I have frequently heard about how smallpox devastated the new world’s indigenous populations during the beginning of colonization because they had no natural immunity. What I don’t understand is how did the reverse not happen. I naively assume indigenous diseases would impact Europeans and probably be brought back to Europe but I have never read of this happening.
In: Biology
Because civilization was different. The tribes of North America lived in much smaller groups and in much less density
Their farming of animals was very different
The tribes of noth America weren’t great hosts for major diseases because the lack of density and mobility
They didn’t really have diseases in the amount europeans did. A huge amount of diseases are from animal farms. Like bird flu, there are a lot of diseases that can go between animals and humans. But natives didn’t really do that, not anywhere near as much as in Europe.
Aside from not having as many diseases directly, the europeans also had stronger immune systems in general. Having to deal with so many disease made their bodies more able to handle the introduction of new ones. the natives did not have the same protection.
So it’s a few things.
1) they absolutely did. Syphilis being a big one
2) relative densities. The European settlers were generally fewer in number in the “new world” creating less density of population to spread between. A lot of colonizers were *colonizers* they didn’t *go back*.
3) European society at the time was already more global than indigenous ones. The average European colonist had more exposure to different people, and thus different diseases, then the much more isolated native tribes, having had the opportunity to build a more robust immune system. They were more prepared to fight off foreign infections because they were more likely to have interacted with foreigners during their lives
American diseases absolutely had an impact on Europeans during colonisation.
European colonists regularly got sick, likely including all sorts of new diseases from North America – it is harder to know which ones because they didn’t have the bring the best medical researchers with them; people got sick, many died, but that was that – there were fewer people to investigate which disease it was. And some of these diseases did make it back to Europe – the most (in)famous being syphilis, which probably originated in the Americas and was seriously deadly when first brought to Europe in the 1490s.
There are a few factors that led to this not being quite as dramatic:
* Europeans already had contact with most of the world’s human population. They had had a lot of pandemics and epidemics, of European, Asian, African etc. diseases. Whereas the American populations were pretty well isolated from the rest of the world. The Europeans had more stuff to spread,
* in terms of raw numbers, it was easier for European diseases to spread in North American populations that vice versa. Initially you had smaller European settlements, where if one small group got wiped out by a disease that would be the end of the story, whereas in the larger Native settlements diseases had a lot more room to spread and cause havoc,
* Europeans could bring their diseases to the Americas when they travelled there – but any infection too dramatic would have a hard time being brought back to Europe by the travelling Europeans as they would be dead or too sick to travel.
* the part we’re not really supposed to talk about; genocide. Sicknesses cause more problems for populations that are ‘stressed’ (short on water, food, medicine, etc.). Early European colonies and expeditions definitely had this problem (and there are early expeditions where ~75% were wiped out by disease). But once established this was less of an issue for them. But as Europeans expanded into North America, driving back the Native populations, taking their land, food sources, water sources etc., that put increasing amounts of ‘stress’ on them, making them more vulnerable to diseases.
Diseases from Tropical Africa absolutely fucking kicked the European’s teeth in, and so they instead razed entire villages and thousands of years of history to the ground, herded off locals to work as slaves in mines and farms, and left as few people as could reliably murder the entire population with automatic weapons if they started getting upity, and stuck to exporting shitloads of their population to places that they could most easily live because there weren’t that many native plagues
The reason why there wasn’t any massive plagues from the Americas that fucked Europeans hard was because there weren’t any beasts of burden in America and in general there was a lot less good targets for domestication in the Americas and typically it was cleaner
Less diseases, no large scale animal domestication leads to the viruses that we know today, not being present in North America. Most of the viruses besides smallpox came from animals.
This is based on an erroneous assumption. The widespread epidemic had started well before the Europeans came and was just as likely to affect them except so many natives had already died they struggled to fight the settlers, otherwise they would have trounced them as they did earlier explorers. When the wave of settlers came that succeeded here, so many natives has ALREADY died that the population was small and spaced out. All people got sick from eachother, but massive numbers of natives were already gone. Lands were cleared and farmed land areas just left out all over making America seem a natural paradise- it wasn’t, it was the abandoned remains of a dying population.
Before Columbus there were a lot less diseases circulating in the New World than the Old World, because there were far fewer people there and because there weren’t many domesticated animals (because humans already killed off most potential candidates like horses when they arrived from Asia). Europeans were exposed to pandemics that spread from Asia and potentially Africa, as well as anything that emerged in Europe, and a high proportion of human diseases originally jumped from or were spread by animals, hence the higher disease burden there compared to the Americas.
Additionally, it’s thought that Syphilis did originate in the Americas and spread through Europe after contact, so at least one disease travelled the opposite way.
Incidentally, Europeans trying to colonise tropical countries certainly were affected by diseases they had less immunity to. There’s a reason the ‘Scramble for Africa’ didn’t take place until after the popularisation of quinine treatment for malaria.
According to Jarret Diamond, a fctor is that the indigenous Americans did not live with their livestock, who act as reservoirs for these diseases, so there weren’t as many to infect the Europeans.
Another thing I want to mention is that living in close quarters with domesticated animals increases the likelihood that a disease will jump from animals to humans.
A lot of the diseases Native Americans got were from the livestock that Europeans brought over. Europeans naturally had immunity.
Most indigenous Americans had a hunter-gatherer culture instead of an agrarian culture.
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