Charles Mann shows how again and again the forces that truly shaped history came from below, not above. For instance, the American Revolution was won by the malaria parasite, which devastated General Charles Cornwallis’s army in the Carolinas and on the Chesapeake Bay, at least as much as it was won by George Washington. I say this not as a bad-loser Brit seeking excuses, but on the authority of the distinguished (American) environmental historian J.R. McNeill. Referring to female mosquitoes of the species Anopheles quadrimaculatus, he writes: ‘Those tiny amazons conducted covert biological
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