If the deaths of millions of indigenous people of the Americas from communicable diseases in the 16th century constituted “a genocide” at the hands of Europeans, it has to follow that the deaths of millions of Europeans from an epidemic of plague 150 years earlier were also a genocide. Presumably, at the hands of the Eastern merchants who brought the disease on their ships.
I don’t understand how one can be considered a scholar and use terminology so carelessly. I’m reading a book on medieval history that everybody quotes and it’s filled with this kind of bloopers.