Evaluate the extent to which the Columbian Exchange (1492–1600) transformed economies AND societies in the Americas.
Evaluate the extent to which the Columbian Exchange (1492–1600) transformed economies AND societies in EITHER Europe OR the Americas.
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The seven documents
Use at least six of the following documents to support your argument. For at least three, analyze how the document’s point of view, purpose, historical situation, or audience (HIPP) is relevant to your reasoning.
Document 1Bartolomé de las Casas, Spanish Dominican friar — A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1542
Source context: Las Casas had served as an encomendero on Hispaniola before renouncing the system and spending the rest of his life advocating for indigenous rights to the Spanish crown.
“The Spaniards have killed more Indians in forty years, by sword and fire and the cruelest tortures, than all the famines and wars and pestilences of recorded history. Where there were three million souls on the island of Hispaniola, today fewer than two hundred remain. The fields lie fallow, the villages are empty, and the survivors are worked to death in the mines or starve in the mountains.”
Document 2Bernardino de Sahagún (compiler), Florentine Codex, Book XII — Aztec elders recalling the 1520 smallpox epidemic, written down in Nahuatl c. 1555
Source context: Sahagún’s Franciscan project recorded indigenous accounts of the conquest in the elders’ own language, providing one of the few extant Native sources.
“Before the Spaniards appeared to us, first an epidemic broke out — a sickness of pustules. It began to spread during the thirteenth month and lasted seventy days, striking everywhere in the city and killing a vast number of our people. Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies; we were covered with agonizing sores from head to foot. The disease brought great desolation; a great many died of it. They could not walk; they only lay in their beds. Many starved; there was no one to take care of them.”
Document 3Pedro de Cieza de León, Spanish chronicler — Crónica del Perú, 1553, describing the silver mines at Potosí (in present-day Bolivia)
Source context: Potosí, discovered in 1545, became the single richest silver source in human history; its silver underwrote Spanish imperial finances and triggered global price inflation reaching as far as Ming China.
“The hill of Potosí pours out silver as a fountain pours out water. Every week, mule-trains carry away bars worth more than a hundred thousand pesos. The town below has grown in fifteen years from nothing to one of the greatest cities of His Majesty’s empire — but the Indians who labor in the mines die by the thousands. The mita system requires each village to send its men, and few return.”
Document 4Giovanni Botero, Italian political theorist — The Reason of State, 1589, on the new American crops in Europe
Source context: Botero’s treatise advised Catholic monarchs on statecraft. He observed that population growth in Europe since 1492 was driven by new high-yield crops.
“The plants brought from the New World — maize, the potato of the Andes, the bean of many varieties — have multiplied the food of common people. Lands that fed a hundred souls now feed three hundred. Princes who plant these crops in their domains shall see their populations grow, their armies fill, and their treasuries swell.”
Document 5Olaudah Equiano, formerly enslaved African, born c. 1745 (post-period reflection) — Interesting Narrative, 1789, describing the Middle Passage system the Atlantic world built on the foundations laid in this period
Source context: Equiano wrote his memoir to support British abolition. Although he wrote later, the trade he described had been running on the same model since the 1520s, when the Spanish first imported enslaved Africans to replace collapsing indigenous labor.
“The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration. The wretched situation was again aggravated by the chains, now become insupportable.”
Document 6José de Acosta, Spanish Jesuit naturalist — Historia natural y moral de las Indias, 1590
Source context: Acosta lived in Peru and Mexico for sixteen years. His Historia attempted a systematic, near-scientific account of the New World’s environment and peoples; it was widely read across Europe.
“The animals carried hence to the Indies have multiplied beyond all reckoning. Horses gallop wild on the plains of New Spain; cattle are countless in the pampas; pigs and goats overrun every island. The Indians, who knew none of these creatures, now eat their flesh and ride their backs. Yet for every gift of European husbandry the New World receives, it returns to us tobacco, cacao, the tomato, and silver enough to buy kingdoms.”
Document 7Estimated population of the Valley of Mexico — modern compilation by historians Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah (1971), based on Spanish colonial census records
Source context: Quantitative reconstruction of demographic collapse in central Mexico. Numbers are best estimates; ranges in the literature run wider, but the trajectory is uncontested.
Year
Estimated population (millions)
Change from 1519
1519 (Spanish arrival)
25.0
—
1532
16.8
−33%
1568
2.6
−90%
1600
1.0
−96%
Your response
Real-exam time: ~60 minutes
DBQ Grader · 2025 rubric
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What an annotated approach looks like
15-minute reading period: read all 7 documents twice. First pass: get the gist. Second pass: group them. What argument do they support together? What argument do they refute?
Thesis (1 point): A defensible position that addresses the entire prompt. Don’t hedge — take a side. “The Columbian Exchange transformed both economies and societies in the Americas more profoundly than in Europe, by destroying indigenous demographic stability while only modestly reshaping European diet.”
Contextualization (1 point): Tell the story of what came before. Pre-1492 Atlantic isolation. The Iberian Reconquista. Indigenous American population concentrations.
Documents (3 points possible): Use 6 of 7 documents to support your argument. For 3 of them, do “sourcing” — explain HISTORICAL SITUATION, INTENDED AUDIENCE, POINT OF VIEW, or PURPOSE.
Outside evidence (1 point): Bring in something NOT in the documents. Smallpox specifically. Encomienda system. Casta hierarchy.
Analysis (1 point): Demonstrate complexity. The transformation was GREAT but uneven — Spanish colonies vs. North America, elite vs. peasant Europe. Show you can hold both sides.
Total: 7 points. The longest, hardest essay on the exam. Treat it like a marathon: pace yourself.
