Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

In the south, agricultural workers who hadn’t developed immunity to falciparum malaria were likely to get very sick. As a result, European indentured laborers were no longer wanted, and nor did they want to settle there.[60] From an amoral economic perspective, West African labor suddenly became a much more appealing proposition for plantation owners. The Italian economist Elena Esposito estimates that the arrival of falciparum malaria in the 1680s explains the rapid rise in numbers of African Americans in the southern colonies from that time—a conclusion that holds even when other possible explanations for the expansion of slavery are taken into account, such as the suitability of a county’s soil for crops like tobacco and cotton.[61] In fact, malaria had the biggest impact on the expansion of slavery in counties where labor-intensive crops were grown, presumably because the economic benefit of healthy workers was greatest there.