Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650

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Cambridge University Press, Feb 13, 1998 - History - 248 pages
The biological mingling of the Old and New Worlds began with the first voyage of Columbus. The exchange was a mixed blessing: it led to the disappearance of entire peoples in the Americas, but it also resulted in the rapid expansion and consequent economic and military hegemony of Europeans. Amerindians had never before experienced the deadly Eurasian sicknesses brought by the foreigners in wave after wave: smallpox, measles, typhus, plague, influenza, malaria, yellow fever. These diseases literally conquered the Americas before the sword could be unsheathed. From 1492 to 1650, from Hudson's Bay in the north to southernmost Tierra del Fuego, disease weakened Amerindian resistance to outside domination. The Black Legend, which attempts to place all of the blame of the injustices of conquest on the Spanish, must be revised in light of the evidence that all Old World peoples carried, though largely unwittingly, the germs of the destruction of American civilization.
 

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Contents

In the Path of the Hurricane Disease and the Disappearance of the Peoples of the Caribbean 14921518
15
The Deaths of Aztec Cuitlahuac and Inca Huayna Capac The First New World Pandemics
60
Settling In Epidemics and Conquest to the End of the First Century
95
Regional Outbreaks from the 1530s to Centurys End
134
New Arrivals Peoples and Illnesses from 1600 to 1650
166
Conclusion
201
Bibliography
217
Index
237
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