Disease and Environment

The history of disease and environment in the Indian Ocean world links the region to broader world histories and offers ways to better understand the region on its own terms. This chapter addresses teaching the histories of diseases such as smallpox, cholera, and malaria that were endemic to the Indian Ocean and have had a global reach. Natural disasters like the 1883 explosion of Krakatau and the 2004 tsunami are considered alongside the ways that human actions have changed the Indian Ocean, from the extinction of the dodo bird to anthropomorphic climate change and the threat of warm oceans and rising sea levels. In keeping with recent scholarship, the chapter draws attention to nonhuman actors in history and to underwater history as ways of fully considering disease and environment in the Indian Ocean.