Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

If Cortés, Pizarro or Aguirre had attempted to search for El Dorado in Africa rather than the Americas, they would have almost certainly been killed by infectious diseases too. In

The continued threat posed by infectious diseases in tropical Africa had an enormous impact on the specific form that colonialism took. The region attracted ambitious and unscrupulous Europeans motivated by making as much money in as little time and with as small a capital expenditure as possible—and then cutting and running before they were struck down by disease.

The Belgians cut off so many limbs that there was a rumor among the Congolese that dismembered body parts were used to make the canned corned beef that formed an important part of the European diet in the tropics.[95]

One observer reported visiting a smallpox-ravaged village in which the vultures had become so fat on their diet of human flesh that they were unable to fly.[96]

Instead, the malaria plasmodium was carried to the Americas in the blood of trafficked West Africans—many of whom would have been recently infected by falciparum and therefore carrying the plasmodium.

Aedes aegypti, prefers to lay its eggs in water vessels rather than in swamps or puddles; as a result, it was well suited to crossing the Atlantic in slave ships.

agricultural laborers imported from Britain would have fared very badly in the Caribbean. Mortality was much lower among trafficked West Africans who had already acquired immunity to yellow fever and malaria.

the impact of Scotland’s Central American misadventure is still felt today.

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.”

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: there was an entire ideology in place to justify a racialized class system in which it was seen as natural that African Americans toiled on plantations while the white population raked in the profits.

The British hoped that banning the trade in human beings would cut off the cheap supply of African labor and force plantation owners to take better care of “their property,” therefore reducing the risk of rebellions spreading from Haiti to other colonies in the region.

In the northern states, freedom implied resistance to the southern slave states that had dominated national politics since the revolution.

It was only because Britain was going through the transition from feudalism to capitalism that it was able to invest the proceeds of colonialism in profit-generating enterprises that were responsible for the economic and social transformation of the long nineteenth century. The

Death rates were so high among the urban working classes that the population was only able to sustain itself because of the continual inflow of people from the surrounding countryside, and increasingly from Ireland.

As northern towns and cities were the epicenter of the Industrial Revolution, this is clear evidence that economic growth and increasing real wages did not automatically lead to improvements in health via the invisible hand of the market. Instead, the rapidly growing urban population in the late nineteenth century was experiencing what Simon Szreter terms the “4 Ds”: disruption, deprivation, disease and death.

economic liberals, who viewed child labor laws as unjustified state intervention in the functioning of the free market.[23] To

Cholera continued to terrify even after it had killed: in some cases, due to post-mortem muscle contractions, the limbs of corpses twitched violently after death, giving the impression that the carts carrying victims’ bodies for burial were teeming with life.[28]

As more people began to travel between India and the rest of the world on increasingly fast ships, cholera was transmitted beyond South Asia. Vibrio cholerae hitched a lift in the guts of travelers, and their soiled clothes and bed linen, where it could stay alive for weeks.

finally the answer the ghost map didnt give

Britain was dominated by a few thousand families who owned most of the land and monopolized the important political offices. In many cases, these people were descended from the Normans who came over from France with William the Conqueror in 1066.

“company” towns legacy?

The emphasis on punishing the so-called undeserving poor overlooked the reality that people were often destitute because of factors beyond their control. In the mid-nineteenth century, the cyclical nature of the capitalist system resulted in regular economic downturns and massive, albeit temporary, layoffs that left enormous numbers of people without a means of earning money.

Providing sanitation and clean water to the masses is an enormously expensive undertaking, but one that delivers huge long-term economic and non-economic benefits. Such projects are not viable for private companies motivated by short-term returns on investment, so the problem of sanitation can’t be solved by the invisible hand of the market.

economic growth alone does not guarantee the health and well-being of the population.

In almost every country that industrialized in the nineteenth century, including most of Europe, the U.S. and Japan, the urban working classes experienced a generation-long decline in health and life expectancy.[68] Eventually, the state intervened to mitigate the deprivation and ensure that growth was converted into improved well-being and health.

concept of public health has long played an important role in traditional Chinese medicine.

Chinese have been inoculating their population against smallpox for over 1,000 years.[19]

sparrows—the latter because they were accused by the Chinese Communist Party of being capitalist birds due to their penchant for “stealing” large amounts of grain and fruit from hard-working peasants.

On its own terms, this campaign was a massive success: it appears to have driven the country’s sparrow population to the brink of extinction. But sparrows don’t eat just grain and fruit; they also consume insects. With the threat from natural predators vastly reduced, the locust population boomed and then feasted on the harvest in a manner far more destructive than anything that sparrows could have achieved. In this way, the campaign to “exterminate the four pests” contributed to the famine that killed 45 million people during the Great Leap Forward.

The U.S. and UK also used international financial institutions to undermine low-income countries’ efforts to tackle infectious diseases through structural adjustment programs.

Structural Adjustment Programs has been told elsewhere.[44] States were forced to lower tariffs on imports, privatize state-controlled industries and concentrate their efforts on producing goods for export.

A recent study found that the poorest 10 percent of households in the UK would have to spend over 70 percent of their income in order to follow healthy eating guidelines.[55]

In addition, the dopamine rush from eating sugary, fatty food is the most affordable way of buying momentary relief from the misery and helplessness of poverty.

The local doctors have coined the phrase “Shit Life Syndrome” to refer to the common denominator for most of the maladies they see: destitution and hopelessness.[57]

Work in factories, as well as mines and docks, was often hard and dirty, but it gave people a sense of security, identity and community. Over the past fifty years, most of these jobs disappeared,

most high-income countries—including the U.S. and UK—became wealthy by protecting domestic industries with tariffs and subsidies. But, once wealthy, they adopted free-trade policies and forced them upon the rest of the world, through violence if necessary. In doing this, Chang argues that the world’s richest countries denied poorer countries the opportunity to industrialize and grow rich. In other words, they were “kicking away the ladder.”