When the Europeans travelled to the New World and brought the diseases that wiped out so many Native Americans, why didn’t the local diseases have the same impact on them?

Question

Were the endemic diseases just less severe?

In: Other

Answer 1

On top of what others have said, in many places disease was a very real concern for Western Europeans. Well into the 19th century, diseases like yellow fever and malaria made it incredibly dangerous for Europeans to travel through places like Africa or even India.

In India for example, the British spent 100 years building up Calcutta as a center of trade before they really began conquering the country. But for all those years, the white population of Calcutta was extremely low (like 1000 people) because the risk of dying of disease was so high. The reward was great as well, so people literally got rich or died trying.

It took the invention of things like anti-malarial medications to really allow the full-scale rapid colonization of whole swathes of Africa and Asia that was seen in the 1800s