300 BCE–300 CE: (Trade Networks and the Birth of Pandemics — The Growing Interconnections Among the Various African-Eurasian Long-Distance Trade Networks in …

300 BCE–300 CE: (Trade Networks and the Birth of Pandemics — The Growing Interconnections Among the Various African-Eurasian Long-Distance Trade Networks in the Last Several Centuries BCE and First Few Centuries CE Having Still One Other Lasting and Periodically Calamitous Consequence for Global History, Making Possible for the First Time the Rapid Transmission of Particular Diseases from One Distant Region to Another, from This Age Onward Pandemics Becoming a Recurrent Factor in Global History): The growing interconnections among the various African-Eurasian long-distance trade networks in the last several centuries BCE and first few centuries CE had still one other lasting, and periodically calamitous, consequence for the longer run of global human history. These links made possible for the first time the rapid transmission of particular diseases from one distant region to another: from this age onward pandemics became a recurrent factor in the global history of us all. The same trade routes that carried gold and frankincense, ideas and converts, bananas and xylophones, also carried pathogens. The commercial networks that linked Rome to India, Aksum to Arabia, West Africa to the Mediterranean, and Kalimantan to East Africa created, for the first time in human history, a single epidemiological zone stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. A disease that emerged in one corner of this zone could now travel, along the bodies of merchants and sailors, to the farthest reaches of the network. The Antonine Plague that devastated Rome in the 160s CE, the Plague of Cyprian in the 250s, and later the Justinianic Plague of the 540s — these were not random misfortunes. They were the inevitable consequences of commercial connectivity, the epidemiological price of the same global trade networks that had enriched every civilization they touched. The agricultural revolution had created disease through sedentism and animal husbandry. The commercial revolution created pandemics through long-distance connectivity. Each advance in human interconnection carried within it the seeds of the next catastrophe.