Takeover:

I felt a little pontifical repeating the following to Mary and yet the point might otherwise be missed. I said, 'And though the stage was set for what man would become by 1500 A.D., the details of what your observers have undoubtedly reported just will not be comprehensible unless you know what happened in the last five hundred years. Basically it was the spread and domination of the entire world by the small subsection of what we now call Eurasia by the type we identify here as Euroman.'

I watched Mary's screen, halfway expecting some objection, but it remained normal, in subdued green, with the word 'Continue' just barely illuminated and flickering very lightly.

So I went on, 'Perhaps before I talk about how mankind was changed physically by the intrusive stranger, I should give you a 'quick and dirty' outline of this expansion. Otherwise it will be difficult for you to understand how all the changes took place so fast.'

In my later years I thought of the spread of Euroman as a kind of epidemic, a plague, that had swept the world. The idea came to me from teaching a new course, medical anthropology, in the last few years of my career. This course was concerned with the cultural influences on illness and health, that is, how man's other customs have affected his physical well-being. In teaching this course I learned much about epidemic diseases, those which travel from person to person and community to community, wreaking havoc in their path. There were those which had been important historically-bubonic plague, the black death, cholera, yellow fever, malaria. Fortunately most had been controlled through scientific medicine, at least in the economically favored countries. However, new ones kept appearing, the latest being AIDS.

As I thought more and more about the expansion of Euroman, the image of a plague kept materializing. It was a disease carried by a virus, bacteria, or other pathogen which had emerged in that small peninsula we call Europe, and spread, almost uncontrollably for over three hundred years, striking down individuals (people of color), communities, and whole societies throughout the world. The original carriers came on ships, later replaced mainly by airplanes. Many societies were destroyed by the plague but the more resilient ones, usually those with large populations and long histories, developed immunities. And though these civilized societies were irrevocably modified, they recovered and were no longer to be ravaged by the White Plague. The period of immunization to the Plague of Euroman can be dated. It was basically from the end of World War I, 1918, until the 1970s when all but the smallest colonies had achieved their independence again.

We could take a mind trip around the world to see what happened in general as the White Plague spread. In fact, it would be interesting to follow the way of the original explorers, beginning with the Portuguese, who were the first to set out.

The tiny nation of Portugal sent its soon to be feared mariners down the African coast in stages, looking for four of the main forms of wealth that would drive all the other European explorers-people, products, natural resources or territory. Though they began by looking for gold, the Portuguese soon became interested in people, to be used as slaves for agricultural labor. This was a condition of the White Plague that would last four hundred years, especially for Africans. Although slavery was nothing new, and although mankind had worked out other systems for acquiring cheap labor, nowhere did the process become as savage as in the system of chattel slavery of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the end, the primary European slavers were the British and Americans. Great numbers of Africans were taken away.

But despite all, the black man survived the White Plague. Colonialism ended in Africa as it did elsewhere. Unfortunately, the consequences of the epidemic were so great, the new Africans nations entered the modern world in a very weak state. Complete health was still a long way off when your group took over.

Shortly thereafter, other European mariners set sail, the most famous being the discoverer of the Americas. As you may know, Christopher Columbus was trying to get to the Indies, which he never did, but instead discovered a whole new continent. To the end of his life he had no idea he had not reached Asia. But he was an intrepid sailor.

The Americas went through a much different history when the White Plague struck. The nature of the illness changed somewhat, but too late to help the natives, who were erroneously called Indians because of Columbus's idea that he had reached the Indies. This mix-up of names is still a source of confusion.

The American Indians never had a chance to develop an immunity to the virulent form of the disease that struck them. And the White Plague, in this case, literally included epidemics of illness. Because the Americas had been separated from Europe and Asia for ten thousand years, the people of the New World had failed to develop immunities to the pathogens of the dung heaps of the Old World. Many Europeans died from their own epidemics, but the survivors developed some resistance to the killer diseases. However, this did not prevent them from being carriers. So in addition to trouble from explorers, soldiers, traders, missionaries, and other Euro-types, the natives of the New World got the pathogens of the Old World-smallpox, measles, cholera, bubonic plague, syphilis (perhaps), and malaria. The epidemics frequently travelled faster than the Euro-carriers, the first person of the native group infected passing it on to others. Thus, when Euroman reached a given region, he was more often than not met by the survivors of epidemics, many of whom were greatly weakened. As a result, among other things, these victims became poor fighters just when good fighters were vitally needed. If the natives were still in good physical condition, it usually did not take long for the explorers to pass on some epidemic-inducing pathogen. So if the explorers were not themselves soldiers intent on conquest, the real soldiers who followed usually had to contend only with sick tribesmen. And when one considers the better technology of the intruders, plus their resolution, the native groups hardly had a chance.