Disease, Ecology and Empire

Empire transformed environments and the spread of disease, sometimes with catastrophic effects. In the late 1880s rinderpest, a cattle disease, arrived in the Horn of Africa, probably with cattle imported for Italian forces in Eritrea, and swept south over the next decade, killing an estimated 80 to 90 percent of cattle in many regions. For herding peoples such as the Maasai, whose wealth and food depended on cattle, the epidemic brought famine and social collapse, and it weakened many societies just as European conquest was accelerating.

Ethiopia suffered a terrible famine between 1888 and 1892. In Uganda, a sleeping sickness epidemic spread by tsetse flies killed an estimated 250,000 people between about 1900 and 1905, possibly linked to population movements and changes in land use. At the same time, colonial plantations replaced diverse farming and forests with single cash crops. Historians increasingly see these environmental changes as central to the story of imperialism.