Topics in World History: Population and Disease
Introduction to Population and Diseases
Before about 12,000 years ago, most humans were nomadic, living in temporary shelters and small-scale societies. When humans
eventually settled down to a sedentary life of agricultural production and animal husbandry, they encountered an entirely new set of
problems. Larger populations settled in urban areas were a consequence of increasing complexity. Those who were congregated in
confined areas faced dangers from parasites and infectious diseases unknown to the earlier, more mobile populations. Many of the
most virulent infectious diseases of human history--like smallpox, plague, measles, cholera, influenza, malaria, and tuberculosis-developed first in animals, spreading from domestic herds to humans. While people lived in isolated communities, diseases tended to
become progressively less virulent over time. Many people might die when the illness first appeared, but over time, those who
survived were likely to develop immunities until diseases became endemic and only small children contracted them. New sets of
problems arose as people established regular communication over wider areas. Travelers regularly brought new diseases along with
commercial items. Urbanization compounded the problem, since they often depended on resources brought by traders and other
travelers. Once new diseases found their way into the community, crowded living conditions allowed pathogens to find a greater
number of hosts with very little effort. A sneeze, improper waste disposal, or the eruption of a pustule might infect dozens of people.
Two of the greatest factors in the spread of disease are population density and interactions between groups. During the early
epidemics, such as the one that devastated the Roman and Han empires, people living in the frontier zones suffered less. Many of the
nomadic people of the African and Eurasian continents--such as the Ottoman Turks, for instance--felt relatively little impact from the
great plague of the fourteenth century.
The spread of disease from one area to another also depends on the speed of travel. As the old stories of "ghost ships" attest, when
travel was slow, people infected with disease having a short incubation period might die before having the chance to pass it along. The
faster and more frequent the travel, the more likely the disease was to reach epidemic and, after about CE 1492, global proportions.
Yet, despite the diseases that people pass along to each other over greater and greater distances, the earth's human population
continues to soar. Advances in medical technology have increased the human lifespan for many societies, as well as overcoming many
of the historical causes of early death. In the year 3000 BCE, there were approximately 14 million humans; in 500 BCE, the
population had grown to about 100 million. By 1900, it had soared to 1.65 billion; thence to over 6 billion a mere century later. Much
of this increase is attributed to a remarkable decline in death rates around the world. Although birth rates have declined (in poor
societies as well as the more affluent), a corresponding drop in infant mortality rates has guaranteed that more children will survive to
create new generations. A generation ago, many scientists and environmentalists predicted a Malthusian crisis--population increases
beyond the capacity to produce food, causing famines and wars--but it now appears that wages and food production are keeping up
with population increases. There is considerable debate about how long this world historical trend will continue into the future.
I. Travels of the Black Death
The Mongol Empires linked China, Russia, Southwest Asia and the Eurasian steppes, bringing about an unprecedented ease of travel
and communication. The Mongols encouraged commerce and trade and provided protection for travelers across the broad expanses
they controlled. Although they did not directly control North Africa or Western Europe, traders from those areas were drawn to their
markets. Opinions differ about the exact origins of the plague known in Europe as the Black Death, but there are strong indications
that it erupted from the Yunnan region of southwestern China. It may have been endemic in the area for centuries, but remained
localized until the Mongol military campaigns spread the disease into the interior of China. In 1331, about ninety percent of the
population of Hebei province (close to modern Beijing) died from the disease. It spread along the trade routes throughout Asia and
traveled to Europe with Genoese merchants fleeing the infected Black Sea ports. By 1348, the plague continued along the AfroEurasian trading routes, killing about one-fourth to one-third of the entire population, up to two-thirds of the inhabitants of some areas.
The disease typically caused the death of sixty or seventy percent of infected humans, and often wiped out whole villages. By the time
the plague erupted in China, the ruling Mongols had already become weakened by internal power struggles, and by the 1340s,
rebellions were erupting across southern China. The effects of the Black Death also stimulated far-reaching changes in Europe.
Serfdom practically disappeared, and movement toward a market economy accelerated. Some nomadic groups, such as the Ottoman
Turks, were not as severely affected as people in densely populated areas, and were able to take advantage of the power vacuum left
by the high mortality rates of more affluent societies, such as the Byzantine Empire.
------------------------------------Document No. 1: Demography and the Black Death
In lands hard hit by plague, however, it took a century and more to begin recovery from the demographic consequences of epidemic
disease. In 1300 China's population, already reduced by conflicts with the Mongols since the early thirteenth century, stood at eightyfive million. In 1400, after about seventy years of epidemic plague, Chinese numbers amounted to only seventy-five million. A
century later demographic recovery was underway, and China's population rebounded to one hundred million. European society also
reeled from the effects of bubonic plague. From seventy-nine million in 1300, European population dropped by almost 25 percent to
sixty million in 1400. As in China, demographic recovery in Europe was underway in 1500 when European population climbed to
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eighty-one million. Islamic societies in southwest Asia, Egypt, and north Africa also suffered devastating population losses, and
demographic recovery took much longer there than in China and Europe. In Egypt human population probably did not reach preplague
levels until the nineteenth centuries.
Because of the heavy demographic toll that it levied, bubonic plage disrupted societies and economies throughout Eurasia and north
Africa. Epidemics killed the young, the weak and the old in especially high numbers, but they spared no group. Peasants and laborers,
artisans and craftsworkers, merchants and bankers, priests and nuns, rulers and bureaucrats all fell before the plague's onslaught. The
disease caused massive labor shortages, which in turn generated social unrest.
In Western Europe, for example, urban workers demanded higher wages, and many left their homes in search of better conditions.
Political authorities responded by freezing wages and forbidding workers to leave their homes. For their part, peasants in the
countryside also sought to improve their circumstances by moving to regions where landlords offered better terms. Landlords
responded to this challenge by restricting the freedom of peasants to move and by reimposing labor requirements: in effect, the lords
sought to reinstate conditions of serfdom that they had allowed to lapse before the arrival of the plague. As a result of sharply
conflicting interests, disgruntled workers and peasants mounted a series of rebellions that rocked both the towns and the countryside of
western Europe. Authorities eventually extinguished revolts, but only after considerable social disruption and loss of life.
See larger versions of the below photos on my webpage: WWW.LRWIELAND.COM/PBOOTHE
Document No. 2: Chinggis Document No. 3: Death
Document No. 4: Man
Document No. 5: Band
Khan Captures City
Dying of Plague
of Mongol Riders
Document 6: Mongol Domains in Eurasia
II. Diseases in Early Empires
Ancient peoples who resided in empires, such as the Assyrians and Persians, probably first constructed roads for military purposes, but
traders, entertainers, and holy pilgrims always made good use of them. Road technology made contact between widely separated
societies more regularized and convenient, and thus invariably accelerated the spread of contagious diseases. Infectious diseases are
generally transmitted only through close contact. Before frequent interaction between societies, it was possible for infectious diseases
to be confined to one group. After the development of road systems, the pathogens could spread from person to person across
thousands of miles in much the same manner as relay runners pass along batons. Even with a relatively short incubation period, an
infected person had time to infect fellow travelers before succumbing. Archaeological evidence confirms that occasional epidemics
occurred along early trade routes, but one most widely spread was the result of the developing trading networks that overlapped
between Han China and the Roman Empire. Although direct contact between the two powerful anchors seems to have been very rare,
infectious diseases traveled along with other trade items. The interlocking trading zones that spanned the Eurasian landmass had
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transmitted the elite status symbols and ideas that helped to define the classical era. They also transmitted the means of its destruction.
Weakened by the epidemics, neither was able to resist the pressures of ambitious warrior societies on their frontiers. Neither Imperial
Rome nor Han China regained their former power. China dissolved into regional states until reunified under the Sui Dynasty. Despite
the best efforts of Charlemagne and Napoleon, Europe never coalesced.
Document No. 1: Demographic Impact of Disease
Like religious faiths, infectious and contagious diseases also spread along the trade routes of the classical world. Aided by longdistance travelers, pathogens had opportunities to spread beyond their original environments and attack populations with no inherited
or acquired immunities to the diseases they caused. The resulting epidemics took a ferocious toll in human lives.
Information about human populations in classical times is scanty and full of gaps. Scholars often do not have records to work with and
must draw inferences about population size from the area enclosed by city walls, the number of houses discovered in a settlement, the
agricultural potential of a region, and similar considerations. As a result, population estimates for premodern societies are rough
approximations rather than precise figures. Moreover, within a single society, individual regions often had very different demographic
experiences. Nevertheless, even for classical times, the general outlines of population history are reasonably clear.
During the reign of Augustus, the populations of the Roman empire stood at about sixty million people. During the second century
C.E., epidemics reduced Roman population to about one-quarter, to forty-five million. Most devastating was an outbreak of smallpox
that spread throughout the Mediterranean basin during the years 165 to 180 C.E. The epidemic was especially virulent in cities, and it
even claimed the life of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (180 C.E.). In combination with wars and invasions, continuing outbreaks
caused a significant population decline during the third and fourth centuries: by 400 C.E. the number of Romans had fallen to perhaps
forty million. By the sixth century C.E., population had probably stabilized or perhaps even begun to expand in the eastern
Mediterranean, but western Mediterranean lands experienced demographic stagnation until the tenth century.
Epidemics appeared slightly later in China than in the Mediterranean region. From fifty million people at the beginning of the
millennium, Chinese population rose to sixty million in 200 C.E. As diseases found their way east, however, Chinese numbers fell
back to fifty million by 400 C.E. and to forty-five million by 600 C.E. Thus by 600 C.E. both Mediterranean and Chinese populations
had fallen by a quarter to a third from their high points during classical times.
Indeed, epidemic disease contributed to serious instability in China after the collapse of the Han dynasty, and in weakening the
Mediterranean society, it helped to bring about the decline and fall of the western Roman empire.
Document No. 2: Han Dining Scene
Document No. 5 Map: Roman Empire
Document No. 3: Plague
Victim with Physicians
Document No. 4 Map: Han China
Document No. 6 Map: The Black Death
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III. Demographic Effects of the Columbian Exchange
Over the millennia, plants, animals, and pathogens had developed very differently in previously isolated parts of the world, such as the
Americas, Australia, and the Pacific islands. The new intercontinental interactions led to an unprecedented exchange across ecological
regions, in a process also called "The Columbian Exchange." The exchange was not unprecedented--the early expansion of the Islamic
empires had diffused crops across much of the Eastern Hemisphere between 700 and 1100--but its impact and volume far exceeded
any previous occurrences. The Columbian Exchange resulted in unprecedented population growth in the Eastern Hemisphere and
widespread death in the Western--an unfair trade by any criteria. Diseases such as smallpox, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough,
and influenza were largely endemic: childhood diseases that caused the death of a few victims, but left many with lifelong immunities.
The New World population had no immunities. Beginning in 1519, epidemic smallpox ravaged the Aztec Empire, combining with
other diseases to claim about ninety-five percent of the native population before the diseases ran their course. Within little more than a
decade, smallpox seems to have spread from Mexico north to the Great Lakes and south to the pampas of Argentina. Wheat, vines,
and domestic animals also traveled from Europe to the Americas. Horses, particularly, were to make a difference in the lives of many
of the survivors. Food crops traveled in the other direction. The maize, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, peppers, peanuts, and various fruits,
enriched African, Asian, and European diets, allowing world populations to surge. After the new crops became established and
accepted, world population exploded.
Document No. 1: Competition for Land
Over the millennia, plants, animals, and pathogens had developed very differently in previously isolated parts of the world, such as the
Americas, Australia, and the Pacific islands. The new intercontinental interactions led to an unprecedented exchange across ecological
regions, in a process also called "The Columbian Exchange." The exchange was not unprecedented--the early expansion of the Islamic
empires had diffused crops across much of the Eastern Hemisphere between 700 and 1100--but its impact and volume far exceeded
any previous occurrences. The Columbian Exchange resulted in unprecedented population growth in the Eastern Hemisphere and
widespread death in the Western--an unfair trade by any criteria. Diseases such as smallpox, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough,
and influenza were largely endemic: childhood diseases that caused the death of a few victims, but left many with lifelong immunities.
The New World population had no immunities. Beginning in 1519, epidemic smallpox ravaged the Aztec Empire, combining with
other diseases to claim about ninety-five percent of the native population before the diseases ran their course. Within little more than a
decade, smallpox seems to have spread from Mexico north to the Great Lakes and south to the pampas of Argentina. Wheat, vines,
and domestic animals also traveled from Europe to the Americas. Horses, particularly, were to make a difference in the lives of many
of the survivors. Food crops traveled in the other direction. The maize, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, peppers, peanuts, and various fruits,
enriched African, Asian, and European diets, allowing world populations to surge. After the new crops became established and
accepted, world population exploded.
Document No. 2: Aztecs Ravaged by Smallpox
IV. 19th Century Plague Spread by Taiping War Refugees
Between 1800 and 1900, the population of China grew from 330 million to 475 million. Demographic pressures led to intense
competition for available resources. Land and wealth were concentrated in a small wealthy elite. Poverty, hunger, and desperation
drove peasants and the urban poor to frequent rebellion. The largest of these violent episodes was the Taiping rebellion (1850-1873).
Somewhere between twenty and thirty million people died in the rebellion--exact numbers are impossible, for how do you count the
people who died from diseases that resulted from the deteriorating conditions? Overcrowding in the confined areas, starvation,
widespread violence and the failure of sanitation measures led to the outbreak of epidemics across a wide area of China. Any event
that forces the dispersal of people can be a catalyst for the spread of disease. Refugees carried the plague with them, just as travelers
along the Silk Roads had done in previous centuries. Now, however, rapid transportation such as railroads and steamships spread
contagions much more rapidly. Outbreaks of the bubonic plague came to international attention in Hong King in 1894. There were
occurrences in ports on every continent within the next five years, including busy trading hubs like Bombay, Sydney, Honolulu, San
Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Alexandria, Cape Town, and Glasgow. Although the early nineteenth century "Yellow Peril"
concerns about migrant Chinese workers were clearly racist, there were valid medical concerns underlying some of the fears that led
to early twentieth-century restrictive laws regarding Chinese immigration.
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Document No. 1: Impact of Taiping Rebellion
The Taiping Rebellion ranks as the world's bloodiest civil war and the greatest armed conflict before the twentieth century. Estimates
of deaths range from 20 million to 30 million. The loss of life was due primarily to starvation and disease, for most engagements
consisted of surrounding the enemy holed up in fortified cities and waiting until they died, surrendered, or were so weakened that they
could be easily defeated. Many sieges continued for months, and people within some cities found that after starving for a year under
the occupation of the rebels they had to starve for another year under the occupation of the imperial forces. Reports of people eating
grass, leather, hemp, and human flesh were widespread. The dead were rarely buried properly, and epidemic disease was common.
The area of early Taiping fighting was closed to the regions of southwest China where bubonic plague had been lingering for
centuries. When the rebellion was suppressed, many Taiping followers sought safety in the highlands of Laos and Vietnam, which
soon showed infestation by plague. Within a few years the disease reached Hong Kong. From there it spread to Singapore, San
Francisco, Calcutta and London. In the late 1800s there was intense apprehension over the possibility of a worldwide outbreak, and
Chinese immigrants were regarded as likely carriers. This fear became a contributing factor in the passage of discriminatory
immigration bans on Chinese in the United States in 1882.
The Taiping Rebellion devastated the agricultural centers of China. Many of the most intensely cultivated regions of central and
eastern China were depopulated and laid barren. Decades later, some were still uninhabited, and provincial population figures show
that major portions of the country did not recover until the twentieth century. Cities too, were hard hit. Shanghai, a treaty port of
modest size before the rebellion, saw its population multiplied many times by the arrival of refugees from the war-blasted neighboring
provinces. The city then endured months of siege by the Taipings. Major cultural centers in eastern China lost masterpieces of art and
architecture, imperial libraries were burned or their collections exposed to the weather, and the printing blocks used to make books
were destroyed. While the empire faced the mountainous challenge of dealing with the material and cultural destruction from the war,
it was also burdened by a major ecological disaster in the north: the Yellow River changed course in 1855, destroying the south part of
impoverished Shandong province with flood and leaving the former riverbed in northern Shandong to decades of drought.
Document No. 2: Chinese
Mother with Children
Document No. 3: Conflicts in the Qing
Empire
V. Maritime Technology and the Spread of Disease
After Portugal broke loose from Moorish control, the Iberians took their battle to Morocco, aiming for the wealth of Africa. Prince
Henry, the third son of the king, devoted the rest of his life to promoting maritime exploration. He founded a maritime research
institute and collected information from Italian merchants and Jewish cartographers and eagerly pursued Arab, Greek and Chinese
technology. Under his sponsorship, the Portuguese developed the caravel, a very small, sturdy, fast ship that could weather the violent
Atlantic gales, maneuver well against the wind, and sail into shallow ports. These technological innovations literally opened the world
to Europeans, and to their pathogens. The explorations of the Americas were enabled by Portuguese technology and Spanish luck.
Columbus was a Genoese mariner sponsored by the Spanish crown. Searching for a route to the rich markets of Asia, he reached the
inhabited islands of the Caribbean. On his second trip, Columbus brought missionaries and settlers with their domesticated livestock to
the island of Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Violent clashes and the pathogens brought by settlers and their
cattle, pigs, chickens and goats combined to result in the deaths of tens of thousands of the indigenous people. Smallpox erupted in
1518, touching off a series of epidemics that plunged the native population of the Caribbean from about six million in 1492 to a few
thousand within about fifty years. The proliferation of maritime technology had set into motion a chain of events resulting in the
deaths of millions of previously isolated people.
Document No. 1: Biological Consequences and Beyond
Isolated for millennia, the indigenous population had no defenses against the Old World pathogens. The trans-American exchange
networks carried the new plagues with distressing speed. Diseases borne by the ships in 1492 had reached the Mississippi Valley
society several years before De Soto's expedition. By 1673, when the first Europeans finally reached the Cahokia site, the region had
already suffered cataclysmic devastation.
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The biological chaos, and resulting social turmoil, during a century or so following the large-scale arrival of Europeans in the
Americas disrupted the existing trade systems, but there were attempts to incorporate the new arrivals. Existing networks reached
European traders in the Gulf of St. Lawrence by the end of the sixteenth century. Furs made their way through the waterways of North
America, across the Atlantic, and into the processing centers of Europe. Trade also continued along the Ohio, Cumberland, and
Tennessee rivers. By the end of the seventeenth century, furs, slaves, salt, and other commodities were moving eastward. English
settlers were anxious to become a part of the system, writing home that although life in the colonies was hard, they expected to be able
soon to secure the "merchantable commodities" so desired by their sponsors. Most described the indigenous societies as self-sufficient,
well organized, and generally amenable to establishing commercial relations. There is evidence that native leaders worked to
incorporate fledgling European settlements into existing social and trading systems. The European settlers might have been absorbed
into the existing systems if the numbers of indigenous peoples had remained stable. The networks that transmitted goods and culture
among the peoples of the New World also transmitted the agents of their destruction. The first waves of epidemics occurred in the
sixteenth century. Disease-bearing watercraft has long been a deadly aspect of trans-oceanic contacts.
Document No. 2:
Expedition on
Mississippi
Document No. 3: Medicine
Man Curing Patient
Document No. 4: Aztecs Ravaged by
Smallpox
Document No. 5 Map:
Atlantic Economy
VI. Transportation Technologies Spread Modern Plagues
Globalization brings costs as well as benefits. Diseases spread more quickly on steamships than by camels or donkeys; air travel has
made it possible for pathogens to spread across the world in days, if not actually hours.
In 1978, the United Nations established a goal for the elimination of all infectious diseases by the year 2000. Ironically, the very next
year, physicians diagnosed the first case of AIDS in the United States. The first evidence of epidemic occurred among sexually active
homosexual men. Some social conservatives declared the disease to be "the will of God." For years, prevailing prejudices and sexual
bigotry limited the funding for research. During those years, the disease spread around the world so quickly that a popular
misconception held that the first case, a "patient zero," was a Canadian airline steward who participated in an early epidemiological
study on HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS. Although that perception has been discounted by scientists, the spread of the disease
has been traced back to people who travel frequently. There are no known cures but there have been remarkable medical advances in
treating the disease. Some patients have now survived for many years, but the drugs are very expensive and beyond the reach of
people in many parts of the world. The goal of a disease-free world seems to be growing increasingly remote. As one anthropologist
has noted, pathogens--viruses and bacteria--are remarkably adroit at exploiting available resources. Curing one disease is likely to
leave a fertile niche for the next to hitch a ride on a jet plane.
Document No. 1: HIV and Aids
The first case of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) was diagnosed in New York in 1979, and the virus that causes it,
human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), was identified by medical researchers in France and the United States in the mid-1980s. Social
responses to the most deadly and rapidly spreading virus of the twentieth century have been likened to the responses of fear and panic
that followed the historic plagues and infectious diseases, such as the Black Death (bubonic plague) and cholera. The development of
tests for AIDS has enabled researchers to trace the transmission of the virus and to study its origins and progress through a population.
The virus that causes AIDS is transmitted by blood, through intimate sexual contact, through infected mothers passing it on to their
babies, and through infected needles in intravenous drug use.
Often regarded as the plague of the twentieth century, AIDS raises many ethical, legal, social, and cultural issues. Victims of AIDS
have been subject to discrimination in housing, employment, and education, often because of ignorance about the means of
transmission of the disease. AIDS has been identified in the United States in particular as a disease that disproportionately affects
homosexuals, regarded as a population that engages in indiscriminate sex with multiple partners and thereby increases the possibility
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of contracting AIDS and passing it on. In recent years it has become evident that the potential for an AIDS epidemic lies in unsafe
heterosexual sex as well. An estimated 70 percent of reported cases are attributed to heterosexual transmission.
Attempts by the United Nations to monitor the disease in Asia and Africa have produced alarming statistics that suggest that AIDS is
spreading fast among populations that are least prepared to respond to the need for treatment and prevention. Around the world an
estimated 21 million adults are infected with the HIV virus, 42 percent of whom are women, who can infect their unborn children.
More than a million people worldwide were expected to die of AIDS-related disease in 1996 alone.
While the disease is still raging in parts of Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, where it first appeared in the early 1980s, the
largest increases now are expected in China and Vietnam, as well as India and southern Africa. In South Africa 10 percent of the adult
population is believed to be infected with HIV, and there are even higher rates in nearby Zambia and Zimbabwe, where 17 percent of
adults have HIV. In contrast, only 0.5 percent of adults in North America carry the HIV virus and 0.2 percent in Europe. This
discrepancy between HIV infection rates in the Euro-American world and much of Asia and Africa can be seen as an extension of the
underdevelopment created by colonialism. India probably has the largest number of cases in the world, and HIV is rapidly spreading
in Pakistan, where Islam discourages or even forbids discussion of sexuality, let alone the transmission of HIV through sexual contact.
Parts of the population in South and Southeast Asia most at risk for infection with HIV are also among the poorest and the least
politically powerful, such as prostitutes whose clients are long-distance truck drivers who spread the disease back to their families and
among the prostitutes they patronize. AIDS is also spread through sexual activity between foreign businessmen in Southeast Asian
cities and young women from the countryside seeking work to support their families, a situation that reflects the residue of
imperialism and colonialism in Asia and Africa. The most dramatic and frightening trend is that the number of young women infected
is growing in nearly every region of the world, raising the possibility of their infecting infants.
Yet AIDS research funds projects based in developed countries, while developing countries lack anything near the comparable
investments in basic health care. Governments that have been reluctant to provide AIDS education and to pursue prevention are
gradually becoming aware that they face devastating consequences if the spread of the HIV virus is not controlled. With AIDS,
modern medical technology faces its most difficult challenge.
VII. Slave Trade, Disease, and Demography
Neither the Native Americans nor Europeans were satisfactory sources of labor or commercial plantations. The indigenous people died
from disease and abuse, or simply vanished. Europeans were in search of land and wealth, not low-paid agricultural labor. Africans
were already accustomed to the heat and humidity of the Caribbean plantation zone. Their history of contact with trading routes
stretching across the giant landmass had left them resistant to the diseases of Eurasia. Their darker skin made them easily identifiable
and lessened their chances to disappear into the countryside. African slaves generally originated as prisoners of war, but the slave
trade itself increased warfare by providing guns and other weapons in exchange for prisoners. The African slave trade itself led to
increased political instability. Violence escalated as even those peoples who did not participate in the slave trade were driven to
acquire weapons and fight to protect their lineages. Notwithstanding their greater resistance to the Eurasian pathogens, the disruption
and altered zones of interactions spread waves of disease that had previously been localized across Africa, although they were not as
deadly as those across the Americas. The wars and social disruptions set into motion by the slave trade left Africa vulnerable to
continued exploitation. The sheer numbers of Africans enslaved or killed in the slave wars had an impact compounded by the fact that
most captives were young men just entering their most productive years. The less productive members of the lineages--children and
the elderly or infirm--were generally left dependent on a shrinking economic base. Economic requirements were not reduced in
proportion to loss of human resources.
Document No. 1: Impact on African Societies
The expanding frontiers of enslavement in Africa produced violence and uncertainty and had devastating effects on African societies.
To protect members of their lineages, Africans required arms, and to pay for guns, more Africans had to be captured for the slave
trade. Thus the possession of guns produced increasing numbers of slaves while destabilizing traditional African society. The
escalation of violence can be seen in estimates that in the eighteenth century 60,000 guns were imported along Central Africa's
Angolan coast, producing about half that many slaves for export.
Other African states also became the targets of European commercial interests. As trade expanded, competition for African markets
increased. European states relied heavily on their investments in slavery and the slave trade as the primary source of capital
accumulation. Inter-African competition for access to European goods also intensified. The violence and insecurity of those made
vulnerable by slaving activities undermined and destroyed some societies; and larger, more trade-dependent polities were created as
people came together for purposes of defense. Trade routes in West Africa had for centuries linked environments and peoples across
the Sahara. In the Atlantic era, the coast became a magnet, attracting trade and people to the opportunities of its seaport towns, while
redirecting interior trade routes.
Still other African societies maintained their independence despite centuries of involvement with Europe and the slave trade. For
example, the kingdom of Benin was in continuous contact with European merchants from at least 1471. The king's palace established
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a special guild to trade with European merchants. The guild's language, based on Portuguese, was a state-guarded secret.
The forest state of Asante in the region of the Gold Coast emerged through the consolidation of political interests and military
expansion beginning in the late seventeenth century. Although the existence of its capital at Kumase was well known, it was never
visited by European traders, who were limited in their access to the interior until the nineteenth century.
Traditions from Oyo, a state on the edge of the forest, claim that hundreds of messengers sent by one early ruler to greet the Europeans
never came back; thus Oyo avoided contact with Europeans for generations. Oyo's involvement in the slave trade was avoidable, in
part due to Oyo's reliance on cavalry and more northward rather than seaward commercial and political orientation before the late
eighteenth century.
Oral traditions record Africans' suspicions about greedy European trading partners. In Angola, the widespread death and dying caused
by the slaving activities surrounding European trading ventures convinced some Africans that the Europeans were cannibals.
Observing the Portuguese taste for red wine, Angolans claimed to have seen Europeans drinking the blood of slaves from the large
barrel casks stored on board their ships. Cauldrons in which food was cooked were also watched with fear and suspicion by the slaves
boarding the Atlantic's "floating tombs."
The widespread slaving activities altered much of African life. More men than women were traded to the foreigners, who found that
African societies valued female slaves and preferred to keep them for their productive (not reproductive) capacities. The loss of
population was dramatic and left African demographic change stagnant for centuries. The loss of potential sources of labor affected
agricultural productivity, though this was somewhat offset by the introduction of new food crops from the Americas such as cassava
and maize that could be grown in marginal agricultural environments. It has been argued that the lack of natural levels of population
increase was responsible for Africa's technological stagnation and developmental lags during the time that slavery's profits were being
reaped and reinvested by Europeans. Thus, Africans involved in the Atlantic world, both as consumers of European manufactured
goods and as laborers exploited in European enterprises, provided the basis of the growth of the new global economy.
Ideological and social changes resulted from the complex cultural and economic negotiation with European traders. Elite classes of
merchants were created in some places—the compradores or merchant princes of West Africa, for example,—and culturally and
materially impoverished groups were the results elsewhere, such as the South African Hottentots, a derogatory term given by the
Dutch to Khoisan servants, who adopted Dutch language and dress in a desperate attempt to buy back their land and cattle and who
eventually were decimated or absorbed by their contact with Europeans. Especially in coastal regions, the impact of merchant
capitalism was deepened by the transformations of slavery and the accompanying political and social violence. The acceptance of
human labor as a commodity after the sixteenth century was reflected in the increased reliance within African states on slavery and
labor coercion, and in the rise of prostitution in urban areas. Alongside cheap European wares, both women's bodies and the titled
ranks of gentlemen could be purchased without reference to traditional, ritually sanctioned, and inherited cultural categories of identity
and access to power. These and other contradictions would be recalled to form the basis of resistance to European colonialism in later
centuries.
Document No. 2: African Involvement
The impact of the slave trade varied over time and from one African society to another. The kingdoms of Rwanda and Bugunda on the
great lakes and the herding societies of the Masai and Turkana of east Africa largely escaped the slave trade, partly because they
resisted it and partly because their lands were distant from the major slave ports on the west African coast. Other societies flourished
during early modern times and benefited economically from the slave trade. Those Africans who raided, took captives, and sold slaves
to Europeans profited handsomely from the trade, as did the port cities and the states that coordinated trade with European merchants.
Asante, Dahomey, and Oyo peoples, for example, took advantage of the slave trade to obtain firearms from European merchants and
build powerful states in west Africa. In the nineteenth century, after the abolition of slavery, some African merchants complained
bitterly about losing their livelihood and tried to undermine the efforts of the British navy to patrol Atlantic waters and put an end to
slave trading.
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Document No. 3: An African Selling
Slaves
Document No. 4 Map: West African States,
1500-1800
Document No 5 Map: Atlantic
Economy
VIII. Impact of Imperialism on Khoikhoi Population
When the Portuguese sailed down the western coast of Africa in 1488, they encountered the local Khoikhol, pastoralists who used
innovative strategies to expel the Portuguese, including having bulls charge into battles. Beginning in 1657, employees of the Dutch
East India Company began settling on the Horn of Africa. They were identifying themselves as "Afrikaners" by 1707. These
Europeans were not, of course, the first settlers in South Africa. By the time of their arrival, some 100,000 pastoral Khoikhoi had
settled along the Orange River. Khoikhoi economy was based on herding sheep and cattle. The VOC traded with the Khoikhoi to
obtain meat to restock ships' provisions but Khoikhoi skill in maximizing profits aroused settler animosity. Colonists responded to the
increased prices and deterioration of quality with coercion and raiding. In 1659, open conflict broke out and ended only after the
Khoikhoi acknowledged the Company's jurisdiction over the lands. After four military campaigns beginning in 1673, the Khoikhoi
chiefs accepted tributary status and agreed to a "tax" of thirty cattle annually "upon arrival of the return fleet." In a very short time,
there was a direct correlation between legal status and race; both Khoikhoi and slaves were officially subject to the domination of the
white minority. They fared no better after Britain acquired the area. The gradual loss of their pasturelands and herds forced the
Khoikhoi and other Africans to seek wage labor. Among the most devastating losses were those due to the spread of epidemics
introduced by the white settlers.
Document No. 1: Khoikhoi Assimilation
The Khoikhoi who were not pushed aside into more marginal environments were relatively easily assimilated into the early European
farming and mercantile communities through the Khoikhoi's traditional system of patron-client relations, by which they had also
attached themselves as clients to other Bantu-speaking African farmers settled in large villages to their north and east. Whereas such
attachments had usually been temporary and symbiotic, the Khoikhois' attachment to the capitalist Dutch community at the Cape
wrought dramatic and lasting cultural and economic transformations. The loss of cattle through sale, warfare, and smallpox epidemics,
together with the Khoikhois' abandonment of aspects of their culture (such as dress and language) and their conversion to wage-based
employment, led to the ultimate loss of African control over Cape lands—and became the impetus for the Khoikhois' joining an
expanding frontier of culturally mixed African and European pastoralists, a frontier that included slaves and impoverished lower-class
immigrants.
Document No. 2: Khoikhoi Herdsmen
Document No. 3 Map: Africa
and Trans-Saharan Trade
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IX. Europeans Bring Disease to Pacific Populations
It took Europeans more than 300 years to explore and prepare charts of the Pacific Ocean. Spanish merchants traveled between the
Philippines and Mexico, but English navigators searching for a Northwest passage between Europe and Asia accomplished most of the
exploration. Captain James Cook charted eastern Australia and New Zealand, and then continued to New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and
Hawai'i. The indigenous Australians were not settled into agricultural communities, so Europeans considered them "savages" and had
no interest in establishing commercial relationships with them. They were interested in their lands, however; Great Britain decreed
that Australia and New Zealand were "vacant lands," and claimed them as colonies. Contacts between Europeans and aboriginal
Australians were fleeting until the late nineteenth century, when relations became increasingly brutal. By 1900, native Australians
were largely restricted to reservations in desert regions. The aboriginal population fell from about 650,000 in 1800 to 90,000 in 1900.
In New Zealand, The British acquired the native lands under a treaty, the Maori translation of which was much less restrictive than the
English version. The Maori fought a series of land wars, but were eventually confined to reservations. Disease and warfare reduced
the Maori population from about 200,000 in 1800 to 45,000 in 1900. The infectious diseases of Eurasia had the same horrific impact
on Pacific Islanders as they did in the Americas, although at a somewhat later date. Although historians and demographers still debate
the mortality rates, it is safe to estimate that they were similar to those in the Americas.
Document No. 1: Epidemics and Settlement
Though geographically distant from the Americas, Australia and the Pacific islands underwent experiences similar to those that
transformed the western hemisphere in early modern times. Like their American counterparts, the peoples of Oceania had no inherited
or acquired immunities to diseases that were common to peoples throughout the eastern hemisphere, and their numbers plunged when
epidemic disease struck their populations. For the most part, however, Australia and the Pacific islands experienced epidemic disease
and the arrival of European migrants later than did the Americas. European mariners thoroughly explored the Pacific basin between
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but only in Guam and the Mariana Islands did they establish permanent settlements before the
late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, their scouting of the region laid a foundation for much more intense interactions between
European, Euro-American, Asian, and Oceanic peoples during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Document No. 2: View of Karakakooa in Owhyee
Document No. 3: Aztecs Ravaged by Smallpox
X. Conclusion
The relationship between changing technologies, demography, and disease is complex, and tracking historical connections among
them is challenging. But tracing the impact of improved transportation routes and methods, for example, on the spread of disease in
the past throws light on some of the most important questions in world history that continue to compel our interest today. As the
world's population soars, diseases spread across the globe with ease, and technology provides previously unimaginable possibilities, it
becomes even more important to understand the historical dimensions of these three arenas of human activity.
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