I’m not saying they weren’t affected at all, but something like 90% of Native Americans were wiped out while places like Japan and deep parts of the African interior didn’t suffer nearly as hard, even though they previously had basically no contact with Europe.
In: 1583
Some partially good answers in here, but I think one thing that is getting overlooked is that Europeans came to the New World with colonization on their minds, and one of the methods they used was biological warfare by speading smallpox to the Indigenous population.
Indigenous people weren’t dying because white people brought cold and flu season with them, but because of a very detailed plan to infect them with a highly transmissable and deadly disease.
Starting in the early Edo period, a new Yokai (Demon) appeared in Japan: the [Korori](https://monster.fandom.com/wiki/Korori?file=Korori.JPG). A tricky monster that breathed a foul breath spreading an invisible sickness that afflicted entire households and sometimes took whole villages.
We call it Cholera today, and the 1862 outbreak in Edo killed hundreds of thousands. It was brought entirely due to contact with traders from the west.
But of course it didn’t have the same total devastation effect that was seen in the Americas and there are a number of reasons for this.
Native Americans were uniquely susceptible to diseases from Eurasia because their immune systems were primed differently than Eurasian people’s. Specifically, when your immune system is developing your body can specialise in creating cells which are either extremely effective against microbes / infectious diseases, or against parasites like hookworms and tapeworms etc.
Native American immune systems were heavily primed against parasites, and weak against microbial diseases. Eurasian and African peoples, thanks to millennia of animal domestication and exposure to the many plagues that have swept across the continents are much more capable of dealing with microbial infection. So even in cases like Korori, you are looking at a group of people with a much better toolset to deal with that type of disease than the Native Americans had.
This is also why Europeans struggled where Native Americans didn’t when it comes to disease. The stereotype of the “lazy southerner” comes mostly due to the fatigue side effects of the [hookworm infections](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-south-a-bad-name/) that were shockingly widespread in the US even into the 20th century.
edit: added links
They basically did succumb. For instance, Europe through China had the Black Death about a hundred years before Columbus sailed and possibly as many as 50% of Europeans died from that. The year 1300’s version of that was also like their XBB.1.5 variant — it wasn’t the original bubonic plague strain and a lot of people already had some form of immunity.
The Americas then were hit with at least several hundred years of viral mutations all at once.
Some remote places in Asia were affected terribly. Native people in coastal eastern Siberia, the Kamchatka region, had the population collapse pretty badly.
Asia, Africa, and Europe are all part of one connected landmass with many connected close by islands that constantly developed and traded different ideas, goods, peoples, and diseases. The Americas for the most part were not. I think it’s more reasonable to think of the diseases sent to Native America as a sort of joint development over many different civilizations of a wealth of Old World diseases and that Europe was simply the vector by which the Americas for the most part received a rich tapestry of pathogens.
Japan is not a remote part of Asia as it has had a lot of long-standing close contact with China and the Korean peninsula and other parts of the mainland as well as other nearby islands which were also connected among each other and with the mainland.
Sub-Saharan Africa for the most part not isolated either. There were connected settlements through the Nile River system with different societies interacting with each other, Indian Ocean trade routes, and camel caravans for quite a while crossing the Sahara. From there on was also quite a bit of trade within the interior. There is some evidence that some more isolated groups like the Khoisan got hit by some new diseases, but it probably wasn’t the sudden onslaught of the introduction of multiple new diseases at once.
The European diseases that destroyed Native American peoples came from large cities and concentrated animal domestication. Animals and humans packed together get sick and the worst diseases go back and forth a few times. It wasn’t unique to Europe.
Those remote places in China and Africa were nearby large cities long before. They already had their rampant disease filters in the past, so the populations were already more genetically immune.
Very large cities and concentrated animal domestication in both Africa and China with empires to make sure diseases reached even the far corners. We have better documentation of China than we do of Africa, but both are well known.
The Americas are incredibly huge and I don’t think the North American populations ever reached that level of concentration along with animal domestication.
I’d recommend the books “1491” and “1492” by Charles C. Mann. Very interesting studies of pre and post-colombian exchange. He discusses many things including the exchange of diseases between the two hemispheres and their distinct ecology.
One interesting difference was that North American Native Americans did not keep livestock in but Asians and Africans did.
This is interesting because a lot of these devastating diseases jumped from livestock to humans long ago. Asians and Africans had some degree of immunity because other strains of the viruses in question jumped from livestock to humans.
It’s why poultry is often culled as a preventative action.
Additionally contact over long periods between populations means a lot of the same diseases were floating around. The flu didn’t exist in North America prior to contact and that decimated populations but it was an old hat in the rest of the world.
By contrast Rinderpest, a cattle disease, swept through Africa in the late 1800s and early 1900s and wiped out the vast majority of herds, which in turn was responsible for food shortages, famine and related illnesses, and man-eating lions and leopards as there was a mass death rates among all ungulates. Luckily this disease has not jumped into human populations.
Besides what has already been said, the America’s lacked access to large domestic mammals besides llamas pretty much, so no cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses. This is grossly simplified but being around these animals spreads diseases to humans, but over hundreds of years the people become more tolerant of the germs and more immune to the diseases from the animals. Because the Native Americans did not have this same centuries long immunity, they got decimated from the diseases and germs the Europeans carried and were mostly immune to. Asia and Africa were pretty connected through trade and had some of these animals so they also became mostly immune, but it is probable that remote populations that hadn’t been exposed could have been taken out too. That was my basic explanation but you’ll find a better one on r/askhistorians
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