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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WmRAllen67" data-source="post: 1903695" data-attributes="member: 20456">The short answer would probably be that they DID pick them up from the East-- meaning that the East was suffering from the same sort of thing at the same time...Consider the Black Death-- it is usually traced to a merchant ship docking in Venice (IIRC) in the 1340's, but if you look further back, you can make an argument that it travelled from Asia along the Silk Road-- which was "held open" by the unified govermental systems in the Mongol Empire. So the Mongols, which in one view are a "barbarian horde poised to overrun Europe" also provided a safe environment for the increase in trade between Europe and the East-- but also allowed the spread of the bubonic plague, which not only ravaged Europe but contributed to the breakup of the centralised Mongol government and the eventual decline of the Silk Road trade (which in turn contributed to the European expansion in a search for the goods they were now missing).    It depends on which part of Africa you mean, I think. Certainly the Western African coastline was death to Europeans, but the Eastern coasts were heavily involved in the European expansion. One of the factors, again, was the cross-pollination of trade and societies-- the influence of Islam on the African coast, the trade networks of the Indian Ocean following the monsoon winds, the East Indian trade in spices from the islands of the South Pacific, all contributed to a mix of cultures, immunities, and technologies. This is one of the reasons that the "European Dominance" of the Indian Ocean took over 300 years to achieve (from 1499 to around 1850) instead of 50 years as in the Americas. In terms of travel time to and from Europe being a factor, most diseases that affected Europeans in the tropics killed them there-- life expectancy for a Dutchman in Batavia (on the island of Java) was approximately three years. Aside from syphilus (and the jury's still out on whether we got that from the Americas or not) the longer-lasting diseases such as malaria are not (again, IIRC) highly communicable human-to-human. (Don't quote me, though, I'm not a doctor, and don't even play one on TV.)The Great Fleet of Zheng He sailed between 1405 and 1433, and were indeed cut short by a change in the Chinese government-- not only in a return to more traditional values ("everything worth doing had already been done by their ancestors") but in a reaction to the cost involved in building those immense junks. The author Gavin Menzies holds an interesting theory that they did, indeed, circumnavigate the world, discovering the Americas &c &c, but his book (1423: The year the Chinese Discovered America) is long on theory and short on actual proof, in my opinion (though it would make for an interesting Oriental Adventures/ European homebrew, which was mentioned elsewhere on these boards some time ago...)And just to take a poke at the original question, I would say that the same factors that slowed the rise of European power in the Indian Ocean, ie the existance of long distance trading networks, the long-term social and cultural interactions (fostering both the common immunities to disease and the socio-political ferment that gave rise to technologies in Asia and Europe), the inter-rellated and inter-regional commerce and banking ties, and so forth, by their absence in pre-Colombian America, and coupled with the American's cultural "biases" ("Why build high density housing when a hermit's shack is all you want?") were responsible for the relatively slow technological development among the Native American and Meso-American cultures.(Edit: I've GOT to learn to type faster...)</blockquote>

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