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November 10 - December 2, 2023
The emergence of agricultural capitalism finally allowed English society to escape the Malthusian cycle of demographic boom and bust for the first time since the Neolithic Revolution.[80]
the indigenous population of Mesoamerica was about 20 million when Cortés arrived but had fallen to 1.5 million a century later.[25]
in 1545 they discovered the next-best thing: a mountain made of solid silver. The Cerro Rico at Potosí is located in the Andes in what is now southern Bolivia at an altitude of 4,000 meters, a two-and-a-half-month journey via pack animal from Lima. It contained so much high-grade silver ore that it provided about 80 percent of the silver mined across the world over the next 250 years.[37]
The Spanish succeeded in colonizing the Americas because they were aided by bacteria and viruses. The Norse were not and failed. In fact, because of their own isolated existence, the European inhabitants of Greenland and Iceland were almost as vulnerable to Old World pathogens as the indigenous people of the New World.
Why did the Pilgrims succeed where others failed? It wasn’t because they were better prepared or more numerous. Rather, between 1616 and 1619 a savage epidemic had swept through the Massachusetts Bay area, most probably brought by European fishermen or traders who operated there.
The motivations of the late-medieval Portuguese were very similar to those of the Spanish conquistadors. The Ottomans’ expansion had closed off lucrative opportunities in the Mediterranean, so fortune seekers spilled out into the Atlantic in
Infectious diseases are responsible for the very different outcomes. The colonization of the Americas was only possible because Old World pathogens came to the conquistadors’ aid. The Portuguese had no such luck. The West African coast was linked to the rest of Europe and Asia by the trans-Saharan trade routes. Where people traveled, so did bacteria and viruses.
West Africa was and continues to be an extremely favorable environment for two mosquito-borne infectious diseases.
malaria was so widespread in West Africa that it would have been almost impossible to avoid being bitten by infected Anopheles mosquitoes.
Yellow fever is also common in West Africa, but the epidemiological dynamics are different. The virus tends not to be deadly in childhood, and after one infection you have lifelong immunity
The major European colonies that were established in Africa before the late nineteenth century were located in the more temperate, less disease-ridden regions. Algeria in the far north was held by France, and the Cape Colony and Natal in the far south by Britain;
when the Congo Free State was created in 1885 it had about 25 million inhabitants; by 1923, when the rubber boom was over, there were 7.7 million. For every 10 kilograms of rubber exported, the population fell by one.
As we’ll see, the emergence of American slavery and the ideology of racism used to justify it had a great deal to do with infectious diseases—and who could, or could not, survive them.
Between 1550 and 1650, 650,000 Africans were trafficked to Spain and Portugal’s American colonies—more than twice the number of Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in that period.
an inescapable path toward racialized slavery because the nascent transatlantic slave trade carried not only people but also some of the mosquitoes and microbes that made West Africa a deadly place for Europeans.
malaria plasmodium was carried to the Americas in the blood of trafficked West Africans—many of whom would have been recently infected
The arrival of West African pathogens turned the Caribbean into a new white man’s grave. Yellow fever epidemics rather than malaria were the major killer of Europeans, but the basic outcome was the same: almost everyone who had grown up in West Africa would have been exposed to yellow fever and acquired lifelong immunity, whereas new settlers from Europe hadn’t developed any tolerance and so died in droves.[23] As a result, African labor became the economically “rational” option for plantation owners.
Between the start of the sixteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century, 12.5 million Africans were transported to the Americas—the largest involuntary migration in human history.[42] Almost 2 million perished, crammed below deck,
Georgia overturned its ban on racialized slavery in 1751 and four years later adopted a slave code that was very similar to neighboring South Carolina’s. By 1760, African Americans accounted for 37 percent of the population.
Cornwallis surrendered twenty-one days after the siege began. He had no choice: over half of the soldiers under his command were unable to fight due to falciparum malaria.
malaria killed eight times more British troops than American guns.
On New Year’s Day 1804, the rebels proclaimed the birth of the new state of Haiti, a name derived from the Taíno term for the island of Hispaniola. The French defeat at the hands of the Haitian rebels—and the island’s mosquitoes—helped to shape the modern world. Without a base in Saint-Domingue, Napoleon had little choice but to abandon his grand plan of building an empire in the western hemisphere. In December 1803, France sold its North American colonial possessions to the United States for $15 million.
The British hoped that banning the trade in human beings would cut off the cheap supply of African labor and force plantation owners to take better care of “their property,” therefore reducing the risk of rebellions spreading from Haiti to other colonies in the region.
most of the Northern soldiers had not developed immunity to malaria, whereas most of the Southern soldiers had. According to one estimate, 40 percent of Union soldiers fell ill each year with the disease.
Throughout the Civil War, twice as many Northern troops died from disease as were killed in battle by Confederate guns.
Spain’s feudal economy was not capable of using the newfound wealth productively. It was only because Britain was going through the transition from feudalism to capitalism that it was able to invest the proceeds of colonialism in profit-generating enterprises that were responsible for the economic and social transformation of the long nineteenth century.
In almost every country that industrialized in the nineteenth century, including most of Europe, the U.S. and Japan, the urban working classes experienced a generation-long decline in health and life expectancy.[68]
bacteria and viruses have been instrumental in the emergence of the modern world.
