A World in Flux: The Columbian Exchange

In a path-breaking volume published in 1972, Alfred Crosby coined the expression the “Columbian Exchange” to refer to the global circulation of people, animals, plants, and microbes initiated by the European “discovery” of America, an historical phenomenon which shaped the modern world in a radical and unprece dented way. In this chapter, I review the impact the Columbian Exchange had in food habits and health, two fields where the entanglement between biological and cultural facts is of outmost relevance, as shown by the intimate relationship linking epidemics, colonial violence, and demographic collapse. The Columbian Exchange, inducing the global circulation of several animal species, also had a profound impact on human-animal relationships. Given the relevance that European dogs had in the spread of rabies in the Americas, in the last part of the chapter I summarize the results of scholarly studies which explored the changing relationships between ani mals and humans in the post-colonial Americas.