You're Dead to Me - The Columbian Exchange (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock and comedian Desiree Burch in the 15th century to learn all about the Columbian Exchange, which is often described as the start of globalisation.In this episode, we go beyond the expeditions of Christopher Columbus to share the bigger story of a monumental exchange of plants, foods, animals, materials, people and culture across the continents. It’s also a life lesson on why you shouldn't set sail with a couple of cougars aboard your ship!This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Research by Roxy Moore Written by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Steve Hankey

Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are journeying all the way back to 15th century America. And Europe and Africa and Asia, for that matter, because we are getting to grips with the Colombian Exchange. It's an epoch-making moment in history, which has been described by some historians as the birth of globalisation. And joining me to spin our big old globe. are two very special guests. In History Corner, she's senior lecturer in international history

at the University of Sheffield. Not only is she a leading historian of the Aztecs, she has branched out across the Atlantic to explore how the indigenous peoples of the Americas traveled to and discovered, inverted commas, Europe, in the 1500s. And of course, you will remember her from our Aztecs episode. It's Dr Caroline Dodd-Pennock. Welcome back, Caroline.

Hello, thank you for having me back. Pleasure. We're very excited to have you back. And in Comedy Corner, it wouldn't be a proper Your Dead to Me series without our star alumna. She's a comedian, actor, writer and host. You've seen her all over the TV on Taskmaster, Frankie Ball's New World Order, the Horn section. And you'll know her from multiple episodes of this very podcast, including recent highlights, history of timekeeping and Paul Robson, two of my faves. It's Desiree, welcome back, Desiree. Thank you so much.

What do you know of The Columbian Exchange? Is it a phrase you've heard before? No, it sounds very sexy. But I, if it's about Columbus, like, not sexy at all. You know, as an American, you learn, it's like, in 1,492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And you find out that he actually landed in the Caribbean and called it India because he got real mixed up somewhere there about what direction he was heading. But, like, he's Italian, right? Yeah.

So how did he get, how did he, how did he was like, I'm going to leave my nation go rock up in some other one and be. like, hey, I'm going to do all of this, like, bad stuff for you and bring back a lot of gold and you're going to love me. And I'm going to do it in your name. You're welcome. I'm out. He was a freelancer. He was a jobbing freelancer. He was, you know. Okay. He was, he was working his hustle. So for that, we can give him credit. So, what do you know? This is where I guess what our listener might know about today's subject. And I do not think the Columbian Exchange is a phrase people are knowing. But even if the phrase is unfamiliar,

you will recognise the stuff that we're talking about today because the consequences of 1492 shaped the modern world. And that's no understatement. We're talking people, animals, foods, plants, even microbes. We're all introduced to new lands where they are now considered so normal that we don't even realise they are imports. So it's a massive moment in world history.

And in terms of pop culture, the key player is Christopher Columbus himself, who you might recall from The Night of the Museum movie, which ironically was produced by a man called Chris Columbus. But what do we need to know about the Colombian exchange? Well, let's find out, shall we? Dr. Caroline, let's start with the basics. Who was this Columbus fellow? And why was he Italian?

He was Genoese. He was Italian. And he leads expeditions funded by the Spanish crown that in history have been credited with discovering America, even though he actually arrived in the Bahamas. He has four expeditions in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502. And in the beginning, he certainly thinks he's discovered India, which is why we call it the Indies, or they called it the Indies. And the term the Colombian exchange is invented in the 1970s

by a scholar called Alfred Crosby to describe this big exchange, as Greg said. And it's a really Eurocentric term because, of course, it puts all the emphasis on Columbus as usual. and white men going out and exploring things as opposed to the exchange. But it's really important to realize that this is a reciprocal exchange. Some historians would say 1492 is the beginning of globalization. Some would say it starts earlier. Desiree, out of curiosity, how would you define the word globalization?

The way I think of globalization is that I hate to say one big happy family because loads of people are not happy about it, but that essentially we're no longer smaller, distinct cultures, countries were all sort of bleeding into one. Imperialism exported a lot of language and other stuff. And then they were goods taken. But then suddenly Europe gets, I don't know, a banana or a pineapple or something. And everyone's like, woo.

I don't know. Mosh pit. It's global mosh pit. Global Mosh pit is a lovely line. I mean, Caroline, in a sentence, is Global Moshpit a useful summary? It's not the one I would have gone for. But yeah, it's pretty fair. I think globalization is to do with the beginnings of,

global networks. And so some people locate it earlier with things like the Silk Roads. But if you look at 1492, networks tend to be within continents, even if they're quite big or within Africa and Asia. And by the time you get to 100 years later, the trade networks absolutely span the entire world. So today, I mean, we are a comedy show and we're looking here for laughs and a little bit of energy. Obviously, this story has a huge amount of cruelty and horror when you look at the kind of grand scale of it. We're talking here about tens of millions of indigenous Americans dying. It's a story of colonial violence, of genocide, of devastating pandemics. It is not fun. It is not laugh out loud stuff. So we're deciding today not to focus

on that. We're going to look instead on how the wide world was changed by the Colombian exchange, this sort of two-way spread of animals, foods, plants coming in and out of the Americas. We're going to start with the cutest of all, which is the animals. If you were running your own ethical zoo, and we were going to call it Desire's menagerie, what lovely animal would you have in your little zoo? Oh, my goodness. That would be great. Okay, all the cats, giraffes, because I love giraffes, a bunch of different birds, just as many birds as we could get to stick around

all of the different colors, because I love birds. I mean, what else? I don't know. You want, like, a rhino there, and you want, like, random things that you forget are animals, like the ardbark and the capybara. Caroline, Desiree's menagerie sounds quite tricky to source. But in 1492, or rather pre-492 in the Americas, how many of those animals are available on that landmass? I mean, birds, I'm guessing, giraffes, no.

Well, if you think of the area that the Spanish arrive in, the Caribbean land's controlled by the Aztec Mishika, what's now in Mexico, there are very few large animals that you would put in a zoo. You're talking about mostly small animals like dogs, guinea pigs, turkeys and parrots being domesticated, there's some wild game, some deer. There's bison in the north, what's often called the American buffalo, which is pretty big. But apart from that, it's mostly small animals, small dogs like the Chihuahua, for example. Lovely.

You have little dogs, but not big dogs. But then, of course, things like Jaguars, you do have, I'd completely... Guinea pigs, voles, and then a Jaguar. Terrifying jungle cats. And in terms of agriculture, What animals are pulling the plows? You've talked about small animals, so I'm guessing chihuahuas and guinea pigs

are not the ones pulling the plows. They don't have plows. They use a digging stick is what would be the English translation. So you have mixed agriculture where you have beans and corn or squash, things like that, together in one field. So instead you have a human digging round them. You use manpower, essentially. And if you want to move something, you don't use a large animal.

You use water or people. I mean, when we talk about Indigenous peoples, I mean, you've talked about the mission. who we might call the Aztecs, and then there's the Inca in Peru. Obviously, there are many indigenous peoples in what we might call North America, who we would also say Native Americans, is a phrase sometimes used. They're all different from each other. It's not like this one great big body of people who agree on stuff.

Absolutely. I mean, it's a vast number of peoples with infinite different kinds of beliefs and attitudes. In Mexico alone, you still have more than 60 indigenous languages spoken today. And hundreds of languages have been wiped out. You have hundreds of tribes in North America and Canada. It's an infinite variety of people. But even though they're very different, they do tend to share a slightly different attitude to nature than Europeans do.

They see themselves as more interdependent with nature, more alongside animals and other natural forces, rather than simply owning them and exploiting them. We do have the Spanish introducing new animals, though. So we're talking today about an exchange. So we have the Spanish arriving in the early 1500s, bows after Columbus, and they're bringing animals with them. So what you have is most of the large animals that we think of as things like cattle.

So cows, sheep, goats, pigs, also big dogs, which they use for war. Donkeys, as you said, all of these domestic animals that are seen as essential to European society are imported really early on. Cows are really key, and they make big changes to what happens in the landscape. You have reports as early as the 1520s of herds of like 500. cows on places like Hispaniola, maybe even 8,000, then you have cattle ranches in Mexico from immediately after the conquest in 1521. And this has devastating effects on the landscape. Well, of course, because they were putting all their cow farts into the air already.

And they're eating on there. I guess if you're grazing cattle, they're going to change the landscape and the ecology of an area. And the other thing, of course, is when you get that many cattle and you get ranches, what happens when you get ranches, Desiree? Who shows up them? I mean, people to rob the ranchers. Like I, you know, like once you're there and you're stuck, you're sitting duck, you know. It's true. What we get, this is the arrival of, I guess, chaps in chaps, by which I mean cowboys. Some ranches had 150,000 cattle. What does that even look like? Oh, smell like. Yeah. We've taken animals out into the Americas from Europe, but now let's do the reverse. So what other species, Desiree, are crossing back to Europe from the Americas? Interesting. Maybe the bison

if there's anything else that we haven't named that plows like the llama or that like will pull something, probably that I can't imagine why you'd be like let's get all these guinea pigs on a boat like that is the weirdest version of Noah's Ark I can fathom I mean Caroline the most obvious one is birds

right? I guess because birds are small you can put them in cages but birds are a real hit in Europe aren't they? That's right a lot of the things that you mentioned is very do get brought back just as curiosities really because they want to see these new animals and it's a period of scientific interest. And one of the things that's most appealing in terms of its appearance is birds. And they have birds of amazing colors. They've thought really beautiful and vibrant and clever. You often

see parrots in particular, trained parrots. Parrots are also a big thing and other kinds of bird, like the Ketzel among indigenous people who use their feathers for clothing and for ritual decorations. Is this how pirates got parrots? I cannot pretend to be an expert in the pirate parrot kind of conjunction. But yeah, I imagine so because parrots are being trained really early on and brought across the Atlantic. So they're among the first things to be traded.

Columbus has parrots in October 1492 on his first voyage. They start appearing on maps in the 16th century and they start appearing in Renaissance paintings. In 1532, a friendship seized by the Portuguese had a cargo that supposedly included all these monkeys and jaguar skins and 600 parrots that supposedly could all speak French.

I mean, worse than having the French mock you is having French parrots mock you because they'll just keep at it. But let's move to a much smaller animal. Have you heard of the humble cochineal? No, but I can't wait to. It makes a big impact, or rather a bug impact, because it's a little insect.

It's sometimes called a beetle. I don't think it is a beetle. But Caroline, what's the cautionil for? Well, Cochineal is a tiny insect that lives on a kind of cactus, and it's native to the Americas, and if you squish it, it creates a red dye, a really vibrant red dye. Maya people and the Aztec machica people have been using that from at least as early as the 2nd century BC that we know of. It colours ceremonial textiles, things for special events. It's colours maps.

Aztec paintings. The people who draw them are called the painters in red and black, because of the red is such a big colour in the paintings. and the Spanish really admire it, and so they start copying the usage. It's also known as Carmine in Europe. So you might have heard it called Carmine dye, and it sets really well on wool, so those two things together. And Cocheneal becomes such a huge thing that dyes are actually the second most valuable export from the Americas after silver, because of course they're very light, easy to transport.

You can make a lot of money with them. And it transforms indigenous ways of life again because they start growing cacti rather than food stuff. So we have records of Indigenous councils complaining about this basically Nouveau-Rich class of ordinary people who've started making a lot of money and why aren't they growing the maize like they're supposed to. Let's talk

now about plants. Desiree, what do you think is the kind of number one plant exports? For me and my diet, I would say it's got to be the banana. I am fairly certain that Europe I didn't have bananas because they're very to me associated

with like Costa Rica, Central America, whatever. I imagine that's where they came from. But in my head, that would be it because I find them so yummy. But I bet you it's something a lot more practical. Like rice maybe. No, did that come from China? I don't know. I just want it to be bananas. I don't think bananas are from the Americas. I think they're from Indonesia and the Malay kind of. Ah, okay. Makes sense. Makes sense. In terms of plant exports, probably the most important is particular kinds of wood, especially Brazil wood in the early period and then rubber later. So Brazil wood, the fact is called Brazilwood tells you where it comes from, and it's

exported partly because it's a very hard wood, but also it makes amazing red dye again. We are really addicted to red dye. I know. So the Spanish export Cochineal and the French export Brazilwood. But let's move on. What product is named after the 17th century French diplomat and scholar Jean Niccoe? NICO. I had no idea, man. N-I-C-O-T.

Nicotine. Yeah, there we go. Nicotine, so tobacco. So it's a huge part of indigenous life in the Americas. And after the Colombian exchange, it's farmed and grown in the Virginia colony. And it becomes one of the most consumed substances in the world, Caroline, doesn't it? That's absolutely right. And people, I think, forget that whenever anybody is smoking or chewing tobacco, a pipe, cigarette,

it's an indigenous practice that's been exported around the world. Tobacco in the Americas is seen by various indigenous cultures as essential to physical, social, spiritual, well-being. The earliest archaeological evidence for the use of tobacco seeds is around 2,500 to 1800 BCE in Peru, and it's used in really different ways by different indigenous communities. So in Mesoamerica, in ceremonial practice, in an elite practice, you tended to inhale smoke through pipes and cigars. Workers chewed tobacco laced with lime, which alleviated tiredness and thirst and hunger, supposedly.

You can use it in symbolic ceremonies. Europeans arriving were often made part of tobacco ceremonies. And it's one of the first indigenous things that Columbus encounters. He's presented with dried tobacco leaves in 1492 on the 12th of October, I think it is. And they're a ceremonial gift, and then he throws them away. We've also got the diplomacy history, gift giving, which is a really important part of this story, the exchange element. And we do know of, as you said, the Maya people coming to the Spanish court.

What is that moment like? How are they speaking to the Spanish king? Well, this is in 1544 when a group of Maya lords led by a man who's become a great community hero among the Maya in his area. He leads an expedition to the Spanish court and several Maya lords come along with, Spanish priests who are local and community elders. And they bring all these gifts. They bring with them, though, in relation to the Colombian Exchange, all this amazing stuff. So they bring whisked chocolate, clay pot, chilies, beans, maize, ketzel feathers, loads of ketzel feathers. And these gifts have really symbolic meanings as well as practical ones. They're not just showing the riches of where they come from, but also the fact they're making cocoa and they're the first

people to make drinking chocolate in Europe that we know of. There's an earlier record of someone bringing beans, but this is the first record of drinking chocolate, and it's brought by Indigenous people made at the Spanish court. And presumably that means there were women who aren't mentioned in the party because women are usually the people who make the chocolate. They have this very successful expedition, and in return, the Spanish king gifts the delegation these huge silver bells for their church as well as all these other objects, crosses and cloth and religious objects to spread Catholicism in the Americas.

This is like when Homer gives March the bowling ball, right? Like, it's just like, we gave you all this like stuff that's important to us and useful and chocolate. And you're like, here's some Jesus stuff so we can wipe out your religion and your practices. There's a little bit more going on to it than that because actually our Popbats is supposedly the first Maya chief to voluntarily convert to Catholicism. And he does that because he's seen what happens to other communities around. Is that voluntarily then?

Well, that's the thing. Recorded as voluntarily is a careful phrasing. But it does seem like he deliberately realizes that if he acts in this particular way, it will protect his community. It's this amazing story of this incredible journey where they bring them, and the bells are so heavy they sink into the ground on the way back. And one of them, supposedly you can still hear ringing under the ground during storms and things because they can't recover it.

It's this amazing community history about that. first connection. Just a little mini quiz for you, Desirek, which of these foods were not in European or Asian or African cuisine prior to 1492? Okay, so I'm going to list lots of foods here and you tell me which of them was not available, okay? So, tomatoes, squashes, chilies, avocados, pumpkins, papaya, potatoes, blueberries, peanuts. Which of those not available? Do you want to give me the list again? I'm going to put you out your misery instead. I'm going to say we've basically cheated you here.

Every single one of them is from the Americas. I was going to say, where the heck did you get a papaya? So, you know, we think about tomatoes in Italian cuisine. We think about the importance of squash, you know, in African cooking. We think about avocados. What were Italians eating before tomatoes? Yeah, or potatoes. Imagine European food without potatoes or Indian food without potatoes or peanuts.

I mean, these are all from. the new world, as the Spanish are calling it. These are all from the Americas. So the colonialism is so woven into their identity that they wouldn't even have the foods we consider to be Italian without that. Exactly that. So, I mean, Caroline, do you want to talk us through some of these? And are there any ones I've missed out?

Well, there are so many, really, that I could just list huge numbers. But some of the ones that we're less aware of are actually the most valuable in terms of contemporary global trade. So peanut oil and sunflower oil are two of the biggest things to come out of the Columbia. in exchange, massively used in terms of modern value. Chili's are introduced to South Asian clicking by the Portuguese, and that's the beginning of a network that leads it then all across Africa and Asia. All beans, except soybeans, come from the Americas.

You have these three plants that are so central, don't you, to indigenous cuisine, maize, beans and squash, called the three sisters that are grown together. Europeans are really, really skeptical of this kind of growing, but you remember it's only 100 years or so later, they realize that you need to do crop rotation because of the land becoming deprived of nutrients where the beans are putting the nutrients back into the soil. The indigenous people are doing an amazing job of farming. Tomatoes are really, really popular, of course. They are getting all across Italy and Spain and places by the end of the 16th century. The word tomato is from the Nahuatl

language, which is the Aztec language. They become really popular. Potatoes are variably introduced. Ordinary people are eating them quite early on. They recognise their potential. Plus, they're not listed as one of the things you might get taxed on. So, of course, these new things start being eaten more widely because they're not in the list of things where people come and say, give me one tenth of your corn or whatever it is. I will say from personal experience that poverty really will diversify your diet.

Let's get onto one of my favorite foods, the fanciest of all the foodstuffs, the humble, or rather not humble, pineapple. Caroline, why is the pineapple so exciting for Europeans? And can you tell us about the history of the pineapple? It just seems really, really exotic, I think. And also it's very difficult to grow in Europe, which means that it's usually an import at the beginning. So it means you're rich enough to have one of them.

Basically, it's really, really tasty and unusual for Europeans. Walter Raleigh says, no man can express in words the excellence of that fruit. So far does it exceed all others, he says. They were always very understated, these Europeans. But as I say, it was very hard to grow, so it remains a luxury. And then so you get these amazing surviving things in European houses where they've sculpted pineapples in the banisters and things.

And it's a symbol of wealth and of luxury. And also a conversation starter. You put it on your table. And people go, ooh, what's that? Yeah, I mean, Desiree, you could actually rent a pineapple for your dinner party. Well, I've heard about this. It wasn't until I moved to the UK because I'm from California. there's pineapples. People will be having

pineapples. It's just a sweet fruit. But like that when the pineapple came, like there were parties, like regal parties and people be like, yo, Claire got a pineapple at our house. And people all just be like, we got to go and look at it. And I was just like, I mean, before TV happened,

entertainment was sparse, was it not? So that's a sort of huge global exchange. That's why it's called the Colombian exchange. Stuff comes in, stuff goes out. And all these foods and all these plants and all these animals that are now everywhere in the world, they are being ceded into new lands, into new fields, into new cultures and societies. It's an enormous transition. I mean, it's a really fascinating history, isn't it? Desiree.

I mean, it's delicious, for sure. It's tragedy plus yummy food, which I think is a story of like all cultures. This is where our expert, Dr Caroline, talks to us for two whole uninterrupted minutes. And without much further ado, can we have the nuance window, please, Caroline? It's really easy thinking about this topic to end up creating this picture of a jolly cosmopolitan world, a place where Europeans and indigenous peoples exchange thoughts and goods and where they're cultures and ideas entangled and where we get the roots of all the tasty things that make up our modern world.

But what often gets forgotten, I think, is the human dimension in all of this. When we do hear stories about the people involved, they're nearly always white men. Columbus, Magellan, Walter Raleigh with his tobacco and potatoes, even though he wasn't the first to bring either of those things to Europe. But indigenous people, as we've heard, also crossed the Atlantic from the very moment of first encounter. We heard about the Maya Lords at the Spanish court. And it's really tempting to think of them as an exception. But what I want to point out is that in reality,

tens of thousands of indigenous people came to Europe after 1492. These are the people who were smoking in the streets of Seville and preparing chocolate in family homes. They helped create the first indigenous alphabets. They demonstrated how to use Brazil-wood canoes and hammocks. They transformed European languages and cultures. Some of these people, like the Maya Lords, were elite ambassadors. Others were interpreters, traders, sailors, family members, servants.

But the majority, and those people who most often get forgotten, were the tens of thousands of enslaved people who were sold into the slave markets of Europe after 1492. Close to 5 million indigenous people were enslaved before 1900 and many of them were shipped to Europe across the Atlantic in appalling conditions. Like many African and African-descended peoples,

indigenous peoples too were dragged into the brutal transatlantic slave trade. They're not always easily visible to us in these stories, but they are part of this global history and part of the Colombian exchange. And so I want people to remember to look for them when they're thinking about this story. Thank you so much. Beautifully said.

Desiree, I mean, that's a really important final thought, isn't it, from Caroline? That's huge. Thank you so much because I think we tend to oversimplify our history, obviously, as you well know, as a historian. But you don't think about indigenous people being on all of those boats, indigenous people working themselves

into all of these European cultures as well. we don't hear about how important, not just the goods and the products, but the people have been to the formation of global culture and European culture. So thank you. Listener, if you want to hear more from Dr. Caroline Dodds Penock, you can check out our episode on the Aztecs way back in series one. Or if you're desperate for more Desiree, of course you are. Then you've got plenty to choose from my personal faith history of timekeeping

because we had a lovely nerdy time. And I think you slightly lost your mind at one point about how timekeeping rules the world. Yeah, it's overwhelming when you realize it. It's a good episode. But if you've enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review online, tell your pals about the podcast, share it around, subscribe to your dead to me on BBC Sound. So you never miss any future episodes. But I'd like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we had the brilliant Dr Caroline Dodd-Pennock from the University of Sheffield.

Thank you, Caroline. Thank you for having me on again and listening to me ramble about all of these fascinating things. And in Comedy Corner, the Birch Queen herself. It is Desiree Birch. Thank you, Desiree. I mean, it is always a pleasure. I've learned so, so much. So thank you.

Absolutely. It's fascinating stuff. And yeah, global history is everyone's history. So, you know, it's all interconnected. But to you, lovely listener, join us next time as we sink our teeth into more tasty historical treats. But for now, I'm off to go and see how much this pineapple is worth on eBay, because I reckon I can rent it out. Bye! You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios production for...

for BBC Radio 4. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince, and we're back for a new series of the Infinite Monkey Cage. We have our 201st extravaganza, where we're going to talk about how animals emote when around trains and tunnels, or something like that. I'm not entirely sure. You're doing one on potatoes.

Of course we're doing one on potatoes. You love potatoes. I know. Yeah, you love chips. I'll only enjoy it if it's got curry sauce on it. We've got techno fossils, moths versus butterflies, and a history of light, that'll do, won't it? Listen first on BBC Sounds.