Biological Consequences of the European Expansion, 1450-1800

’Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.’ So wrote Charles Darwin in 1836. Though there has been considerable discussion concerning their precise demographic impact, reflected in the articles here, there is no doubt that the arrival of new diseases with the Europeans (such as typhus and smallpox) had a catastrophic effect on the indigenous population of the Americas, and later of the Pacific. In the Americas, malaria and yellow fever also came with the slaves f...