If I had a nickel for every time European colonization introduced a pathogen that a continent had no immunity to, thereby destroying civilizations across that entire continent, and leaving the land so empty that the resulting springback of wildlife would lead later European explorers to declare the place a pristine wilderness, and formulate their ecological theory based on the faulty assumption that the land had always looked this way -- I would have two nickels. Which is two more than I desire.

In the late 19th century, rinderpest became a disease of imperialism, aided in its movement across Africa and Asia by new technologies and networks of exploitation. Cattle shipped to the Philippines in 1886 to feed Spanish colonial authorities brought rinderpest with them. Rivers became clogged with dead buffalo in an outbreak with a probable 90% mortality rate. A similarly destructive outbreak unfolded across much of Africa after Italian forces brought infected cattle to Massawa (now in Eritrea) in 1887. The disease quickly spread eastward and southward. A horrific famine followed in its wake.

The rinderpest virus spread throughout Africa as a result of European colonization. Brought by Italians during their attempt to conquer Ethiopia, the disease quickly engulfed the herds of Ethiopia, killing over ninety percent of the cattle and spreading throughout the Sub-Saharan region. Mortality among buffalo, hartebeest, and antelope populations was also high. A subsequent outbreak of smallpox exacerbated the situation and devastated indigenous populations. Rinderpest remained widespread in Africa until the introduction of an effective vaccination at the end of the twentieth century. On June 28, 2011, the worldwide eradication of rinderpest was officially declared at the 37th conference of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The rinderpest epizootic of the fourteenth century was a notorious catastrophe. Less is known about livestock disease outside of Europe in the earlier period, but rinderpest was certainly a problem from one end of Eurasia to another for centuries. In the calamitous seventeenth century, the disease wiped out entire herds in East Asia.

The amazing long-range ecological dynamics of rinderpest in the Serengeti are the textbook model of pathogen-driven ecosystem control: the rise and fall of herbivores has affected predator populations, the advance and retreat of grasslands, and the frequency of fires – in short, the entire ecosystem. Food webs spanning from microbial parasite to apex predator have been linked in oscillatory dynamics, distantly perturbed by humanity's role in globalizing animal disease.