ABSTRACT
The importance and the extent of the Global Atlantic becomes apparent as the chapter begins to follow the histories and patterns and processes that began to spread further afield via the Americas into the Pacific. In the early sixteenth century an ambitious political and legal Spanish elite would claim the entire Pacific Ocean as the Spanish Sea a single oceanic domain to be controlled by their empire. The expanding networks of the Global Atlantic led to the spread of Afro-Eurasian diseases into the Americas and the global distribution of silver, commodities, and manufactured goods, as well as numerous plants and agricultural crops, such as maize, potatoes, peanuts, tomatoes, tobacco, and chilies. A significant portion of the silver from the Western Hemisphere also ended up in Asia via Europe and its Global Atlantic Indian Ocean trade networks. These global biological and cultural exchanges were part of a phenomenon that the historian Alfred Crosby first described as the Columbian Exchange.
