Sweet potatoes were first brought over to the Old World by the Spanish. Due to many different currency changes, China was becoming poorer and poorer. When sweet potatoes were first brought to China, in a small amount of time, China’s population doubled from 150,000,000 to 300,000,000. This means that due to sweet potatoes, China became richer which allowed people to feed more children. Without this potato growth, China would not have been able to keep the people of their culture alive. Today, China is still the world’s largest sweet potato producer and seller. This means that sweet potato growth in China of this time largely affected China today. Therefore, sweet potatoes made an immense impact on the Old World and in the Columbian …show more content…
Diseases during the Columbian Exchange were exchanged from both New World to Old World and Old World to New World. When Columbus first came to the Americas, the New World was populated with more than 10 million Native Americans, but it was reduced to less than a million by the time Columbus left to go back to the Old World. Due to these diseases, the population decreased 90% due to disease. Scientists have proven that the people of the New World had only one disease that barely affected the either population. However, more than 100 diseases were brought over from the Old World including the bubonic plague, smallpox, the flu, yellow fever, etc. Without these diseases, there would be many more Native Americans today. The current population of Native American descendants is 5,220,579. For these reasons, some believe that disease made the largest impact on the Columbian