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3 - Globalization of disease, 1300 to 1900

from Part One - Global matrices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

By
James L. A. Webb
Edited by
Jerry H. Bentley ,
Sanjay Subrahmanyam  and
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Jerry H. Bentley
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii, Manoa
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
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Summary

Some of the upheavals, such as the Eurasian outbreak of Black Death of the fourteenth century and the introduction of Old World diseases to the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had such broad historical consequences that they seem to stand categorically outside of earlier human experience. The common cold was almost certainly among the first of the Old World viruses to infect individuals in the Caribbean. Beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century, a second wave of infections from the Old World crossed the Atlantic and opened a new chapter in the global integration of infectious disease such as falciparum malaria and yellow fever. The third wave of infections from seventeenth century into middle of the nineteenth century is bubonic plague confined for centuries to the expanses of Eurasia, breaking out periodically. In Northern Africa and Eurasia, the disease burden was substantially different, because many of the tropical diseases could not be transmitted in other ecological zones.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History , pp. 54 - 75
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

Further reading

Carpenter, Kenneth J., The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Courtwright, David T., Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crosby, Alfred W. Jr, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972).Google Scholar
Curtin, Philip D., Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Echenberg, Myron, Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Echenberg, Myron, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (New York University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Fenn, Elizabeth A., Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).Google Scholar
Gottfried, Robert S., The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1983).Google Scholar
Kiple, Kenneth A. (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNeill, John R., Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNeill, William H., Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor, 1976).Google Scholar
Riley, James C., Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stannard, David E., American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Webb, James L. A. Jr, Humanity's Burden: A Global History of Malaria (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Google Scholar

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