The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492

Crosby’s book is a foundational and formative text in the field of environmental history. When he authored The Columbian Exchange in the early 1970s, his work was controversial, and he had difficulty finding a press willing to publish it. Political and social history were the dominant areas of study. Fields like women’s history or environmental history, which are standard in university history departments today, were in their infancy. In his 2003 preface to the 30th anniversary edition of the book, Crosby is quick to point out his work’s flaws, particularly outdated and Eurocentric terminology, but he also writes that the work still carries merit because “It is about something so huge we often overlook it […]” (xx.) His work tells the story of continents, peoples, and their respective ecosystems that existed separately for centuries and the significant, disastrous consequences of their contact. The Columbian Exchange posited the groundbreaking thesis that “the most important changes brought on by the Columbian voyages were biological in nature” (xxvi).

Major published studies in English didn’t investigate the biological and ecological consequences of Europe’s encounters with the Americas before Crosby’s seminal work. Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano addressed the ecological and human impact of the conquest in his 1971 book Venas abiertas de América Latina, but the English translation, Open Veins of Latin America, was not published in 1973. Donald B. Cooper highlighted the book’s uniqueness when he wrote in his review of the text in 1973, “The Columbian Exchange is an innovative and important book and hopefully it will not be overlooked because it does not fit neatly into traditional disciplinary categories” (Cooper, Donald. “Review of The Columbian Exchange”). In a 2011 interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Crosby said:

Now, the ideas are not particularly startling anymore, but they were at the time. Publisher after publisher read it, and it didn’t make a significant impression. Finally, I said, ‘the hell with this.’ I gave it up. And a little publisher in New England wrote me and asked me if I would let them have a try at it, which I did. It came out in 1972, and it has been in print ever since. It has really caused a stir (Gambino, Smithsonian Magazine).

In the same interview, Crosby explained that “for the first 40 or 50 years of my life, the Columbian Exchange simply didn’t figure into history courses even at the finest universities” (Gambino, Smithsonian Magazine).

Today, the term that Crosby coined is standard across history courses, and the consequences of contact are covered in most world, Latin American, and American history courses. As J.R. McNeil notes in his foreword to the 2003 edition of the book, “Mainstream history gradually took notice” (xii) of Crosby’s new approach to history. By the 1990s, the term “Columbian Exchange” was commonplace in textbooks. McNeil credits Crosby with launching other ecological histories because he created an intellectual framework to which other historians looked: “Crosby’s legacy lies not in the comprehensiveness of chronicling the Columbian Exchange, but in the establishment of a perspective, a model for understanding ecological and social events” (xiii). His work was, thus, transformative to the discipline of history.