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December 29, 2023 - January 5, 2024
The D.R.C.’s is a typical story—albeit an extreme version—for the nations that were created in the Scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century and won their independence in the second half of the twentieth. The ten poorest countries in the world are all former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. It is not unreasonable to conclude that these societies would have been better off if Europeans had never discovered a moderately effective treatment for malaria and the region had remained a white man’s grave.
When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe. —Frantz Fanon
Dying at the hands of law enforcement is, however, only the most shocking and violent manifestation of the discrimination that Black people face. The median household wealth of African Americans is $17,600 compared to $171,000 for whites,[2] and they are almost six times more likely to be incarcerated.[3]
The founder of economics, Adam Smith, agreed that New World slavery was morally repugnant, but he also pointed out that it was economically inefficient. In The Wealth of Nations Smith argued that “the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves.” This is because enslaved workers who had no prospect of being freed could only be encouraged to be productive through violence and threats. At the same time, there were enormous incentives for slaves to try to sabotage their workplaces, attack their supervisors and escape from a living hell. According to Smith, the
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The early conquistadors’ decision to use enslaved Africans on their sugar plantations had unexpected but momentous consequences: it inadvertently set the whole of the American tropics on 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.[20]
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.
The failure of New Edinburgh didn’t just kill 2,000 people; it also wiped out all the money that had been invested in—or gambled on—this doomed project. Cannily, the English promised to compensate the investors if they agreed to closer ties between the two countries. Even committed Scottish nationalists supported the 1707 Act of Union when faced with the possibility of financial ruin. “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
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Women were subject to widespread rape and sexual coercion. Perhaps the most notorious sexual predator was Thomas Thistlewood, a British plantation owner in Jamaica whose diary describes 3,852 acts of sexual intercourse with 138 enslaved women over thirty-seven years in the mid-1700s.[43] A recent study based on the DNA provided to the biotech company 23andme by 50,000 people demonstrates that he was far from the exception.[44] Almost twice as many males were transported across the Atlantic as females, and yet African women provided twice as much DNA to the modern-day population of former
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Curtin points out that immunity to infectious diseases was a major factor in these stereotypes. The idea that Black people are well suited to a life of hard labor was influenced by African immigrants’ apparently unique ability to survive on the plantations in tropical regions of the Americas. In contrast, Native Americans were seen as a “weak race” because they often died after their first encounters with “white people.”[46]
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
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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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In early August, the British Army set up camp in Yorktown. In late September they were surrounded by the enemy, which included not just American forces but also newly arrived French soldiers who had come to help their fellow revolutionaries. 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. The newly arrived French soldiers were also susceptible to malaria, but because it takes about a month from being bitten by an infected mosquito to the onset of symptoms, they didn’t
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Although John McNeill is careful not to completely ignore the role of Great Men like George Washington, he drolly suggests that the female Anopheles quadrimaculatus mosquitoes should be considered one of the “founding mothers of the United States.” As he points out, malaria killed eight times more British troops than American guns.
the humble Aedes aegypti would play a critical role in the Haitian Revolution, the only time in history when enslaved Africans succeeded in overthrowing their European oppressors.
The arrival of falciparum malaria in the late seventeenth century had set the colonies in the south and north on diverging trajectories, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century the differences between the two regions had become stark. Enslaved African labor was a crucial part of the southern plantation economy, whereas the north’s growing manufacturing sector relied on free labor from Europe; this led to very different understandings of liberty.[85] In the northern states, freedom implied resistance to the southern slave states that had dominated national politics since the revolution.
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According to one estimate, 40 percent of Union soldiers fell ill each year with the disease. The debilitating fevers were massively disruptive to the war effort and, if they didn’t kill sufferers outright, made them susceptible to other infectious diseases such as dysentery and measles. Throughout the Civil War, twice as many Northern troops died from disease as were killed in battle by Confederate guns.[87]
Malaria didn’t change the outcome of the Civil War: the North won despite the disproportionate toll that Plasmodium falciparum had on the Union Army. But it probably delayed victory by months or even years, which in turn had a momentous effect on the postwar settlement.[88]
Despite the remarkable advances in public health, human existence is still plagued by disease and death.
Yet 3.6 billion people—almost half the world’s inhabitants—still don’t have access to toilets that get rid of their waste in a safe manner and 2 billion people have to drink from sources that are contaminated with human excrement.[6] As a result of these unsanitary conditions, 1.5 million people—mainly young children in low-income countries—die every year from waterborne diarrheal diseases such as rotavirus.[7] Cholera outbreaks still occur periodically and tend to strike particularly hard when normal life has been disrupted.
infectious diseases create a “poverty trap” that is almost impossible to escape.[16] Poor people are more likely to get ill, making them even poorer and even more prone to infectious disease. Low-income countries tend to be afflicted by more infectious diseases, which in turn undermines economic growth and makes it very difficult for them to prosper. The prevalence of infectious diseases in sub-Saharan Africa helps to explain why it is not only the poorest region in the world but has become even poorer in relative terms over the last few decades, as economic growth has failed to keep pace with
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The British experience demonstrates that, even when a country has passed through the epidemiological transition, disruption and deprivation can still create new, non-communicable plagues that have a similar impact as infectious diseases.
The United States spends more on health care than any other country—almost $11,000 per person every year, compared to $4,300 in the UK, for example.[65] And yet health coverage is patchy. Those Americans who can afford to pay benefit from the best health care anywhere in the world. Yet tens of thousands of people die prematurely every year because they are unable to access health care.[66] More than 30 million are uninsured, and even people with insurance face such high costs that a quarter of the population have reported delaying seeking medical treatment and half a million people are
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In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than 5 percent of the population had been vaccinated by the end of 2021.[68] There were enough vaccines to go round, but the self-interested actions of high-income countries created artificial scarcity in low-income countries. Rich nations bought far more vaccines than they actually needed; one study estimates that by the end of 2021 they had stockpiled 1.2 billion doses, despite having vaccinated their populations already.[69] That is more than enough to vaccinate all adults in sub-Saharan Africa twice. In addition, several high-income countries, including the UK
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Epidemics have played a critical role in, among other things, the transformation from a planet inhabited by multiple species of human to one in which Homo sapiens reigned supreme; the replacement of nomadic foraging with sedentary agriculture; the decline of the great empires of antiquity; the rise of new world religions; the transition from feudalism to capitalism; European colonialism; and the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. In other words, bacteria and viruses have been instrumental in the emergence of the modern world.