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1500 as a Turning Points: The Birth of Globalization - Disease and Migration

6 important questions on 1500 as a Turning Points: The Birth of Globalization - Disease and Migration

What is meant by the "Columbian exchange"?

Biological exchanges around the world.

What was interchanged and spread?

- Diseases spread from Europeans and Africans who reached the New World.
- Foods were interchanged from the Americas to other regions and from Europe and Africa to the Americas.
- New movements of peoples resulted as well, as the Columbian exchange set a new framework for many different societies - not only in Europe and the Americas, but in Africa and Asia too.

Which two phases were there in the disease story?

- The dramatic first phase involved the encounter of Native Americans with contagions like measles, typhus, and smallpox for which they had no prior immunity, that were now brought in from Europe and Africa.
- Because of the new mixing of peoples, by the later eighteenth century there were no large regions in the world in which this pattern of massive die-offs could ever recur.

What is a virgin soil epidemic?

When a previously separate population is exposed to unfamiliar diseases with high resulting mortality compared with the patterns current among peoples accustomed to the same diseases.

What kind of diseases were spread?

Outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever increased in the seventeenth en eighteenth centuries.

Where and when did cholera spread?

It was in the nineteenth century that cholera, historically a disease in the Indian subcontinent, began to spread to other regions; seven major epidemics, from 1832 onward, brought cholera all the way to Europe and, from Europe, to the Americas.

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

Globalization in World History | 9780367279868 | Peter N Stearns

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