The Columbian Exchange (Radio Edit)

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0:44Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are journeying all the way back to 15th century America. And Europe. And Africa. And Asia, for that matter. because we are getting to grips with the Colombian exchange. It's an epoch-making moment in history which has been described by some historians as the birth of globalisation. And joining me to spin our big old globe are two very special guests. In History Corner, she's Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield.

1:19Not only is she a leading historian of the Aztecs, she has branched out across the Atlantic to explore how the indigenous peoples of the Americas travelled to and discovered, inverted commas, Europe in the 1500s. And of course, you will remember her from our Aztecs episode. It's Dr Caroline Dodd-Pennock. Welcome back, Caroline. Hello. Thank you for having me back. Pleasure. We're very excited to have you back. And in Comedy Corner, it wouldn't be a proper You're Dead to Me series without our star alumna. She's a comedian, actor, writer and host. You've seen her all over the TV on Taskmaster, Frankie Ball's New World Order, The Horn Section.

1:53And you'll know her from multiple episodes of this very podcast, including recent highlights, History of Timekeeping, and Paul Robeson, two of my faves. It's Desiree Birch. Welcome back, Desiree. Thank you so much. What do you know of the Columbian Exchange? Is it a phrase you've heard before? No, it sounds very sexy, but if it's about Columbus, like not sexy at all. You know, as an American, you learn, it's like in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And you find out that he actually landed in the Caribbean and called it India because he got real mixed up somewhere about what direction he was heading.

2:30But like, he's Italian, right? Yeah. So how did he, how did he was like, I'm going to leave my nation, go rock up in some other one and be like, hey, I'm going to do all of this like bad stuff for you and bring back a lot of gold and you're going to love me and I'm going to do it in your name. You're welcome. I'm out. He was a freelancer. He was a jobbing freelancer. He was, you know. Okay. He was, he was working his hustle. So for that, we can give him credit. So what do you know?

3:05This is where I guess what our listener might know about today's subject. And I do not think the Columbian Exchange is a phrase people are knowing. But even if the phrase is unfamiliar, you will recognise the stuff that we're talking about today because the consequences of 1492 shaped the modern world. And that's no understatement. We're talking people, animals, food, plants, even microbes. We're all introduced to new lands where they are now considered so normal that we don't even realise they are imports. So it's a massive moment in world history. And in terms of pop culture, the key player is Christopher Columbus himself, who you might recall from the Night of the Museum movie, which ironically was produced by a man called Chris Columbus.

3:43But what do we need to know about the Columbian Exchange? Well, let's find out, shall we? Dr Caroline, let's start with the basics. Who was this Columbus fellow and why was he Italian? He was Genoese, he was Italian, and he leads expeditions funded by the Spanish crown that in history have been credited with discovering America, even though he actually arrived in the Bahamas. He has four expeditions in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502. And in the beginning, he certainly thinks he's discovered India, which is why we call it the Indies or they called it the Indies. And the term the Columbian Exchange is invented in the 1970s by a scholar called Alfred Crosby to describe this big exchange, as Greg said.

4:29And it's a really Eurocentric term because, of course, it puts all the emphasis on Columbus as usual and white men going out and exploring things as opposed to the exchange. But it's really important to realise that this is a reciprocal exchange. Some historians would say 1492 is the beginning of globalisation. Some would say it starts earlier. Desiree, out of curiosity, how would you define the word globalization? The way I think of globalization is that I hate to say one big happy family because loads of people are not happy about it, but that essentially we're no longer smaller, distinct cultures, countries.

5:04We're all sort of bleeding into one. Imperialism exported a lot of language and other stuff and then there were goods taken. But then suddenly Europe gets, I don't know, a banana or a pineapple or something and everyone's like, woo! I don't know, mosh pit. It's global mosh pit. Global mosh pit is a lovely line. I mean, Caroline, in a sentence, is global mosh pit a useful summary? It's not the one I would have gone for. But yeah, it's pretty fair. I think globalization is to do with the beginnings of global networks. And so some people locate it earlier with things like the Silk Roads. But if you look at 1492, networks tend to be within continents, even if they're quite big or within Africa and Asia.

5:45And And by the time you get to 100 years later, the trade networks absolutely span the entire world. So today, I mean, we are a comedy show and we're looking here for laughs and a little bit of energy. Obviously, this story has a huge amount of cruelty and horror when you look at the kind of grand scale of it. We're talking here about tens of millions of indigenous Americans dying. It's a story of colonial violence, of genocide, of devastating pandemics. It is not fun. It is not laugh out loud stuff. So we're deciding today not to focus on that. We're going to look instead on how the wider world was changed by the Colombian exchange.

6:19This sort of two way spread of animals, foods, plants coming in and out of the Americas. And we're going to start with the cutest of all, which is the animals. If you were running your own ethical zoo and we were going to call it Desiree's Menagerie, what lovely animals would you have in your little zoo? Oh, my goodness. That would be great. OK, all the cats, giraffes, because I love giraffes, a bunch of different birds, just as many birds as we could get to stick around all of the different colors. I love birds. I mean, what else? I don't know. You want like a rhino there and you want like random things that you forget are animals like the aardvark and the capybara.

6:57Caroline, Desiree's menagerie sounds quite tricky to source. But in 1492, or rather pre-1492 in the Americas, how many of those animals are available on that landmass? I mean, birds, I'm guessing. Giraffes, no. Well, if you think of the area that the Spanish arrive in, the Caribbean lands controlled by the Aztec Mexica, what's now Mexico. There are very few large animals that you would put in a zoo. You're talking about mostly small animals like dogs, guinea pigs, turkeys and parrots being domesticated. There's some wild game, some deer. There's bison in the north, what's often called the American buffalo, which is pretty big.

7:38But apart from that, it's mostly small animals, small dogs like the chihuahua, for example. You have little dogs, but not big dogs. But then, of course, things like jaguars. You do have a completely... Guinea pigs, voles, and then a jaguar. terrifying jungle cats. And in terms of agriculture, what animals are pulling the plows? You've talked about small animals, so I'm guessing chihuahuas and guinea pigs are not the ones pulling the plows. They don't have plows. They use a digging stick is what would be the English translation. So you have mixed agriculture where you have beans and corn and squash, things like that, together in one field.

8:18So instead you have a human digging round them. You use manpower, essentially. And if you want to move something, you don't use a large animal, you use water or people. When we talk about indigenous peoples, I mean, you've talked about the Mexica, who we might call the Aztecs, and then there's the Inca in Peru. Obviously, there are many indigenous peoples in what we might call North America, who we would also say Native Americans is a phrase sometimes used. They're all different from each other. It's not like this one great big body of people who agree on stuff. Absolutely. I mean, it's a vast number of peoples with infinite different kinds of beliefs and attitudes.

8:51In Mexico alone, you still have more than 60 indigenous languages spoken today. And hundreds of languages have been wiped out. You have hundreds of tribes in North America and Canada. It's an infinite variety of people. But even though they're very different, they do tend to share a slightly different attitude to nature than Europeans do. They see themselves as more interdependent with nature, more alongside animals and other natural forces, rather than simply owning them and exploiting them. We do have the Spanish introducing new animals, though. So we're talking today about an exchange. So we have the Spanish arriving in the early 1500s, I suppose, after Columbus, and they're bringing animals with them.

9:30So what you have is most of the large animals that we think of as things like cattle. So cows, sheep, goats, pigs, also big dogs, which they use for war. Donkeys, as you said, all of these domestic animals that are seen as essential to European society are imported really early on. Cows are really key and they make big changes to what happens in the landscape. You have reports as early as the 1520s of herds of like 500 cows on places like Hispaniola, maybe even 8000. Then you have cattle ranches in Mexico from immediately after the conquest in 1521. And this has devastating effects on the landscape.

10:09Well, of course, because they were putting all their cow farts into the air already. And they're eating on their sort of, I guess, if you're grazing cattle, they're going to change the landscape and the ecology of an area. And the other thing, of course, is when you get that many cattle and you get ranches, what happens when you get ranches, Desiree? Who shows up then? I mean, people to rob the ranchers. Yeah. You know, like once you're there and you're stuck, you're sitting duck, you know? It's true. Well, we get, this is the arrival of, I guess, chaps and chaps, by which I mean cowboys. Some ranches had 150 ,000 cattle.

10:40What does that even look like? Or smell like, yeah. We've taken animals out into the Americas from Europe, but now let's do the reverse. So what other species, Desiree, are crossing back to Europe from the Americas? Interesting. Maybe the bison. If there's anything else that we haven't named that plows the llama or that will pull something, probably that. I can't imagine why you'd be like, let's get all these guinea pigs on a boat. That is the weirdest version of Noah's Ark I can fathom. I mean, Caroline, the most obvious one is birds, right? Very keen. I guess because birds are small, you can put them in cages.

11:15But birds are a real hit in Europe, aren't they? That's right. A lot of the things that you mentioned, Desiree, do get brought back just as curiosities, really, because they want to see these new animals. And it's a period of scientific interest. And one of the things that's most appealing in terms of its appearance is birds. And they have birds of amazing colours. They're thought really beautiful and vibrant and clever. You often see parrots in particular, trained parrots. Parrots are also a big thing and other kinds of bird like the Quetzal among indigenous people who use their feathers for clothing and for ritual decorations.

11:46Is this how pirates got parrots? I cannot pretend to be an expert in the pirate-parrot kind of conjunction. But yeah, I imagine so because parrots are being trained really early on and brought across the Atlantic. So they're among the first things to be traded. Columbus has parrots in October 1492 on his first voyage. They start appearing on maps in the 16th century and they start appearing in Renaissance paintings. In 1532, a French ship seized by the Portuguese had a cargo that supposedly included all these monkeys and jaguar skins and 600 parrots that supposedly could all speak French. Oh, bonjour!

12:26I mean, worse than having the French mock you is having French parrots mock you because they'll just keep at it. But let's move to a much smaller animal. Have you heard of the humble cochineal? No, but I can't wait to. It makes a big impact, or rather a bug impact, because it's a little insect, sometimes called a beetle. I don't think it is a beetle. But Caroline, what's a cochineal for? Well, cochineal is a tiny insect that lives on a kind of cactus and is native to the Americas. And if you squish it, it creates a red dye, a really vibrant red dye. Maya people and Aztec Meshika people have been using that from at least as early as the second century BCE that we know of.

13:09It colours ceremonial textiles, things for special events. It's colours maps, Aztec paintings. The people who draw them are called the painters in red and black because the red is such a big colour in the paintings. And the Spanish really admire it. And so they start copying the usage. It's also known as carmine in Europe. So you might have heard it called carmine dye. And it sets really well on wool. So those two things together. And cochineal becomes such a huge thing that dyes are actually the second most valuable export from the Americas after silver. Because, of course, they're very light, easy to transport.

13:42You can make a lot of money with them. And it transforms indigenous ways of life again because they start growing cacti rather than foodstuff. So we have records of indigenous councils complaining about this basically nouveau riche class of ordinary people who've started making a lot of money and why aren't they growing the maize like they're supposed to. Let's talk now about plants. Desiree, what do you think is the kind of number one plant exports? For me and my diet, I would say it's got to be the banana. I am fairly certain that Europe, I didn't have bananas because they're very, to me, associated with like Costa Rica, Central America, whatever.

14:21I imagine that's where they came from. But in my head, that would be it because I find them so yummy. But I bet you it's something a lot more practical, like rice, maybe. No, did that come from China? I don't know. I just want it to be bananas. I don't think bananas are from the Americas. I think they're from Indonesia and the Malay kind of. Ah, okay. Makes sense. Makes sense. In terms of plant exports, probably the most important is particular kinds of wood, especially Brazil wood in the early period and then rubber later. So Brazil wood, the fact is called Brazil wood, tells you where it comes from.

14:57And it's exported partly because it's a very hard wood, but also it makes amazing red dye again. We are really addicted to red dye. I know. So the Spanish export cochineal and the French export Brazilwood. But let's move on. What product is named after the 17th century French diplomat and scholar Jean Nico? Nico. I had no idea, man. N-I-C-O-T. Nico. N-I-C-O-T. Nicotine. Yeah, there we go. Nicotine, so tobacco. So it's a huge part of indigenous life in the Americas. And after the Columbian Exchange, it is farmed and grown in the Virginia colony. And it becomes one of the most consumed substances in the world, Caroline, doesn't it?

15:41That's absolutely right. And people, I think, forget that whenever anybody is smoking or chewing tobacco, a pipe, cigarettes, it's an indigenous practice that's been exported around the world. Tobacco in the Americas is seen by various indigenous cultures as essential to physical, social, spiritual well-being. The earliest archaeological evidence for the use of tobacco seeds is around 2500 to 1800 BCE in Peru. And it's used in really different ways by different indigenous communities. So in Mesoamerica, in ceremonial practice, in an elite practice, you tended to inhale smoke through pipes and cigars.

16:20Workers chewed tobacco laced with lime, which alleviated tiredness and thirst and hunger, supposedly. You can use it in symbolic ceremonies. Europeans arriving were often made part of tobacco ceremonies. And it's one of the first indigenous things that Columbus encounters. He's presented with dried tobacco leaves in 1492 on the 12th of October, I think it is. And they're a ceremonial gift and then he throws them away. We've also got the diplomacy history, gift giving, which is a really important part of this story, the exchange element. And we do know of, as you said, the Maya people coming to the Spanish court.

16:55What is that moment like? How are they speaking to the Spanish king? Well, this is in 1544 when a group of Maya lords led by a man who's become a great community hero among the Maya in his area. he leads an expedition to the Spanish court and several Maya lords come along with Spanish priests who are local and community elders and they bring all these gifts they bring with them though in relation to the Colombian exchange all this amazing stuff so they bring whisked chocolate clay pot chilies beans maize quetzal feathers loads of quetzal feathers and these gifts have really symbolic meanings as well as practical ones.

17:39They're not just showing the riches of where they come from, but also the fact they're making cocoa and they're the first people to make drinking chocolate in Europe that we know of. There's an earlier record of someone bringing beans, but this is the first record of drinking chocolate and it's brought by Indigenous people made at the Spanish court. And presumably that means there were women who aren't mentioned in the party because women are usually the people who make the chocolate. Ah. They have this very successful expedition, and in return the Spanish king gifts the delegation these huge silver bells for their church, as well as all these other objects, crosses and cloth and religious objects to spread Catholicism in the Americas.

18:17This is like when Homer gives Marge the bowling ball, right? Like, it's just like, we gave you all this stuff that's important to us and useful and chocolate, and you're like, here's some Jesus stuff so we can wipe out your religion and your practices. There's a little bit more going on to it than that, because actually R. Popbats is supposedly the first Maya chief to voluntarily convert to Catholicism. And he does that because he's seen what happens to other communities around. Is that voluntarily then? Well, that's the thing. Recorded as voluntarily is a careful phrasing. But it does seem like he deliberately realises that if he acts in this particular way, it will protect his community.

18:58It's this amazing story of this incredible journey where they bring them and the bells are so heavy, they sink into the ground on the way back. And one of them, supposedly, you can still hear ringing under the ground during storms and things because they can't recover it. It's this amazing community history about that first connection. Just a little mini quiz for you, Desiree. Which of these foods were not in European or Asian or African cuisine prior to 1492? Okay, so I'm going to list lots of foods here and you tell me which of them was not available. Okay, so tomatoes, squashes, chilies, avocados, pumpkins, papaya, potatoes, blueberries, peanuts.

19:41Which of those not available? Do you want to give me the list again? I'm going to put you out of your misery instead. I'm going to say we've basically cheated you here. Every single one of them is from the Americas. I was going to say, where the heck did you get a papaya? So, you know, we think about tomatoes in Italian cuisine. We think about the importance of squash, you know, in African cooking. We think about avocados. What were Italians eating before tomatoes? Yeah, or potatoes. Imagine European food without potatoes or Indian food without potatoes or peanuts. I mean, these are all from the new world, as the Spanish are calling it.

20:16These are all from the Americas. So the colonialism is so woven into their identity that, like, they wouldn't even have the foods we consider to be Italian without that. Exactly that. So, I mean, Caroline, do you want to talk us through some of these? And are there any ones I've missed out? Well, there are so many, really, that I could just list huge numbers. But some of the ones that we're less aware of are actually the most valuable in terms of contemporary global trade. So peanut oil and sunflower oil are two of the biggest things to come out of the Colombian exchange, massively used in terms of modern value.

20:46Chilis are introduced to South Asian cooking by the Portuguese, And that's the beginning of a network that leads it then all across Africa and Asia. All beans except soybeans come from the Americas. You have these three plants that are so central, don't you, to indigenous cuisine, maize, beans and squash called the three sisters that are grown together. Europeans are really, really skeptical of this kind of growing. But you remember it's only 100 years or so later they realize that you need to do crop rotation because of the land becoming deprived of nutrients. where the beans are putting the nutrients back into the soil.

21:22The indigenous people are doing an amazing job of farming. Tomatoes are really, really popular, of course. They are getting all across Italy and Spain and places by the end of the 16th century. The word tomato is from the Nahuatl language, which is the Aztec language. They become really popular. Potatoes are variably introduced. Ordinary people are eating them quite early on. They recognize their potential. Plus, they're not listed as one of the things you might get taxed on. So, of course, these new things start being eaten more widely because they're not in the list of things where people come and say, give me one tenth of your corn or whatever it is.

21:56I will say from personal experience that poverty really will diversify your diet. Let's get on to one of my favourite foods, the fanciest of all the foodstuffs, the humble or rather not humble pineapple. pineapple. Caroline, why is the pineapple so exciting for Europeans? And can you tell us about the history of the pineapple? It just seems really, really exotic, I think. And also, it's very difficult to grow in Europe, which means that it's usually an import at the beginning. So it means you're rich enough to have one of them. Basically, it's really, really tasty and unusual for Europeans. Walter Raleigh says, no man can express in words the excellence of that fruit.

22:36so far does it exceed all others, he says. They were always very understated, these Europeans. But as I say, it was very hard to grow, so it remains a luxury. And then so you get these amazing surviving things in European houses where they've sculpted pineapples in the banisters and things. And it's a symbol of wealth and of luxury and also a conversation starter. You put it on your table and people go, ooh, what's that? Yeah, I mean, Desiree, you could actually rent a pineapple for your dinner party. Well, I've heard about this. It wasn't until I moved to the UK because I'm from California. There's pineapples.

23:09People will be having pineapples. It's just a sweet fruit. But like that when the pineapple came, like there were parties, like regal parties and people be like, yo, Claire got a pineapple at her house. And people would all just be like, we got to go and look at it. And like, and I was just like, I mean, before TV happened, entertainment was sparse, was it not?

23:30So that's a sort of huge global exchange. That's why it's called the Columbian Exchange. Stuff comes in, stuff goes out. And all these foods and all these plants and all these animals that are now everywhere in the world, they are being seeded into new lands, into new fields, into new cultures and societies. It's an enormous transition. I mean, it's a really fascinating history, isn't it, Desiree? I mean, it's delicious, for sure. It's tragedy plus yummy food, which I think is the story of like all cultures. The Nuance Window!

24:07This is where our expert Dr Caroline talks to us for two whole uninterrupted minutes. And without much further ado, can we have the Nuance Window please Caroline? It's really easy thinking about this topic to end up creating this picture of a jolly cosmopolitan world. A place where Europeans and indigenous peoples exchange thoughts and goods and where their cultures and ideas entangled and where we get the roots of all the tasty things that make up our modern world. But what often gets forgotten, I think, is the human dimension in all of this. And when we do hear stories about the people involved, they're nearly always white men, Columbus, Magellan, Walter Raleigh with his tobacco and potatoes, even though he wasn't the first to bring either of those things to Europe.