How did the epidemic 500 years ago affect the modern world?

The pandemic of the new coronavirus is now comparable to many previous outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as the Pandemic and the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, yet few have considered what may be the most important historical disease event, and without the weekly epidemics that swept through the 16th and 17th centuries, the modern world as we know it might not exist, but rather that they created the modern world.
In the aftermath of columbus expeditions, more and more Europeans came every week, bringing with them a range of viruses, such as smallpox, influenza, measles, mumps and chickenpox, which Native Americans had not previously been exposed to and had not resisted, and historians would The resulting epidemic is known as the "virgin land epidemic", and now the coronavirus has proved the impact of the epidemic on vulnerable populations, as well as the rapid spread of these virology epidemics to Native American areas, thus overwhelming the local community, many people fell ill. The effects of the
epidemic are so widespread that, to some extent, they have caused the people who could have resisted European expansion to leave, and today's research suggests that the population of the Americas could be as high as 100 million before contact with Europeans, and in many areas, about 95 per cent of the population dies within a century of exposure to these diseases.
We all know the Aztek and Indo-Canadian empires, but there seems to be a similar society elsewhere, if not so complicated; when Hernando de Soto began exploring what is now the southeastern United States in 1540, he discovered that the inhabitants lived in large towns and could form thousands of troops, and when British explorers entered the area at the end of the next century, they found only scattered tribes.
Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons For years historians have questioned the validity of the Di Soto expedition's records, but archaeology has now validated many of the descriptions brought back by his men, and although direct contact between these societies and Europeans was very limited, it was wiped out by the virgin epidemic.
These epidemics not only killed many people, but also destroyed culture and morale, and most Native Americans were illiterate and did not have written language, so when the elderly died at the same time, many of the cultures and knowledge of the community disappeared accordingly, a loss that triggered a cycle of despair and demoralizing that undermined the resistance of Native Americans and provided some justification for the expansion of Europeans in the Americas.
Some observers from East Asia argue that the failure of Western governments to contain the new coronavirus is proof of the weakness and fragility of Western democracy, and that in the 16th century Europeans saw the virgin epidemic as proof of their moral and biological superiority, and that they saw themselves as evidence that God had created to control the Americas.
When pilgrims arrived in New England in 1620, they found that the local population had been "destroyed" by disease, and that some abandoned villages along the coastline provided the perfect settlement, as if God blessed the pilgrims.
The epidemic itself would help rationalize colonialism, which was "after all God's will", allowing Europeans and Americans to encroach on indigenous lands while absolving them of any responsibility and treating their imperialism as some kind of sacred prescancer "destiny".
We don't yet know exactly how big the long-term social and economic impact of coronavirus is, but these virgin land epidemics have unintended consequences, with many early European adventurers speculating that Native Americans would provide labour to farm their fields, and that demand for labour became so strong when they started producing lucrative crops such as sugar, coffee and tobacco that Europeans turned to Africans for their labour.
The slave trade had long existed in all its forms, but in the 17th and 18th centuries its scale, methods of use and the reasons given were unprecedented, and absolute ownership was based on the concept of racial superiority - slavery was in many ways the result of these virgin land epidemics.
The racism of the 18th century and the sense of European superiority that plagued the world, but it did not develop in the same way, and we can also consider whether Europe would have occupied such an important place in the world without the profits of America's natural wealth;
References: 1 Virgin Soils As Factor in the Economics Depoulation in America 2 The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas (3) Boris Johnson in hospital: a Chinese gaze at Western democracies in the COVID-19 pandemics: Image on New England's Colonial Landscape 5 how the modern world shape wasd by the months 500 years agoby. Matthew Ward, The Conversation This article is from Bio Valley, for more information please download Bio Valley APP (