The Columbian exchange

What Hacker News says

1. julienchastangAug 2021
   There are many examples of that. Hungarian paprika made of peppers that are originally from the Americas. Same for Indian cuisine. Read The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 by Alfred W. Crosby

   My understanding is that pizza maybe originally from Italy, but it was popularized in the US by Italian-Americans. When American tourists started traveling in Europe in large numbers, they wanted "authentic" pizza, so Italians obliged by serving them a reinvented pizza.

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2. gxqozAug 2020
   Alfred Crosby's classic history The Columbian Exchange explores how syphilis was perhaps the only major disease that went from the New World to the Old World. Well worth a read even though it's almost 50 years old at this point.

   Also I hadn't realized until recently that the "syphilis spread via Columbus" theory was current in the 18th century. There's a section in Voltaire's Candide where it's discussed.

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3. julienchastangMay 2020
   Indeed. Read "The Columbian Exchange" book by Alfred W. Crosby. Imagine Hungarians without paprika and Indian cuisine without peppers. :-)
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4. TSiegeJan 2023
   Actually 1491 was more a condensing of research. IIRC it was actually Alfred W. Crosby who proposed this in his book The Columbian Exchange
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5. benbreenOct 2014
   Agreed, Diamond's most salient points are 1) the latitudinal axis of Eurasia compared to the longitudinal one of the Americas and 2) the role of domesticated animals as disease vectors. The stuff about pre-Columbians not paying attention to quarantine is quite frankly rubbish (both because Europeans had no modern notions of quarantine either, and because it's impossible to make a blanket statement about how two continents-worth of civilizations conceptualized disease), as is the stuff about lack of urbanization (at least in the context of present-day Mexico and Peru, which indeed did have urbanization on a scale to rival Europe).

   A personal pet peeve of mine is that Alfred Crosby wrote about this stuff in the 1970s (The Columbian Exchange) and the 1980s (Ecological Imperialism) but Diamond gets all the credit for it because he successfully repackaged it for more popular audiences, without adding much.

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