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9 - Disease and world history from 1750

from Part II - Population and disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

By
Mark Harrison
Edited by
J. R. McNeill  and
Kenneth Pomeranz
J. R. McNeill
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
Kenneth Pomeranz
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

Disease has followed trade, exploration, and conflict, and has magnified their consequences. The middle of the eighteenth century saw few great shifts in patterns of disease but the advent of what would become a near global conflict between the European powers, the Seven Years' War, brought heavy mortality to the affected regions. By 1801, the disease had crossed the Atlantic, where it intermittently ravaged the Mediterranean coast of Spain for two decades, severely affecting cities such as Cadiz and Barcelona. As cholera disappeared from the developed world, a new and more terrifying threat emerged from the Orient. Epidemic diseases such as cholera remained a problem in the most deprived parts of Asia and Africa, particularly at times of famine and unrest. Civilian populations suffered as a result of infection and destruction of sanitary infrastructure. The influenza of 1918-1919 marked the end of a century of pandemic disease, but the great upheavals of previous decades affected many species other than humans.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History , pp. 237 - 257
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

Further reading

Bhattacharya, Sanjoy. Expunging Variola: The Control and Eradication of Smallpox in India, 1947–1977. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006.Google Scholar
Echenberg, Myron. Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Echenberg, Myron. Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901. New York University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Farmer, Paul. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Fidler, David P. SARS, Governance and the Globalization of Disease. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamlin, Christopher. Cholera: The Biography. Oxford University Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrison, Mark. Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease. New Haven, ct, and London: Yale University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Mark, Harrison. The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War. Oxford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy. “A concept: the unification of the globe by disease.” In The Mind and Method of the Historian. Brighton: Harvester, 1981, pp. 28–83.Google Scholar
McNeill, J. R. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914. Cambridge University Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mishra, Saurabh. Pilgrimage, Politics, and Pestilence: The Haj from the Indian Subcontinent, 1860–1920. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Packard, Randall M. The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria. Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Packard, Randall M. White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Diseases in South Africa. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Phillips, Howard, and Killingray, David, eds. The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19: New Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Price-Smith, Andrew T. Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, ma: MIT Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Webb, James L. A. Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria. Cambridge University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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