Although the number of enslaved African Americans in the southern colonies was rapidly increasing, white European settlers were still a significant proportion of the population. They put up with the initial, debilitating bouts of fever in order to take advantage of all sorts of relatively lucrative, high-status positions in the slave economy. Those Europeans who didn’t die developed immunity to falciparum malaria, as did their surviving children. At this point the descendants of settler colonies were capable of working on the land without getting gravely ill, but the die was already cast:
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