All assignments go into the Student Google Folder. Assignments are due in the folder by midnight on the date listed below.
These are one-page minimum reflections on the prompt listed below, based on readings, discussion, and field visits. The first four are phrased as questions to which I append my own answers AFTER I have read through student papers, to clarify points that that I want to get across in the first part of the cours.
1. Thursday Jan 5. Q: What were the causes of the plagues in ancient Rome? (And think about why we do not have accounts of ancient plagues in Asia.) A: Roman demand for Asian products brought pepper and other commodities to the ancient Mediterranean, some by land but mostly by sea, up the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. Roman consumer demand also brought plague, which infected troops fighting Roman imperial wars in Mesopotamia, who carried both Antonine and Justinian plagues back to Rome. Soldiers and workers died during the Justinian Plague in sufficient numbers to weaken Roman imperial power, notably in Syria, where early Muslim communities encountered the plague. (We lack records of plague in ancient Asia because of the mobility and low-density of populations in areas where plague travelled, but there were clearly outbreaks in densely populated parts of India and China.)
2. Friday Jan 6. Q: How did the Black Death reflect historical change in the previous millennium? A: The Mongol Empire built routes of mobility and centers of trade and political power inside expansive Turkic spaces of mobility all across the steppe. Mongol expansion increased the mobility of people and animals that carried the plague to Europe. At the same time, centuries of agricultural and population expansion, particularly in warm centuries after 800, increased the density of populations in places where pandemics became killer epidemics.
3. Saturday Jan 7. Q: What could be said to be historical stages in the globalization of disease? A: Stage One is the ancient (pre-600CE) commercial interaction of Europe and Mediterranean, by land and sea. Stage two: their more intensive late medieval interaction after the Mongols (note the travels of Marco Polo in the 1300s). Three: the post-1500 seaborne Columbian exchange. Stage Four: the post-1600 global expansion of European seaborne empires. Those can reasonably defined as the four main historical stages in the globalization of pandemic disease into the 20th century.
4. Monday Jan 9. Q: Consider the case of cholera as pandemic, epidemic, and endemic? A: Cholera seems originally to have been endemic in deltaic localities in lower Bengal (and perhaps in some other watery coastal regions of tropical India). It became epidemic in coastal regions because of increasing population density in urban areas driven by ongoing commercial and English imperial expansion, around Madras and Calcutta, in 1817. Cholera became pandemic by traveling with troops, merchants, and other migrants along routes of British imperial globalization, which eventually brought cholera to coastal regions and to port cities around the world, including New York City.
5. Tuesday Jan 10. Write your paper on your BRAC presentation project theme,.
6. Wednesday Jan 11. Consider your theme in the context of socio-economic inequality.
7. Thursday Jan 12. Discuss pathocoenosis in the Bangladesh context
8. Monday Jan 16. Discuss the politics of public health in the context of globalization.
9. Tuesday Jan 17. Write a brief description of your paper topic and indicate some source materials that you will use.
10. Wednesday Jan 18. Write up a short presentation your final paper.
10 page paper due at midnight on Jan 20. Discussion and Presentations in class. Jan 19-20.