So I've been wondering about a couple of things this week. That's what I get for having a rare week when seminar reading is light and I don't have any deadlines hanging over me.
1) So it's a well known fact that small pox and other European diseases decimated the indigenous population of North America and other colonial locations. This is generally explained by the natives not having resistance to European disease. How come there wasn't a similar decimation of Europeans? I know that European explorers in Africa often died of Malaria but I can't think of a single other case and certainly nothing on the scale of small pox in the Americas or Australia.
2)Whenever the news sites talk about the recent French move to criminalise denial of the Armenian genocide they say that it is a move by Sarkozy to sway Armenian voters. But aren't there rather a lot of ethnic Turks in France? Surely on that logic and assuming that migrant Turks have a similar strength of feeling on the issue as migrant Armenians the end result will be minimal.
Yellow fever was pretty feared in the Carribbean, although apparently its from Africa originally. Interesting point though, nothing big got unleashed in Europe.
ReplyDeleteHey danner!
ReplyDeleteCould have something to do with the migration patterns I guess. Large amounts of Europeans turned up in the Americas but not vice versa.
What was the story with yellow fever?