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Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., author of The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood, 2003), is a well-known American historian and writer. Crosby Jr. is also Professor Emeritus of American Studies, History, and Geography at the University of Texas in Austin. The original edition of The Columbian Exchange -- a compilation of six essays -- was published in 1972 and translated into Spanish and Italian.
The author states his thesis in his preface: “the story of the divergent evolution of the ecosystems and associated societies, isolated by rising sea levels, and when they did meet, the catastrophic and bountiful effects they had on each other.” The author concentrates on epidemic disease, transplantation of Old and New World crops, and the introduction of European farm animals into the New World.
In the first chapter, Crosby Jr., begins by explaining the history of Native peoples in the Americas and their relationship to European explorers, namely Christopher Columbus, which is controversial from the start. For example, “‘Stupidity’ was simply evidence of the cultural gap between Europeans and Indians, but we must admit that the Old World snob was roughly correct in much of the rest of his estimation.” With that view in mind, Crosby Jr. rounds up an impressive collection of insights without backing them up with hard facts. His opinions become clear later, saying, “it may be accurate to say that the Indians were more different from the rest of humankind in 1492 than any other major group of humanity.”
Then to make things more complicated, it is at this point that Crosby Jr. shifts his focus from the voyage of Columbus to a discussion of Darwin and the evolutionary process of the Native American people of the Americas without using strong facts and thus muddling his thesis. Concluding the first chapter, Crosby Jr. arrives at the curious assertion that “isolation not only hampered the growth of their civilization, but also weakened their defenses against the major diseases of mankind.” What is our perspective of Native Americans? People who did not grow in complexity in their civilizations? Archaeological evidence from the ancient North American settlement Cahokia and the vast effigy mounds of the Midwest could easily prove Crosby Jr.’s statement false.
Crosby, Jr. asserts in his book that behind the exploration of the New World, there were many consequences, such as biological and cultural, which have shaped our modern world. In “Conquistador y Pestilencia,” Crosby Jr. rationalizes, “there is little exaggeration in the statement of a German missionary in 1699 that ‘the Indians die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost.’” In support of his thesis, the lack of scholarly evidence on the scale of smallpox in the New World is a problem for historians studying a virus that took untold numbers of Native peoples up and down North and South America. The author reveals, “early historians were much more likely to cast their eyes skyward and comment on the sinfulness that had called down such epidemics as obvious evidence of God’s wrath that to describe in any detail diseases involved.”
Unfortunately, Crosby Jr. reverts back to barefaced generalizations. An example of this can be found in the concluding paragraph of Chapter Two. “The Mayan peoples, probably the most sensitive and brilliant of all American aborigines, expressed more poignantly than any other Indians that overwhelming effect of the epidemic.” Does the author back this statement up by proving why Mayan peoples are more brilliant than all other American aborigines? No, he does not, although he does apologize in the preface of the 30th edition for that comment.
Although the author makes sweeping statements throughout book, he does well in examining the psychological effect of epidemic disease in the Old and New Worlds. In “The Early History of Syphilis: A Reappraisal,” using rhetorical questions the author engages his reader in an intellectual challenge. “Did syphilis exist in the New World before 1492? Did it exist in the Old World before 1492?” He cites many examples of Native American testimony throughout his research and thoroughly compares the Columbian theory on the origin of syphilis to the Unitarian theory using many cited resources, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. He says, “in fact, such is the paucity of evidence from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that the Unitarian theory is no more satisfactory than the Columbian. We simply do not know much, and may never know much about the world distribution of the treponemas in the 1490s.” He concludes that global ecology has been altered permanently as a continuing pattern and struggle among life forms developed amplified homogeneity.
As a whole, I found this book extremely eye-opening as a student interested in history, Native American studies, and cultural anthropology. I enjoyed reading the material in the fourth chapter because of its depth, which helped me to revise my opinion of the author whose points in other chapters were hard to overlook. The swapping of organisms that transformed the Old and New World is a complex subject for researchers to ponder four hundred odd years later and Crosby Jr. gives much insight to vast questions. It was pleasant to read the passion Alfred Crosby Jr. has for history while building upon many strong positions, using his own ideas and the works of others.
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