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Conquest by Disease 12 March 2007 Volume 3, Issue 5
With all of our work exploring what the nations of the world think of the United States, we decided to have this month's World History To Go turn the tables on the U.S. impact on other nation by focusing on a critical aspect of what other nations and peoples have brought to the Americas. With conquest and settlement came freedom and opportunity for many, but also traumatic and devasting diseases. We focus here on how smallpox, malaria, yellow fever and others have shaped the growth of nations and the fall of others. Conquest by Disease
Caribbean Fevers
Inside the Berkshire Encyclopedia:
For more on these subjects, see articles on Biological Exchanges, Christopher Columbus, Animal Diseases and Plant Diseases. Malaria's MightA parasitical infection of the blood that produces high fevers and debilitation, malaria is one of the oldest diseases afflicting human beings. It first emerged in Africa, and as human beings migrated outward approximately 100,000 years ago, they brought malarial infections with them. Malarial fevers have been a scourge of humanity throughout much of the inhabited Afro-Eurasian landmass ever since. Historians of disease estimate that malaria has probably killed more people than any other disease in history. Early migrants crossing the land bridge from Asia into North America at the end of the last ice age apparently did not sustain the chain of infection, and it is generally held that malaria became established in the Western hemisphere following European contacts with the New World in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Malaria became the first truly global infection that was carried by a vector (an organism carrying a pathogen)—in this case, the mosquito, and today the parasitical infection is found in a broad tropical band that stretches around the globe.
[From the article “Malaria,” by James L. A. Webb, Jr. in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History.]
Plagues and PeoplesIf you've been forwarded this newsletter, sign up to receive new issues of World History to Go twice a month.
For more on the influence of disease on the course of history, consider reading Plagues and Peoples by W. H. McNeill, senior editor of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History and author of numerous books on global topics, including The Rise of the West.
With warm regards, |
When Christopher Columbus brought the Old and New Worlds together in 1492, he unleashed the organisms of each on the other. The most spectacular early result of the intermixing was the traumatic spread of Eastern Hemisphere infections among the Native Americans. The European conquest of the Americas was not so much a matter of brutality, though there was plenty of that, as of imported diseases. Smallpox figures significantly in the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru, and again and again throughout the Americas. The Native American population fell by as much, claim highly respected demographic historians, as 90 percent before beginning recovery. [From the article “Columbian Exchange,” by Alfred W. Crosby in the 
Caribbean islands and tropical coastlands of the Americas also proved hospitable to malaria and yellow fever from Africa once the species of mosquito that carried them got across the Atlantic on board slave ships. No exact time horizon for the arrival of malaria in the New World can be discerned, but in 1648 a lethal epidemic of yellow fever in Havana announced the arrival of that disease unambiguously. When it subsequently became endemic, survivors acquired a very potent protection against invading armies, since soldiers from Europe regularly fell ill and died of it within about six weeks of their arrival. This allowed the Spanish to overcome British efforts to conquer the sugar islands in the 18th century, doomed Napoleon's attempt to reconquer Haiti in 1801, and persuaded him to sell the Louisiana territory to Thomas Jefferson in 1803. Quite a political career for a virus from tropical Africa! [From the article “Diseases - Overview,” by William H. McNeill in the 
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