Lessons · Teaching · exploration, and what contact cost
What crossed the ocean in both directions
European voyages from the late fifteenth century opened a permanent exchange between hemispheres: crops, animals, people and diseases moved both ways. The diseases were the largest single cause of death among indigenous peoples, killing a great part of the population before most Europeans arrived.
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What it is for
The exchange explains almost everything that follows, and the disease part explains why a supposedly empty continent looked empty. A teacher who has that can answer the question a bright child asks, which is why so few people were here if so many people were here.
How to think about it
Split the exchange into what went each way and follow one item through its consequences. The potato going east changed European population; the horse going west changed how plains nations lived and hunted. Name the diseases as the main killer plainly, and do not soften it.
Worked example
East to west: wheat, horses, cattle, and diseases including smallpox and measlesThe horse transformed plains life; the diseases emptied whole regions.
West to east: potatoes, maize, tomatoes, cacao, and enormous quantities of silverThe potato alone reshaped European population growth.
Disease killed a large proportion of indigenous people, often ahead of settlementWhich is why later arrivals described land as empty that had not been.
The exchange was permanent and it ran both waysNeither hemisphere ate, farmed or travelled the same way afterwards.
Your turn
Name the main cause of indigenous deaths after contact.
The largest single cause of death was
Solve one, graded on the server
The trap
Presenting the exchange as a discovery and a gift. It was an exchange with catastrophic costs on one side, and an examination expects a candidate to be able to say both halves.