columbian Exchange were not isolated to the parts of the world most directly participating in the exchange: Europe and the Americas. It also had large, although less direct, impacts on Africa and Asia. European exploration and colonization of the vast tropical regions of these continents was aided by the New World discovery of quinine, the first effective treatment for malaria. Moreover, the cultivation of financially lucrative crops in the Americas, along with the devas­tation of native populations from disease, resulted in a demand for labor that was met with the abduction and forced movement of over 12 million Africans during the 16th to 19th centuries.

The Columbian Exchange has provided economists interested in the long­term effects of history on economic development with a rich historical laboratory. Economic studies have thus far mainly focused on how European institutions, through colonialism, were transplanted to non-European parts of the world. The seminal papers by Engerman and Sokoloff, La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, and Vishny, and Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson examine the effects that European contact, taking the form of formal and informal colonial rule, had on other societies.

In this paper, we attempt to broaden the scope of economic studies of the Columbian Exchange by studying aspects of the exchange that have received less attention. First, we pay particular attention to the effects that the exchange had on the Old World rather than examining outcomes in the New World. Second, rather than concentrating on the effects of the exchange that work through institutional and political structures, we focus on the less-studied but no less-important chan­nels, namely, the biological exchange of food crops and disease. Our hope is that our broad descriptive overview of some of the neglected aspects of the Columbian Exchange will spur further, more rigorous studies of the long-term consequences of these aspects of the exchange.

We are aware of only a handful of empirical papers that either focus on the effect of the exchange on the Old World or focus on channels other than legal institutions. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson examine the effects of the three-comer Atlantic trade on Europe. They argue that the profits from the trade strengthened the merchant class, which resulted in stronger pro-business institutions and increased economic growth.

Two studies have recently explored the effects of the botanical exchange. In Nunn and Qian, using a generalized difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we find that the introduction of potatoes to the Old World resulted in a significant increase in population and urbanization. Our finding complements earlier research by Mokyr that estimates the effects of the potato on population growth within Ireland.

Hersh and Voth examine the benefits that arose from the increase in land for cultivating the Old World crops of coffee and sugar after 1492. According to their calculations (see Table 9), the increased availability of sugar increased English welfare by 8 percent by 1850, while the greater availability of coffee increased welfare by 1.5 percent.

In the following section, we examine the most devastating and unfortunate consequences of the Columbian Exchange, which arose from the exchange of disease between the Old and New Worlds. Next, we turn to the effects of the exchange that arose from the transfer of foods between the New and Old Worlds. We then examine the indirect consequences of the exchange in Africa and Asia. The final section of the paper offers concluding thoughts.