Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

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. They weren’t colonial settlers. So, unlike in New England, they didn’t bring their families with them, settle down and build institutions in the image of their home country. Rather, the Europeans who colonized Africa in the last decades of the nineteenth century created “extractive institutions” that used violence and the threat of violence to coerce the population into mining natural resources and transporting them to the coast, where they were shipped to Europe. The ultimate aim of this brutal endeavor was not to build a new and better society, but to enrich a small group of Europeans by draining wealth from the region.[92]