Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

The massive expansion in the transatlantic slave trade and American slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coincided with a period of great intellectual energy in Europe, the Age of Enlightenment. One of its major preoccupations was ordering the natural world into various categories. This included humans, who were classified into different races, each with their own supposed physical, intellectual and moral characteristics. The pseudoscientific, racist taxonomy of humans had a clear hierarchy, with the white Europeans who came up with the schema placed at the top. Immanuel Kant, for example, wrote that the “race of the whites contains all talents and motives in itself.” Black Africans, in contrast, “can be educated, but only to the education of servants” or, in other words, “they can be trained.” Native Americans were, according to Kant, “uneducable” and “lazy,” which might have served to soften European guilt for colonizing their continent and literally decimating them. 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.”