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
For one thing some of the European invaders of North America decided that they would deliberately infect natives with smallpox by giving them tainted blankets, clothes and other goods. Pure evil.
If your question is “why are there so few native Americans left”, surely contact with Europe and their diseases had something to do with it but are we not going to talk about the systemic “wars” against these people carried out by the US government as they colonised westwards?
Isolated places in Asia and Africa did suffer. Particularly in parts of far north eastern asia, the parts across from Alaska, colonization and disease devastated the populations there, just as happened to their counterparts in America.
However, many parts of africa and asia that seem isolated, really weren’t. East african ports in particular was part of trade routes linking India, Africa, and Europe for millenia. And these coastal hubs had links deep into the continent. Western Africa was connected via trade routes across the Sahara. Mansa Musa, the Emperor of Mali, went on Hajj to Mecca in the 1320s, a few decades before the Black Death would arrive in that part of the world.
Because you adapt to your surroundings. Native Americans did not have immunity to some afflictions because it wasn’t in their environment until the Europeans came along. Also they gave them blanked riddled with measles
Lots of good answers here.
A limited number of traders interacted for centuries between Europe, Asia and Africa. Millions of Europeans moved to the Americas and started interacting with hundreds of thousands of native Americans.
Few people went from China to Europe until Marco polo, but more traders along the silk road had shorter stunts long before then. One trader from the Middle east to persia. Another from Persia to India, and another from India to China. This limited the contact and slowed it down disease transmission giving people time to adjust. Limited contact means one disease can spread one at a time and over the course of many years.
If we look at the mongol army (lots of people), it spred the area between China and Europe. Along with this improved connection, we have the spread of the bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis), which has an outbreak 2000 years ago (and still persists) in China. This is an example of lots of people interacting with lots of new people in a short amount of time and spreading diseases.
When the Spanish visited the inca cities, hundreds of thousands lived in the inca capital with no previous immunity. Lots of people meeting lots of new people in a short amount of time is great for spreading diseases. Here we see a whole range of different diseases all impacting at once.
Another factor I don’t see here is survivor bias. Those diseases probably did impact remote places in Africa and Asia, but those communities didn’t survive.
Even if they were remote in one generation, they could have had more contact in previous generations or earlier in life.
The low number of people meeting infrequently in remote locations also makes it harder for diseases to travel.
Not sure native americans were decimated by disease more shot by white men and died of too much whiskey.
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