The discovery of the Americas greatly influenced world history, and in particular the history of Europe. The development of it’s lands and peoples as the beginnings of the new Atlantic World made a great impact on the world system. Of course, this is obvious considering that most countries from Western Europe were involved – “Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, France, the Dutch Republic, Russia, and Denmark.” The shift in economic centres (particularly for Spain and Portugal), “represents one of the most profound transformations in human history.” The questions are, what exactly was it’s impact, and what effects did it have on the world system? This essay discusses the demographic and economic effects of the Americas on the world system, focussing primarily on population figures since the European settlement of the Americas and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The Americas, discovered accidentally by Columbus in 1492, became an object of interest for European explorers in about 1500 when Amerigo Vespucci “concluded that the so-called Indies were not part of eastern Asia but were in fact a new continent.” The Spanish began conquering and settling the Caribbean Islands, and soon after in 1519, Hernan Cortez commanded an expedition into the Mexican mainland, conquering the capital of Tenochtitlan (modern day Mexico City) and decimated the Aztec population through both warfare and disease. After this, other Spanish Conquistadores advanced to the north and south – Pizarro took over the Peruvian Incan Empire in 1532, and in the same year the Portuguese settled Brazil.
Spanish and Portuguese migrants exploited the Americas for their Silver and Gold, returning the wealth to their mother countries. The natural resources the New World offered meant that “hundreds of thousands of European settlers flooded into the Americas” and their economies grew larger.
The introduction of European diseases into the Americas devastated the local population. Smallpox and measles were major contributors in the decline of the indigenous populace. Within fifty years of European settlement “more than half the Indian population had perished. Within a century, no more than a fourth remained.” The Mexican demographic decreased from twenty eight million indigenous people in 1520 to only one million in 1620. The indigenous people of the Americas were being exploited as slave labour by European settlers, and the demographic decline hindered the Europeans’ economy. To resolve this issue, slaves were brought in from Africa as a labour force – “especially to Brazil, the Caribbean, and coastal regions—to replace the Indians.” Not only did millions of indigenous people from the Americas perish due to disease, but during the four hundred and fifty years that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade encompassed, it is estimated that somewhere between nine and thirteen million slaves were imported into the Americas. While the colonization of the Americas destroyed local populations, it destroyed those of the African continent as well. According to Hugh Thomas’s statistics presented in his book The Slave Trade, four million slaves were imported to Brazil and two and half million to the Spanish Empire, these making up 35.4% and 22.1%, respectively, of all slaves accounted for between the years 1450 and 1900. The result of this slave trade was that five times as many Africans arrived in the Americas than Europeans. Slaves were then also imported to the British and French West Indies, as well as parts of Europe and it’s islands.
