The Great Dying and Its Consequences.In the Western Hemisphere, the demographic collapse among Native Americans was catastrophic in places that had large populations on the eve of European contact. These places included the Caribbean islands, central Mexico, the Mayan highlands of southern Mexico and central America, and the Andes Mountains. The Great Dying involved multiple infectious diseases and ferocious pandemics that followed one after another for more than a century and a half. It began when new disease pathogens were inadvertently introduced to American Indian populations by early Spanish and Portuguese invaders. Owing to the long separation between the western and eastern hemispheres, the populations of the Americas had not evolved significant natural immunities to Afroeurasian infections, which included measles, smallpox, influenza, typhus, and tuberculosis. Therefore they had no inherited defenses against them. In this perspective, the epidemic diseases can be seen as part of the Columbian Exchange of numerous organisms, including plants and animals. The Great Dying caused massive social, economic, and cultural upheaval in numerous Amerindian societies. This was probably the major factor in the disintegration of the Aztec and Inca empires. The calamity also had a major impact on the development of the new Spanish empire in the Americas. The population loss meant that the Spanish faced severe shortages of labor and rapidly shrinking taxes. They therefore had to create an administrative system that gave priority to the mining industry and ensured the continued export of silver. Another consequence was the creation of social and legal institutions to force surviving Indian men and women to work for Europeans in mines and commercial agriculture.
The Great Dying, however, was just one aspect of the many ecological transformations that resulted from the Great Global Convergence. The arrival of Europeans in the Americas transformed the natural environment because the newcomers brought with them new organisms of all types, including many new |
food plants, several domestic animals (of which Native Americans had few), and numerous species of weeds. Because America’s pre-existing biota was often
unable to compete successfully with these invading species, much of the Western Hemisphere’s environment came within several centuries to resemble the environment of northwestern Europe. In 1500, for example, wheat was unknown to peoples of North America. After European wheat-eaters introduced this crop to the North American temperate climate (which was not radically different from Europe’s climate), it became a staple of the diet of most of the population. The same was true for the populations of the southern cone of South America. |