070216 SE Research Seminar Applied Global History - Global Food History (2022S)

The globalization of food production and consumption is a phenomenon as old as agriculture and animal husbandry. However, the growing speed and scale of transnational flows of food products, foodways, and fodder provision have resulted in increased cross-border dependencies for supplies, related environmental implications, and epidemic viral diseases.
Global history has set out to overcome Eurocentric positions. Global food and environmental history show that Europe as a geographical research setting does not encompass the whole picture. Especially because the origin of domesticated plants, animals was not European, there only epidemic diseases were triggered. A global historical perspective shows that domestication first emerged in the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East. Only, successively, together with settled agriculture and encompassing urbanity, epidemics spread to Europe through all kinds of interactions foremost, changed foodways and intensified animal breeding as the primary causes.
The so-called Columbian Exchange (900 to 1900), a term coined by Alfred Crosby, describes this unprecedented process of global interaction. A long-durée perspective (Fernand Braudel) reveals the causes for the mass death of indigenous peoples in the Americas that implicated the Eurasian expansion of animal husbandry and human-caused environmental alterations. Not surprisingly, with the European invaders, germs and viruses reached the colonies with devastating consequences for the indigenous populations and the environment. Particularly zoonotic pathogens were carried by livestock, horses, swine, sheep, fowl, rodents, etc. Plants and animals invaded European colonies as secondary pioneers and continuously changed the global ecosystem by causing so-called “virgin soil epidemics” (Crosby 1982).