In this project, we look at Taiwan and the Ryukyu Archipelago, and their connections to major (South-) East Asian port cities, to examine maritime disease transmission patterns, local healthcare and cri-sis management in face of epidemic outbreaks, and transcultural medical knowledge transfers be-tween commercial centres and island societies. Thereby, we want to answer the following questions: 1) Was the transmission of infectious diseases rather prompted by increasing mobility or by natural environmental factors? 2) How did local societies (a) manage epidemic outbreaks, and (b) which me-dical treatments did they adopt? What foreign medical knowledge was transferred and how was it inte-grated into local practices? Results will provide us with innovative insights into the positive and nega-tive effects of the early modern ‘medical globalisation’ on formerly more isolated island populations and on transcultural knowledge transfer between Asian and European medical practices.

I. Dutch Taiwan and Batavia

Jorrit Cockx, MA

II. The Ryūkyū Islands

Angela Schottenhammer

III. Ryūkyū & Taiwan in Early Modern (South-)East Asian Epidemiology