During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the colonizers did not intentionally disseminate disease. Indeed, they did not yet know how to do so. Especially during the sixteenth century, the colonizers valued Indian bodies and souls even more than they coveted Indian land. They needed Indians as coerced labor to work on mines, plantations, ranches, and farms. And Christian missionaries despaired when diseases killed Indians before they could be baptized. Only later, and almost exclusively in the English colonies, did some colonists cheer epidemics for depopulating the lands that they
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