Impact Of Imperialism In The Age Of Exploration

When Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 the world had no idea what the effects on the environment would be. The interaction between the Europeans and the New World Inhabitants of North and South America and Africa, as well as Asia is still relevant in the ecological impact that took place between their encounters during the Age of Exploration and onward. The exchange of ideas was the utopian ideal but the utter truth was that the natural environment and human stewardship of that environment during this new global encounter was altered for the worse. This paper will examine the great exchange between different cultures and examine the ecological imperialism that was carried out by Europeans.
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Europeans through the Columbian Exchange brought African slaves “skilled in its cultivation” of rice or “Sativa” to North America. However history gives credit whereas “scholarship has uncritically attributed the presence of rice and its subsequent establishment in the Americas to Europeans who carried seed from Asia to Africa.” History writes that Africa “provided nothing important” to the New World. This “racist bias of European scholarship” according to Carney has neglected not just the “domestication of rice and development of irrigation” by Africans but it also left out the role African rice played in Atlantic history and the colonization of the Americas. In regards to North America in the late 17th century “African slaves accompanied the first European settlers of the colony, and they were already planting rice for subsistence in 1690” in the Carolinas. However no credit is given to these slaves in the Eurocentric history of the world. It was the slaves who knew how to work the swamps of the Carolinas and even helped increase land productivity with their small slave gardens. The slave gardens in the Americas were small gardens that did not need much time and attention, therefore slaves