Title: The Turning Point: European Conquests of the Americas (1492-1800)
Headings: The Turning Point: European Conquests of the Americas (1492-1800)
The Turning Point: European Conquests of the Americas (1492-1800)
Content: The transmission of the European diseases that depopulated the Americas was part of a larger cultural and demographic exchange, between the “new” and “old” worlds that included food, animals, people, trade, diseases and technology. Europeans won the better of the exchange. While native populations decreased ninety percent, Europeans took gold, silver, and nutritional new (to them) foods, such as potatoes, tomatoes, chiles, squash, vanilla, turkey, corn, and cacao (to make chocolate). Indigenous Americans received, in return, European diseases—smallpox, measles, influenza, bubonic plagues, cholera, chicken pox, whooping cough, diphtheria, and tropical malaria. Historians call this the “Columbian Exchange,” and it was not an even trade. ‹ ›
There were many long-term consequences of the European conquest of the Americas and the global exchange that ensued. It took the Spanish only a few years to find and plunder the two wealthiest empires in the Americas. Huge silver mines found in Mexico and Peru in the mid-16th century meant that Spain instantly became the largest supplier of silver in the world. In the first 150 years following conquest, the Spanish exported 32 million pounds of silver and 360,000 pounds of gold (Marks 78). Spain spent much of this wealth in costly wars in a failed attempt to rule Europe.