19. The weather was as fickle as it was extreme, leading to consequences still felt in some regions
During the summer months of 1816, both Europe and the United States suffered dramatically, but they were not alone. Merchants and businessmen on both continents were aware of the adverse circumstances being felt which were affecting their counterparts overseas. Such was not the case in less communicative Asia. China, India, and Japan were all affected. In China, the annual monsoons, critical to their rice crops, were far heavier than usual, lasted longer, and destroyed the foodstuff which was critical to the survival of its people. Flooding in China swept away villages, roads, and other infrastructure, destroyed rice paddies, and led to widespread and deeply felt famine.
In India, the monsoons did not arrive at their normal time, creating adversely dry conditions and hunger. When they did arrive they were far heavier than those of a normal year, and heavy flooding occurred, conditions which bred a more virulent strain of cholera than in previous years. The germs proved more adaptable to the unusual weather than humans, and cholera spread across the subcontinent, watched with growing alarm by the British Raj. Through trading ships and caravans, cholera spread to Africa and around the world, carried by the ships of the British Empire, and ravaged the unprepared local populations where it landed. The cholera pandemic spread across the Mediterranean, North Africa, India, and Asia, raging until roughly 1824, and claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of people before it ebbed away.