Columbia Exchange: A Big Synthesis or A Narrow Topic?

Columbia Exchange: A Big Synthesis or A Narrow Topic?

Virginia Dejohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)

Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)

The Columbian exchange proposed by Alfred Crosby is always a hot topic, which greatly attracts the attention of historians. There is no doubt that both Alfred Crosby and Jared Diamonds are pioneers of doing their researches on this topic.[1] However, their works are so general that more historical studies on specific animals and products are still in need of further exploration. Following them, Virginia Anderson, an early American historian, examines how significant of the domestic animals were in shaping the relationships between native Americans and colonial Americans in early America period, which greatly revised the historical writing of early American history. Meanwhile, Marcy Norton, a historian who is very interested in the cultural history of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe and its American colonies, traces how tobacco and chocolate were spread and consumed in the old world after the Columbia exchange. In this paper, rather than discuss their woks separately, I am going to compare these two books and evaluate their contribution to the historical studies on the Columbia exchange.

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[1] Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Greenwood Press, 1972) ; Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton Company, 1997).