“Thus,” wrote the historian John McNeill, “Great Britain was born, with the assistance of fevers from Panama.” Over 300 years later, the union is a major political issue and pro-independence parties currently hold a majority in the Scottish parliament. New Edinburgh was a particularly spectacular example of the damage that infectious diseases wrought among white colonial would-be settlers in the American tropics. But the colonies that lasted did so because plantation owners quickly learned that trafficked West Africans provided a much more reliable source of labor than Europeans.
