The Columbian Exchange and the Atlantic Slave Trade By Ethan and byron
The Columbian Exchange and the Atlantic Slave Trade was a smear on the pages of humanities history, affecting millions of people worldwide during a period of time between 1492 and is still ongoing today.
The Columbian Exchange was a period of time between 1492 and the late 1800s.It was a monumental leap forward in human history, creating a type of interconnection and trade that had never before been seen. The Columbian Exchange itself created many good things for the Western World, while the Natives in the countries that they colonised payed the price for our cravings. The good that the Columbian exchange brought was far outweighed by the negatives, which included huge pandemics in the native population, causing a huge drop in the population of the natives. These diseases spread worldwide by the increased interconnection of these boats, allowing these epidemics to quickly become uncontrollable and wreaked havoc on the Native populations of the colonised areas. These diseases caused the most shocking population drop in recent history, with the population of natives in the Americas dropping by around 26 million in the space of a century.
The Columbian exchange brought a lot more material positives but these were heavily outweighed by the negatives that wreaked havoc on the populations of the world that negotiated with these trades. The Columbian Exchange was literally the start of the Atlantic slave trade that flourished at the detriment to the native populations of the Americas and to a lesser extent, Africa. The massive population drop in the Americas was caused by the diseases that were carelessly introduced by the white explorers and absolutely decimated the native population as they had no prior immunity to even the simple common cold. The diseases that did come across and caused a monstrous drop in the population included those as serious as Smallpox, Typhus, Measles, and Diphtheria.
