We often hear indigenous peoples died from disease introduced by European settlers in North and South America. If indigenous peoples there were susceptible to eradication by unfamiliar disease why is the same not true of disease and death to settlers? Or is it true but more easily overcome?
In: Biology
They did. Part of the impetus for the acceleration of the slave trade was to keep profitable plantations running in the face of a high death rate among workers.
It’s complicated. Disease transmission is not necessarily an even exchange; you give me two and I give you the same . And even when there are relatively similar numbers of new diseases, they are not necessarily transmitted in the same way or are equally deadly. The immune system learns and develops as it encounters new diseases; if a disease doesn’t kill on first contact we may still see illness but not deaths.
[this](https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk?si=2vBfoC6sCL1kOlS2) is a great video on the topic from about 10 years ago, I highly recommend you check it out
They absolutely died of disease. A lot.
Scotland tried set up a colony in Central America only for most of the settlers to die from disease. The failure bankrupted Scottish finance so much that they were eventually forced to accept joining a union with England.
Most of our nastier diseases come to us from our domestic animals. The much smaller range of these in the Americas meant much fewer diseases to catch .
Well the first is that many settlers did die of disease. Jamestown, Plymouth, and pretty much every other colony suffered heavily from disease (made worse due to poor conditions and malnutrition). Growth in these early colonies was slow and needed heavy backing.
Second is that while indigenous populations in the Americas had no immunity compared to Europeans, European settlers also exploited the ravaged populations and general societal breakdown via expansion. This lead to warfare (native groups fighting Europeans and/or native groups fighting other groups), expulsion, and slavery (encomienda system for example).
Survivorship biased.
Failed expeditions do not have tales to tell.
There is an advantage of being a settler. You have a home base for people to do research. You can ask the people back home for an answer. They can keep sending people over to overcome the problem. If you have more knowledge of the world, your chances of having an answer is better.
Plus the initial settlers are usually the fittest as they need to survive the voyage. If you are the native, you have got children and elderly to take care of. A pandemic is going to wreck more havoc on the vulnerable population.
They did, but unlike the indigenous peoples, they were able to choose the places they wanted to be. Daron Acemoglu for instance suggests settler mortality was an important factor for European colonialism, e.g. we don’t really see too many settlers in the tropical zones because of this.
They did. The early colonization of the 17th century had a death rate of about 50% in the first year. It was called the seasoning sickness. After that in Virginia about 1 in 10 lived to prosper. Further along, next century, in those tough enough to survive, the child mortality rate was humongous.
European colonists did die of disease, especially as they got closer to the equator. Until the discovery of quinine, exploring Sub-Saharan Africa was a death sentence for Europeans.
Native Americans had no genetic immunity diseases that the Europeans carried for several reasons. Native Americans were not especially genetically diverse, and they did not have domesticated animals that are usually the vector for disease.
West Africans are actually less susceptible to tropical disease, especially malaria (sickle cell trait). Africans made attractive slaves in the new world because they died of tropical disease at lower rates than natives or Europeans (this does not justify slavery however).
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