Alfred Crosby – The Columbian Exchange
22 October, 2021 -
examPrep
- Xiii – Nothing can be understood apart from its context, and man is no exception. He is a living entity, dependent on a number of other living entities for food, clothing, and often shelter. Many living things are dependent upon him for the same.
- Xiv – Tradition has limited historians in their search for the true significance of the renewed contact between the Old and New Worlds. Even the economic historian may occasionally miss what any ecologist or geographer would find glaringly obvious after a cursory reading of the basic original sources of the sixteenth century: the most important changes brought on by the Columbian voyages were biological in nature.
- 10 – The problems of explaining Africa and Asia were difficult but surmountable. After all, it had always been known that they were there and, if Europeans had not seen elephants, they had at least always known about them. But America, who had ever dreamed of America? The uniqueness of the New World called into question the whole Christian cosmogony.
- 112-13 – The history of this phenomenon is best known for Mexico, but there is sufficient evidence to suggest that a similar sequence of events — expansion of livestock herds and then decline in the size and quality of the grasslands — occurred elsewhere, or at least began to occur elsewhere in the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. . . . This wild oscillation of the balance of nature happens again whenever an area previously isolated is opened to the rest of the world. But possibly it will never be repeated in as spectacular a fashion as in the Americas in the first post-Columbian century, not unless there is, one day, an exchange of life forms between planets.
