People

  • The vast preponderance traveled from Old World to New.
  • Only handfuls went to the Old World
  • 4/5 of the people brought to the New World between 1492 and 1820 were from Africa and were enslaved
  • Of non-African immigrants (with the exception of New England), 4/5 were male.

Animals

  • Before Europeans, the only large domesticated animal in the New World was the llama
  • Europeans recreated their Old World lives by bringing horses, pigs, cows, sheep, and goats.
  • New animals had a massive effect on the flora, fauna, and landscape of the New World. It led to fencing of lands — conflicts with native peoples.
  • The arrival of the horse also changed the lifestyles of Pampas and Plains Indians, allowing them to survive as cohesive groups longer.
  • Again, direction is mainly from the Old World to New

Plants

  • Exchange is a little more even, but what the New World sent back had vastly greater impact
  • 3/4s of today's crops grown for food originated in the New World.
  • Corn and potatoes have especially big effects on Europe and Africa spurring massive population growth — and dependency; in Ireland, a potato blight led to famine.
  • Cash crops (desirable commodities) in the New World sustain the exchange — tobacco, vanilla, chocolate, cotton
  • The Old World sent to the New rice, coffee, and sugar.

Microbes

  • Movement was vastly weighted in the direction of Old to New — smallpox, measles, typhus, cholera, whooping cough, plague, influenza, malaria
  • Pre-contact population numbers are debated but death tolls reached 80 percent in many areas.
  • Because of large networks of travel and exchange between native peoples throughout the Americas, disease spread to some areas in advance of settlers.