Question

How did trade help to spread diseases during the pre-modern world? Explain.

Answer 1

Pre-modern trade spread diseases because merchants, pilgrims and goods moved along silk roads, Indian Ocean routes and Atlantic crossings, carrying pathogens as well as products. These germs, smallpox, plague and others, reached immunologically naive populations, provoking large epidemics that travelled ahead of colonisers and reshaped societies, altering demographic, economic and political systems both worldwide and locally very significantly.