The Collateral Damage of Colonialism

Here is an interesting blog post on the possible development of HIV/AIDS in the years before the 1980s: Notes towards a pre-1981 history of HIV/AIDS. Randy McDonald, the post's author, suggests that it was the social dislocation wrought be colonialism (and in particular the exploitation by France and Belgium of rubber resources in the Congo basin) that led to the virus crossing from animals and then being able to spread through the human population.