Question

Compare and contrast globalization and global trade in the contemporary world with the Columbian Exchange in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Pick one or two items such as food, thought, disease, and culture.

Answer 1

Answer-

In US state of Virginia, where a Dutch pirate ship turned up in August 1619 with nearly two dozen black slaves onboard, captured when the pirates attacked a Portuguese slave ship. As it was harvest time, the Jamestown colonists seized the opportunity to buy the slaves.That purchase set the seal on slavery in America. But what the Virginia tobacco farmers didn't realize was that by buying the labor of slaves from Africa, they also acquired the disease these Africans carried in their blood. Plasmodium falciparum, a parasite that causes malaria, now gained a foothold in North America. Attacks of this fever were a high price the colonial farmers paid for their exploitation of African slaves.

The "Columbian Exchange" as historians call this transcontinental exchange of humans, animals, germs and plants affected more than just the Americas. In China, for example, the new era began when sailors reported the sudden appearance of Europeans in the Philippines in 1570. The astonishing thing about this was that they had come across the ocean from the east.Until this point, China had shown little interest in Europe, in the belief that its inhabitants had little to offer China's blooming civilization. This time, though, the new arrivals brought something from America that electrified China - silver. Some items such as food,

Tomatoes
Tomatoes are a fruit that originated in South America. Botanists believe that
approximately 1,000 years before the Spanish arrived in the Americas, an unidentified
wild ancestor of the tomato made its way north and came to be cultivated in South
and Central America (Smith, 1994, p. 17). The tomato is first mentioned in European
texts in 1544. Mathiolus described how tomatoes, pomi d'oro (golden apple), were
eaten in Italy with oil, salt, and pepper, suggesting that the first tomatoes in Europe
were yellow and not red (Gould, 1983, pp. 30-53). European cultivation became
widespread in the ensuing decades in Spain, Italy, and in France.

Tobacco
It is believed that Native Americans began to use tobacco around the first
century BCE. There is no evidence that Native Americans ever consumed tobacco
recreationally. It was instead used as a hallucinogen during religious ceremonies
and as a painkiller. Ramon Pane, a monk who accompanied Columbus on his
second voyage, gave lengthy descriptions about the custom of smoking tobacco.
He described how natives inhaled smoke through a Y-shaped tube. The two ends
were placed in the nostrils and the third end over a pastille of burning leaves.

Disease
The Spread of Disease from the Old World to the New
The list of infectious diseases that spread from the Old World to the New is
long; the major killers include smallpox, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox,
bubonic plague, typhus, and malaria (Denevan, 1976, p. 5). Because native popula
tions had no previous contact with Old World diseases, they were immunologically
defenseless. Dobyns (1983, p. 34) writes that "before the invasion of peoples of the
New World by pathogens that evolved among inhabitants of the Old World, Native
Americans lived in a relatively disease-free environment. .. . Before Europeans
initiated the Columbian Exchange of germs and viruses, the peoples of the Amer
icas suffered no smallpox, no measles, no chickenpox, no influenza, no typhus, no
typhoid or parathyroid fever, no diphtheria, no cholera, no bubonic plague, no scarlet fever, no whooping cough, and no malaria."