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The year 2022 is the 50th anniversary of Alfred Crosby's celebrated book – The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. In the book, Crosby was the first to discuss the impact that the Spanish and Portuguese colonial periods had on world agriculture and human culture. How the crops of the world became homogenized, and how an indigenous culture was destroyed by disease after Columbus landed. His landmark study broke new ground in its broad conceptualization of the Atlantic exchange.
Building on what Crosby so succinctly and brilliantly presented, the main goal of this new work is to present the depth of information that has emerged since "The Columbian Exchange" and to discuss more fully the development of crops and agriculture before and after the Iberian contact. It follows the journey of crops and livestock in the Old and New Worlds and ends with their distribution in today's world.
James F. Hancock is a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. He received his PhD in Genetics at the University of California, Davis. After a short stint in the Biology Department at the University of South Carolina, he moved to Michigan State University (MSU) as an assistant professor of Horticulture, where he was for over thirty years, being promoted to Professor in 1986. He was the Director of the Plant Breeding and Genetics Program at MSU from 2004 to 2009. The emphasis of his research has been on the breeding and genetics of blueberries and strawberries, and he has published prodigiously in these areas. His previous books have been The Strawberry; The Blueberry (with Jorge Retamales); Plantation Crops, Power and Plunder: Evolution and Exploitation; and Plant Evolution and the Origin of Crop Species. He has also edited Temperate Fruit Crop Genetics: Germplasm to Genomics, and Environmental Biosafety (with Rebecca Grumet, Karim Maredia and Cholani Weebadde). He is a fellow of the American Society for Horticultural Science, a Wilder medal recipient of the American Pomological Society, a former Fulbright Fellow to Chile, and received the Technology Transfer Achievement Award from the Innovation Center of MSU for his blueberry cultivar releases.
