ARI Working Paper Series

Disease regimes were one of the factors keeping Southeast Asian populations low, particularly in moist lowland areas, until the nineteenth century. Concentrations of population sufficient to maintain an endemic pattern of diseases such as smallpox and measles emerged relatively late, beginning with agricultural systems associated with Pagan, Angkor, and northern Vietnam around the 8th-11th centuries.

On the other hand the prevalence of certain tropical diseases such as malaria provided a kind of ‘protection’ against absorption into imperial systems, helping to explain the intense variety of Southeast Asian populations into our own times. The relation between the endemic disease pools of China proper and ‘exotic’ or ‘tropical’ diseases such as malaria in Southeast Asia helped to define the boundaries between these two regions.