The Great Geographical Discoveries from the Perspective of Environmental History--A book report on The Columbian Exchange

Abstract

The Columbian Exchange, the masterpiece of the American historian Alfred W. Crosby, is honored as the founding text for researches on environmental history, in which the author Crosby explored an environmental-history perspective that was novel at the time, re-examining the historic events in the Age of the Great Geographical Discoveries including Christopher Columbus's discovery of the Americas and Europeans' colonization there, and interpreting the history by virtue of exchanges and transitions of the environment and the creatures therein. From the perspective of historical research, this ecological-history perspective represented at that time a pioneering research progress.