The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

Alongside the decline of typhus and smallpox and the virtual disappearance of the bubonic plague, nineteenth-century Europeans also had to contend with an entirely new threat to their life and health: Asiatic cholera. The disease spread to Europe as a result of the opening up of new trade routes through Afghanistan and Persia following the British conquest of northern India, escaping from its reservoir in Bengal in 1817 and making its way westwards initially with troop movements and then with trade. Cholera spread to Europe because Europe’s strategic power was spreading across Asia. Soon christened ‘Asiatic cholera’, the disease was widely understood as Asia’s revenge: a deadly invasion from the supposedly backward and uncivilized East, launched just as Western civilization, in the eyes of many Europeans, was reaching the height of its progress and achievements.