1) On August 12, 1492 Christopher Columbus and his men unexpectedly land in the Bahamas, "discovering" the New World and initiating the Columbian Exchange. He then returned to Spain in March 1493, bringing with him animals and plants—this included corn, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, turkeys, cocoa, squash—that he had found in the “discovered” New World. Later on, he returned to the Americas with approximately 1,200 settlers and a collection of European animals and plants such as wheat, coffee, horses, pigs, cows, sugar, bananas, oats, and even disease. In this way, Columbus began a vast global exchange that would profoundly affect the world.
Crops such as corn, potatoes, and cassava allowed Europeans and Africans to overcome chronic food shortages. Europe’s population greatly increased due to of the new variety of foods exposed to them. Two of these new foods, corn and potatoes, became important foods in the Old World. Easy to grow and store, potatoes helped feed Europe’s rapidly growing population. Corn, which spread all across to Europe, became one of the world’s most important cereal crops. Soon, these food crops transferred from continent to continent over time. By the 1700s, corn, potatoes, beans, and tomatoes were contributing to the population growth around the world. Today, what we now consider to be the "traditional" cuisines of Europe are heavily flavored with the products of the Columbian Exchange. Before 1492, the Italians ate no tomatoes, the Irish ate no potatoes, the Spanish no peppers, and the Swiss no chocolate. For tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and cocoa—like corn, cassava, peanuts, avocados, strawberries, pineapple, vanilla, and tobacco—are species native to the Western Hemisphere, brought back to Europe for the first time as the literal fruits of colonial success.
The Columbian Exchange of foods richly improved the European (and African) diet, not only by improving and diversifying its taste but also, by simply increasing Old World societies' abilities to feed more people. Starvation, which had long limited population growth in Europe and Africa, was largely overcome through the transplantation of New World foods. The colonies the Europeans have established in the New World soon became efficient producers of not only New World crops, but Old World crops as well. As a result, European economies became greatly wealthy and powerful for having many more natural resources from the New World.
2) The New World happened to be much a healthier place than the Old before 1492, hosting few or none of the devastating diseases that continuously plagued the populations of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Thus, when Europeans arrived, they generally found life in the Americas to be at least as healthy as back home. By contrast, American Indians—never before exposed to vicious Old World pathogens like smallpox, thus lacking any immunities to them—began dying at extremely fast rates. The American Indians' "Great Dying"—which possibly could have killed as many as one out of every five humans alive worldwide in the 16th century—ravaged not only American Indian bodies but their entire societies and cultures. The traumatized survivors were often left unable to mount any effective resistance against the incursions of the European colonists. The Columbian Exchange became even more unbalanced with Europe's successful appropriation of New World staple crops originally developed by Indians. So, European conquest of the indigenous people greatly reduced their population. Enslavement and captivity also became a factor of how the following generations of the indigenous people would live. As time goes by, they were looked down upon as a minority and forced to move from place to place.
