The Spread of Disease across the (South-)East Asian Seas: Environment, Health, and Medicine (1560 to 1850)

This project is being sponsored by the Chiang-Ching Kuo foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (蔣經國國際學術交流基金會), Project Number: RG001-U-23 (July 2024-).

Infectious diseases significantly affected Asian port cities and island communities in the early modern period. Increasing inter-Asian and Chinese-European contacts as a result of growing commercialisation and globalisation greatly fostered the spread of diseases across oceans. The advent of the Portuguese, then the Spanish and the Dutch, in Asia constituted an entirely new gateway of diseases into (South-)East Asia and had particular impacts on island communities.
Placing (South-)East Asia’s early modern epidemiological history into the wider ‘global’ Asian context, including the frequent connections and relations with European merchants, missionaries, and travellers, this project investigates 1) how diseases spread across maritime transmission channels, and how they dispersed locally; 2) in which ways especially island communities like, for example, Ryūkyū were affected; 3) how local crisis management worked, which medical tools, drugs, and knowledge were available for treatment and prevention; and 4) which venues and characteristics of transcultural medical knowledge transfer we can discern. In so doing, we seek to bring new insights (South-)East Asia’s early modern disease patterns, the roles of human beings and environments in it, and local (ethno-)medical and socio-anthropological developments as responses to epidemiological crises.

Project Members

Prof. Dr. Angela Schottenhammer
Dr. Paul D. Buell
Dr. Cheng Weichung
Dr. Mathieu Torck
Dr. Wim De Winter
Maria Ngiam (MA)