Do you think the benefits of the Columbian Exchange outweigh the drawbacks?

I think it is very difficult to argue that the benefits of the Columbian Exchange outweigh the drawbacks. To do so, one would essentially be arguing that the lives of millions of Native American people lost to European diseases were an acceptable cost for the introduction of crops and other commodities to Europe. Ultimately, the introduction of such New World crops as potatoes, corn, turnips, and others led to a massive population increase in Europe,...

I think it is very difficult to argue that the benefits of the Columbian Exchange outweigh the drawbacks. To do so, one would essentially be arguing that the lives of millions of Native American people lost to European diseases were an acceptable cost for the introduction of crops and other commodities to Europe. Ultimately, the introduction of such New World crops as potatoes, corn, turnips, and others led to a massive population increase in Europe, but it coincided with the loss of millions of Native people to diseases such as smallpox and typhus. Additionally, animals introduced by Europeans, including swine and (inadvertently) rats wreaked havoc on Native crops, which had never previously needed to be protected by fences. The introduction of disease essentially made it possible for Europeans to settle and ultimately to exploit the Americas, both in terms of clearing lands to settle (as happened at Plymouth, where the Pilgrims settled near lands already cleared by Natives that had died off) and in terms of destabilizing the political situation in the New World. So the Columbian Exchange was undoubtedly a process that shaped the world we live in today, but it did so at an extraordinarily human cost.