7 ms·

Is that true? I've read that 90+% of the population died from diseases, the vast majority without ever knowing about the European conquerors (that is, they neve

• kristopolous 5y ago
  I've always wondered why this wasn't a two-way street. Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share? I know the imperialists weaponized their diseases and intentionally tried to spread it and that may be the difference. Usually the smallpox theory is presented in a way that removes agency and culpability from the conquerers. It's always struck me as remarkably convenient and quite unbelievable; they were an idyllic people in some wondrous land without their own disease. Oh really now ... we're talking the Caribbeans here. Even the Wikipedia page on the matter (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influx_of_disease_in_the_Caribbean https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influx_of_disease_in_the_Car...), does it cite epidemiological sources with someone looking at like bone sample DNA? No. It's economic and social science. Excuse me for questioning the qualification of economists for being able to authoritatively make confident statements about historical virology. It may be true but I'd like more evidence than convenient stories by the descendent of a conquerer about how by sheer coincidence his/her ancestors were actually not guilty of genocide and as of by miracle, North America became a land without people; it just happens to follow Frederick Jackson Turners Frontier Thesis a little too closely to be called a coincidence.
  • gameman144 5y ago
    From what I've read, native populations had less frequent interactions with livestock (through which many diseases arise) and less concentration in poor-sanitation settings (e.g. urban centers without sewers), both of which gave European settlers more exposure to transmissible pathogens in the centuries before settlement.
  • dleslie 5y ago
    > Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share? Not all diseases are equally harmful, right? Perhaps the indigenous populations of the Americas simply lacked a disease as deadly as those brought by the Europeans.
    • handrous 5y ago
      IIRC a lot of Eurasian diseases were a result of long-term close contact with domesticated animals. Guess which side of the Atlantic didn't really have domesticated animals....
  • michaelbuckbee 5y ago
    IIRC that certain aspects of how livestock were raised in Europe contributed to a long history of more virulent illnesses so that when the European population eventually met the North American it was the North American that suffered.
  • not2b 5y ago
    It's possible that syphilis was brought back to Europe from the New World by the Spanish. That hasn't been proven though. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis : The first recorded outbreak of syphilis in Europe occurred in 1494/1495 in Naples, Italy, during a French invasion ...
  • roywiggins 5y ago
    The usual explanation is that the Europeans lived in much closer proximity with livestock... smallpox probably came from cows, etc. Also it's generally believed that syphilis didn't exist in the Old World before 1492, so there's at least one disease that probably made the opposite journey. However, the disease narrative doesn't absolve the Europeans. Nobody forced the European powers to colonize the Americas. If they'd packed up and gone home, even if the Americas had still been decimated by smallpox, they would have bounced back, given the opportunity. Human populations tend to do that. (The Black Death is sort of an exception, it suppressed European population for a long time, because it kept coming back, killing a bunch of people, and then going away again. But- Europe thrived during that period, the Renaissance was coterminous with very bad bubonic plague outbreaks)
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  • LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    > I've always wondered why this wasn't a two-way street. Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share? Cities are a breeding ground for diseases. America wasn’t densely populated at the time.
  • sharikous 5y ago
    Well, syphilis went the other way
  • sjburt 5y ago
    First, it was a two-way street. Syphilis, for one, is believed to have originated in the new world and have been brought to Europe post-contact. But Europe, Asia, and Africa combined was a much bigger population pool, so more opportunities for mutation and transmission leading to more types of infectious diseases.
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  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    > I've always wondered why this wasn't a two-way street. Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share? They did: syphilis! But the Europeans had far more diseases to share because there was far more animal domestication going on in the Old World. And most of our diseases came as a result of that animal domestication, so they had already spread through the population which developed immunity in the millennia between the first human infection and the Columbian Exchange. > Usually the smallpox theory is presented in a way that removes agency and culpability from the conquerers. It's always struck me at remarkably convenient and quite unbelievable; they were an idyllic people in some welder land without their own diseases, oh really now ... we're talking the Caribbeans here Typically I hear "the smallpox theory" presented as "Europeans killed 90% of Native Americans including by disease" as though Europeans collectively set out to exterminate Native Americans. To be certain, there was a lot of brutality and genocide and even some deliberate spread of disease, but no European could have credibly believed that the disease would spread throughout the new world to such effect.
    • alwillis 5y ago
      but no European could have credibly believed that the disease would spread throughout the new world to such effect. Certainly not, but once they figured out what was going on, they certainly aided and abetted the spread of these new diseases.
      • throwaway894345 5y ago
        They didn’t find out what was going on until the 20th century… Before that they thought it was God’s judgment on the heathens or something.
        • tomrod 5y ago
          They sent blankets used by infected people. They didn't understand germ theory, but they understood contagion.
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  • antasvara 5y ago
    I think the key is density in Europe vs North America. Europe was living in densely packed cities with domesticated animals in close proximity, while North America had smaller communities and less domestication. As a general rule, this makes disease spread and zoonotic viruses much less likely.
  • seph-reed 5y ago
    CPG Grey has a great video on this exact subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk In short, you need cities to develop these types of viruses. Cities where the virus can just keep killing, without ever hitting a dead end.
    • VHRanger 5y ago
      Fwiw that's based on "Guns, Germs and Steel" which is not very respected as an academic work
      • vintermann 5y ago
        A lot of what he says in it is uncontroversial stuff that he didn't come up with himself. But you don't get much academic respect for things others have said before you, even if you succeed at bringing it to a new audience (especially if you don't pepper it with source references, which I don't recall GGS doing!) Being a wildly successful popularizer is always risky for an academic. The most serious criticisms I've seen have been about tangential stuff.
      • seph-reed 5y ago
        So, I just went down a rabbit hole of criticisms on Guns, Germs, and Steel... it's largely coming from the far left and far right. Very few moderates. The far left says it's a cop out on racism, blaming white evil on natural conditions. The far right says that it's too PC, that plenty of other places had the right conditions and gives no credit to culture or innovation. So both the far left and far right want to take credit from chaos and put it on the people: either to hate them, or to take pride. This in and of itself is not proof of anything. But if something pisses off far left and right at the same time, I tend to think of it as a green flag.
        • VHRanger 5y ago
          Uh, go to a place like r/badhistory where they actually cite sources for their problems with it for a start Actual academics have problems with it
  • space_fountain 5y ago
    I think parts of it are deeply controversial, but Guns, Germs, and Steel argues this was because Europe had higher population densities for longer + more domesticated livestocks providing a more potent breading ground for deadly diseases. I also think that disease being a factor hardly removes culpability from the conquers, there are plenty of quotes of some of them saying things about how the plagues were a gift from god and similarly terrible things. I also am not an export, but I believe there was some transfer in the other direction, particularly syphilis. If we're just speculating though, I wonder if the fact that one group was traveling by boat could have insulated the disease transfer a bit. Most really bad diseases would run their course by the time a sailing ship made it back across the ocean and certainly people knew to quarantine ships with sick people on them in Europe. For a disease the ship crews were resistant to reach the Americas they just had to visit a village, where to go the other way it had to survive an in built month plus quarantine which is plenty of time for most diseases to show up
  • heavyset_go 5y ago
    Population density and totals, and their proximity to animals and their waste, matter. Extensive trade and empire building exposes people to new pathogens and allows new ones to develop, as well.
• AlotOfReading 5y ago
  This is not accurate. Individual epidemics did not have mortalities even approaching the 90% range. What actually happened were dozens of epidemics over decades or centuries. Moreover, outside the Northeast, Columbian epidemics are closely associated with persistent European contact and colonization. It should also be noted that human populations are incredibly resilient to epidemics. In the absence of "other things", populations suffering catastrophic virgin soil epidemics will typically rebound to pre-epidemic levels in decades. It's not a sufficient explanation for the centuries-long decline of indigenous American populations. The black death was no less severe and successor epidemics continued throughout Europe in the 15th century, yet we see nothing like the demographic collapse of the Americas post-contact.
  • caethan 5y ago
    More than 90% collapse in Mexico from 1520 to 1580, mostly from three epidemics. Starting from ~22m, 8m (37%) dead from a 1520 smallpox epidemic, 12-15m dead (~80%) from a 1545 cocolitzli epidemic, and another ~2m dead (~50%) from a 1576 cotolitzli epidemic. Mexican population didn't recover to its previous highs until the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics
  • irrational 5y ago
    Isn't that because Europe was able to bounce back while in the Americas, the diseases were immediately followed up by the European colonizers who didn't give them time or space to repopulate?
    • AlotOfReading 5y ago
      That's exactly the point. Epidemic disease alone is an insufficient explanation for the demographic collapse of indigenous Americans.
      • bobthepanda 5y ago
        Is it not? We have a more recent example in Hawaii. Hawaii was not subjugated by any foreign power until the 1890s. That being said, the Native Hawaiian population pretty much collapsed from a high of 300,000 in 1770 to 20,000 in 1920.