any others followed, creating a new direction in story and altering forever the lives of the people of the Americas as the ecologies of Europe, Africa, and the Americas were joined into a single system. Crosby says that with the arrival of Columbus, the two worlds started to become more alike where they had been very different before:
That trend toward biological homogeneity is one of the most important aspects of the history of life on this planet since the retreat of the continental glaciers (Reilly 34).
Reilly points out that the arrival of the Europeans decimated the population of the Americas as the result of the introduction of new diseases. He finds that the Europeans also decimated the population of Africa with the slave trade so that one of the consequences of European conquest was the destruction of much of the indigenous population (Reilly 39). The countries of Latin America became more dependent on the foreigners who had changed their way of life forever.
Brazil can serve as an example. Brazil had a c
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