Unit 4 Overview | World History Project AP®

Can you imagine Italian food without tomatoes or Indian food without chilis? It’s kind of hard to do, but before the late fifteenth century, people in Afro-Eurasia didn’t know about tomatoes or chilis. The transfer of plants, animals, people, ideas, and diseases that occurred between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas after 1492 is known as the Columbian Exchange. Tomato sauce and spicy curries were some of the positive outcomes of this exchange. But there were many negative impacts as well, namely the decimation of Indigenous Americans through the transfer of diseases and the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.