Atlas Trail
The Columbian Exchange, Crop by Crop
Five staple crops carried across the Atlantic after 1492, three of them newly filled in by this wave: the familiar New World grain that fed the Old World, the tuber whose own pre-Columbian journey is still debated, the underground legume that reshaped West African and Asian cooking, and the tree whose domestication story is itself unsettled.
Stop 1 of 6.
Concepts
Start with the concept itself: the transfer of crops, animals and disease between the Old World and the New after 1492.
Stop 2 of 6.
Crops
Maize, a New World grain, remade farming across Africa, Europe and Asia within a few centuries of 1492.
Stop 3 of 6.
Crops
The potato followed the same route, becoming a staple across northern Europe.
Stop 4 of 6.
Crops
The sweet potato's own pre-Columbian spread to Polynesia, centuries before 1492, is a genuinely separate and still-debated puzzle from its later Old World adoption.
Stop 5 of 6.
Crops
The peanut, domesticated east of the Andes, became a staple oil and food crop across West Africa and South Asia after the Exchange.
Stop 6 of 6.
Crops
End with cacao: a New World crop whose own domestication region and date are still disputed among scholars, even as its post-1492 global trade reshaped economies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Create an account to keep this trail. Saving copies its stops into a collection of your own, which you can add to, reorder and share.
Where you have got to in this trail is kept by your own browser and is never sent to us. Clearing your browser data clears it. All trails.