Analysis of Alfred W. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492

Crosby’s landmark 1972 work argues that environmental factors shape our history just as much as—and sometimes more than—human factors. While earlier scholars emphasized cultural and technological factors as defining the way our world developed, Crosby claims that nonhuman factors, such as the exchange of plants, animals, and microbes between the Old and New Worlds, had greater overall impact. One of the first historians to look at the importance of the spread of food crops and diseases in relation to history, Crosby introduces the idea that human societies are the product of a wider set of biological relationships and need to be understood in these contexts.
Crosby's landmark 1972 work argues that environmental factors shape our history just as much as-and sometimes more than-human factors.
One criticism of history is that historians all too often study it in isolation, failing to take advantage of models and evidence from scholars in other disciplines. This is not a charge that can be laid at the door of Alfred Crosby. His book The Columbian Exchange not only incorporates the results of wide reading in the hard sciences, anthropology and geography, but also stands as one of the foundation stones of the study of environmental history. In this sense, Crosby's defining work is undoubtedly a fine example of the critical thinking skill of creativity; it comes up with new connections that explain the European success in colonizing the New World more as the product of biological catastrophe (in the shape of the introduction of new diseases) than of the actions of men, and posits that the most important consequences were not political – the establishment of new empires – but cultural and culinary; the population of China tripled, for example, as the result of the introduction of new world crops. Few new hypotheses have proved as stimulating or influential.