Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

Historians, demographers, environmental scientists, and experts in numerous other disciplines are still struggling to provide an exhaustive and definitive account of the tragic population collapse that befell the indigenous peoples of the Americas. A thorough review of the most recent findings is beyond the scope of this work, but a narrative like this cannot proceed without at least offering a big-picture sense of the native cataclysm. The waves of epidemic and expiration that followed the arrival of whites became part of what has been described as a hemisphere-wide Great Dying. One recent study has suggested that this event killed as many as 56 million people, or roughly 90 percent of the overall hemispheric population of indigenous Americans between the time of first European contact and the start of the seventeenth century. Such a number would make the deadly transmission of diseases like these by far the largest mortality event in proportion to the global population in human history, and second only to World War II in absolute terms with regard to the number of people killed. Others, meanwhile, have criticized what they regard as an excessive focus on pathogens alone, insisting instead on the effects of warfare and of constant, forced displacement, which resulted in both “material deprivation and starvation, conditions that favored disease.” To give a clearer idea of what numbers of this magnitude might mean in practical terms in a given region of the Americas, though...