Nutrition in African History Nutrition has played a much more varied role in history than most historians consciously recognize. Some themes are taken as axiomatic. We can take it for granted that Europe came to be fed by the overseas world as part of the vast complex of change that goes by the name of the Industrial Revolution, just as we take it for granted that the Midwest's ability to feed New England somehow caused the abandonment of the homesteads the chimneys of which can still be found deep in the woods of the Berkshires and the White Mountains. Historians have also recognized the significance of the "Columbian Exchange"-to use Crosby's phrase for the exportation of Old World diseases, animals, and people to the Americas after 1492 in return for the New World crops like maize and potatoes that did so much to change the nutritional potential of the entire Afro-Eurasian landmass.1