The Pathology of Discovery and Conquest  Monday, 27 March 2006
This lecture examined the spread of diseases that accompanied
European expansion overseas from the fifteenth century, paying
particular attention to their demographic impact in Americas.
Extra lecture materials  Transcript of the lecture  The
Pathology of Discovery and Conquest   Linda A. Newson   When
Christopher Columbus arrived in the island of Hispaniola (today
shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti ) in 1492 it had a
conservative population of about one million. By 1540 only 250
people remained. Demographic disaster, although perhaps not
always as extreme as this, accompanied Europeans wherever they
went. Although considerable controversy exists over the size of
the contact populations, it would appear that the initial impact
of colonial rule was greatest in the Americas and in remote
regions such as the Pacific Islands where within the first 100
to 150 years of contact the population is thought to have
declined by as much as 80 to 95