estimate that European diseases killed as much as 80% of the Native American population, not counting the Native Americans the Europeans killed on purpose. Likewise with the Black Death, which killed as much as half of Europe’s population in the 14th century, it traveled down the Silk Road from Asia. Among the effects of the bubonic plague was a weakening of feudalism. (The serfs were dead.) Enfeebled feudalism led to a rise in nation states, causing European warfare to expand from local scuffles into true “national war efforts” – thus, Europe’s history of truly horrendous conflicts starting with the 1618- 1648 Thirty Years’ War (8 million casualties) and ending with World War II (85 million casualties). Or maybe ending with World War III, depending on what Vladimir Putin is up to. And all of that is at least partly to blame on a trade route... As a lot of wars are. If you’ve got a road and you can carry loads of frilly panties, crepe de chine frocks, and Hermes scarves down it, you can march an army up it. The Mongol hordes did. And no mention has even been made of the devastation caused by the kind of trade route where the trade involved a market that was anything but “free.” The slave trade is the worst thing human beings have ever done. Free trade encompasses many excellent principles. How many excellent principles human beings encompass is another matter. Maybe we should keep humans off the trade routes...
governments still line trade routes long after the trading has gone elsewhere. Any exchange of products also leads to an exchange of knowledge and ideas. Again, “exchange of knowledge and ideas” sounds lovely. But this depends on the form the ideas take and the way the knowledge is used. Warring religious ideologies have devastated the Levantine trade route for an extraordinary length of time in an amazing variety of ways – parting of the Red Sea, walls of Jericho falling down, Babylonian captivity of the Jews, Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents, Masada mass suicide, Muslim conquest where a thousand years of Roman Empire was defeated by random Arab tribesmen, Christian crusades ranging from the allegedly chivalrous to the absurd (Children’s Crusade of A.D. 1212), Ottoman domination (rule by footstool?), and a very long movie starring Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia flouncing around in silly clothes, plus whatever horrors tomorrow’s headlines will bring. Was knowledge a good thing for Pre- Columbian Americans? The Admiral of the Ocean Seas returned from what he thought was an exploration of trade routes to the spice-rich Indies with the knowledge (soon shared by every country in Europe) that there were two whole continents over there, and they were basically defenseless. So the Europeans got colonialism and imperialism ideas... And along with an exchange of ideas and knowledge comes an exchange of germs. Some experts in epidemiology and demographics
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