The Columbus Exchange Theory almost went into academic oblivion
The Columbus Exchange Theory almost went into academic oblivion.
Lee Sung Woo in the late 1970s took this new theory and exclaimed to Koreans that gochu was spread from Japan through the Portuguese. Before then, Koreans and all Asians that consumed peppers never questioned the use or origin of red peppers in their cuisine until the Columbus Exchange Theory suddenly dominated the academic narratives.
A look at the Columbus Exchange Theory after 50 years might be instructive. Does Lee Sung Woo’s proposal of the Columbus theory of gochu still hold up today?
The Columbus Exhange Theory or Columbian Exchange was researched almost single-handedly by Alfred W. Crosby. He was hired to lecture the same topic for 10 years about European New World discovery. After 10 years, he got curious about the topic of how Europeans brought diseases that wiped out nearly 95% of the New World indigenous population, which led him to focus on biological exchange, not just people and ransacked gold. His focus expanded beyond the genocide to foodstuffs changing the nature of Europeans eating rotted tasteless monotonously bland food.
However, when he tried to publish his book, the big publishers were not interested at all and rejected the work of an obscure lecturer.
Back in the 1971, his ideas were seen as preposterous. No book publisher was willing to consider publishing Crosby’s unusually ludicrous book. Just when he decided to give up, a small book company took a chance and published his manuscript, and since then the Columbus theory has been canonized in western academia.
Everything with respect to Europe was soon recast into the Columbus Exchange Theory, even being taught in high school. It has become almost an immutable fact now, along with the Earth being round and not flat as once thought by Europeans.
But what about Asia to the east? Since the Portuguese were granted papal authority from the Vatican to have the trade monopoly to the east, it was proposed the main agent spreading New World crops such as capsicum peppers among many others were the Portuguese making physical contact in select parts of Asia. The Spanish did not play a role spreading crops to Asia but only bringing them from the New World across the Atlantic Ocean.
Lee Sung Woo must have learned about the Columbus Exchange as it applies mainly to Europe, and taking the lead of the revolutionary western trend in academia at the time promulgated in the late 1970s the Korean version, that Koreans must have got gochu pepper from Japan via the Portuguese.
Nowadays, in this academic period of sometimes overzealously pushing nullfying multiculturalism and anti-facism and rooting out Eurocentrism and any other nationalism as anti-multicutural as some sort of intellectual ideal appealing to “global democracy”, the Columbus Exchange Theory stands as a curious holdout, perhaps because of the focus on vegetables and livestock which has yet to be politicized.
For Koreans to disclose evidence that questions the Columbus theory is attacked as ultranationalism reflecting the annoying attitudes of Koreans with their Danilminjok defending their homeland to withstand and maintain 5000 years of continuous history, strong cultural traditions, homogenous people who share a unique language, superb Hangeul writing system, first to invent metal type printing, etc… Maybe gochu did come via Columbian Exchange, but historical and scientific evidences point to the possibility it did not. Yet, just to merely bring out contrary evidence is remonstrated by Westerners selectively as ultranationalistic.
Quotes:
• Crosby struggled to find a publisher for The Columbian Exchange because his ideas were new and unusual… Now historians and textbooks commonly use the phrase when they discuss European colonisation.
• There was all the gold and silver wrenched from the Americas, which funded European empires and the leap into the early modern period.
• Stuffed with sugar and potatoes, the New World’s calorie-and-nutrient powerhouses, Europe experienced a population boom in the centuries following Contact.
• But the Americas suffered a massive population crash: up to 95% of the native population was lost in the century and a half after 1492.
• Europeans initially weren’t that enamored with the new spice that Columbus brought back from the New World… “chilies were grown more as curious ornamental plants than as sources of a fiery flavoring.”
• But nothing spread as fast as chilies.
The Time Magazine article summarized below is very typical of how the Columbus Exchange Theory is used to explain everything in broad strokes. But when the fine details of how someting such as capsicum peppers were transmitted throughout Europe even let alone Asia, the evidence gets sketchy.
Crosby’s Columbus Exchange Theory is monumental in clearly documenting reshaping the culinary effect on Europe and his single-handed contribution must be duly admired. I am sure he never intended his Columbus Exchange to be used as a bulwark against free inquiry such as he enjoyed when his ideas were revolutionary.
But academically, does trasmission to Asia after 50 years of the Columbus Exchange Theory dominating the story of peppers, typified in the Time Magainze article, really need to stay set in stone?
Columbus Exchange
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange
Columbus Exchange
https://www.britannica.com/event/Columbian-exchange
How nonhuman life forms can change the course of history
The Irish Times
May 10, 2018
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science … 4?mode=amp
In the ‘Columbian exchange’, plants, livestock and diseases have as much impact as people
Crosby’s pioneering work was The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, published in 1972. In the book, Crosby argued for a different way of looking at the impact of the voyages of discovery on both the Americas and Europe. He suggested the migration of European diseases, livestock and crops was just as important as the migration of European people. Further, he considered the long-term impact of the flow of non-humans between the Old World and the New World.
Crosby struggled to find a publisher for The Columbian Exchange because his ideas were new and unusual.
Now historians and textbooks commonly use the phrase when they discuss European colonisation.
The Columbian Exchange Should Be Called The Columbian Extraction
JSTOR
Oct 14, 2019
https://daily.jstor.org/columbian-excha … xtraction/
Europeans were eager to absorb the starches and flavors pioneered by the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.
The Columbian Exchange of “diseases, food, and ideas” between Old and New Worlds, which followed Columbus’ 1492 voyage, was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not at all equitable. In fact, a better name for it might be the Columbian Extraction.
First Spain, then Portugal, France, England, and Holland, established colonies in the Americas. Millions of inhabitants of the New World got very much the worst of the imposition of conquest and foreign rule. The Old World, though, could not believe its good fortune.
The exchange rate was very much in their favor. There was all the gold and silver wrenched from the Americas, which funded European empires and the leap into the early modern period.
More mundane, but perhaps more influential in the long run, there was all that amazing food. Europeans were eager to absorb the starches and flavors pioneered by the indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere.
Stuffed with sugar and potatoes, the New World’s calorie-and-nutrient powerhouses, Europe experienced a population boom in the centuries following Contact. But the Americas suffered a massive population crash: up to 95% of the native population was lost in the century and a half after 1492. As an example, Nunn and Qian note that “central Mexico’s population fell from just under 15 million in 1519 to approximately 1.5 million a century later.”
Chili Peppers: Global Warming
Time
Jun 14. 2007
In 1492, when Christopher Columbus set off from Spain to find a westward route to Asia, he was looking to secure Europe’s kitchen, not change it.
Europeans had used black pepper as a medicinal aid and to spice up their cooking since Greek and Roman times. The ingredient, imported from the Spice Islands of Asia, had fueled the economies of trading ports like Alexandria, Genoa and Venice. But by the Middle Ages, black pepper had become a luxury item, so expensive that it was sold by the corn and used to pay rent and taxes. When the traditional land and sea routes to Asia were cut off by the rise of the Ottoman Empire, European traders looked for new ways to India and the lands beyond — not just for pepper but for other lucrative spices, and for silks and opium. Columbus headed west, certain he would find a new route to the East Indies. He never got there, of course, but in the islands of the New World the Italian navigator found a fiery pod that would, within years, not only infuse southern European cooking with bold new flavors but also revolutionize cooking in India, China and Thailand, the very places he’d set out to reach.
The remarkable spread of the chili (or chilli, or chile, or chile pepper, to use just a few of its myriad names and spellings) is a piquant chapter in the story of globalization. Few other foods have been taken up by so many people in so many places so quickly. Ask a Chinese chili lover or an Indian or a Thai and most will swear that chilies are native to their homeland, so integral is the spice to their cooking, so deeply embedded is it in their culture. European and American chili addicts, though less numerous, are just as passionate about the spice.
In terms of keeping billions of people fed, the chili can hardly compare to rice or corn or even potatoes, of course. But by adding spice to such staples, by making even the poorest food rich in flavor, the chili has become one of the most important ingredients in the world. For hundreds of millions of poor, chilies are the one luxury they can afford every day, a small burst of flavor in the slums of Asia or the parched grazing land of West Africa.
The secret to the chili’s success lies in the fantastically colorful pods themselves: the chemicals that make them so hot and addictive. “Once we develop a taste for hot food, which provides a high, there is no going back,” says renowned Indian cook Madhur Jaffrey. “It turns into a craving.” The chili, she says, is not so much a seed of change “as a conqueror, or, better still, a master seducer.”
Chilies are native to South America, where people have been cultivating and trading them for at least 6,000 years. Linda Perry, a postdoctoral fellow in archaeobiology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, has identified microfossils of the starch grains found in chilies on grinding stones and cooking pots unearthed in the Caribbean, Venezuela and the Andes. In a paper published in Science last February, she and fellow researchers found that domesticated chilies were being eaten in southern Ecuador some 6,250 years ago. Because there are no wild chilies in southern Ecuador, domesticated plants must have been brought there from elsewhere, perhaps from Peru or Bolivia where, according to Perry and other scientists, chilies were probably first grown by humans. “For whatever reason, a lot of people really liked them,” Perry says. “Once they were domesticated, they spread very quickly around South America and into Central America.”
Chilies belong to the genus Capsicum, a member of the nightshade family that includes tomatoes, potatoes and eggplants. Only five of Capsicum’s 25 species have been cultivated, and in South America, where most of the world’s wild chilies are still found, chilies’ shapes and colors are far more varied than the classic curved red or green ones of Mexican cooking or the small bullet-shaped “bird’s-eye” chilies used in Thai cooking, or the sweet green and orange bell peppers or capsicums found in a million salads. There are pea-shaped chilies, heart-shaped chilies, chilies with the bumps and nodes of a surrealist brain, and chilies that are flat and long like a bean. They come in purple, rusty red, yellow, black, bright orange and lime green. “There are thousands of types and we’re still discovering new ones,” says Paul Bosland, director of the Chile Pepper Institute at the New Mexico State University in Santa Fe. “The variations are incredible.”
By the time Columbus sailed into the Caribbean in the late 15th century, chilies were a long-established part of most diets across the Americas. But as British author Lizzie Collingham relates in her excellent history Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, which tells the story of India and its rulers through their food, Europeans initially weren’t that enamored with the new spice that Columbus brought back from the New World. “On the Iberian peninsula,” writes Collingham, “chilies were grown more as curious ornamental plants than as sources of a fiery flavoring.”
But if Europeans didn’t immediately fall for the chili, they did become its greatest propagator. Portuguese traders carried it to settlements and nascent colonies in West Africa, in India and around East Asia. Within 30 years of Columbus’ first journey, at least three different types of chili plants were growing in the Portuguese enclave of Goa, on India’s west coast. The chilies, which probably came from Brazil via Lisbon, quickly spread through the subcontinent, where they were used instead of black pepper.
In Thailand, a short-lived Portuguese presence failed to convert the locals to Christianity but succeeded in revolutionizing the Thai kitchen. European traders introduced the spice to Japan. As chilies were added to the cooking pots of Asia, they also entered existing local trade routes and were taken to Indonesia, Tibet and China.
The speed of their spread was phenomenal. Within a half-century of chilies arriving in Spain, they were being used across much of Asia, along the coast of West Africa, through the Maghreb countries of North Africa, in the Middle East, in Italy, in the Balkans and through Eastern Europe as far as present-day Georgia. Chilies spread so quickly in part because they are easy to grow in a wide range of climates and conditions, and therefore cheap and always available. “It was something spicy that now anybody could afford,” says Bosland. “It was probably the very first plant that was globalized.”
It wasn’t the only new plant on the market, of course. Columbus returned from his journeys with baskets of strange vegetables and fruits including tomatoes, potatoes and corn. But nothing spread as fast as chilies. Bosland believes it was because people thought the red pods were a new type of black pepper. “People are very conservative when it comes to food,” he says. “But here was something that they thought they knew, only it was spicier and easier to grow and get hold of.” Tomatoes and potatoes took much longer to spread through Europe and Asia.
In recent years, chilies have returned to Europe from Asia on the menus of Indian and Thai restaurants. Indian food is now the most popular cuisine in Britain. In 2001 then Foreign Minister Robin Cook called chicken tikka masala — a British invention that mixes chicken, cream and tomato puree with chili and other spices — the country’s national dish. In the U.S. — where, of course, the chili had arrived thousands of years ago from further south — Mexican food is ever more popular; salsas and chili sauces have outsold tomato-based ketchup since the early 1990s.
