In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Britain was on its way to becoming the dominant colonial force in the world, malaria and yellow fever—the flaming sword of deadly fevers—still made tropical Africa all but unconquerable. The American historian Philip Curtin estimates that around this time between 30 and 70 percent of Europeans died in their first year on the West African coast; little wonder that the region was known to the British as “the white man’s grave.”
