J. R. McNeill

This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Yellow fever and malaria attacked newcomers, which helped keep the Spanish Empire Spanish in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century, these diseases helped revolutions to succeed by decimating European troops.

Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914

Mosquito Empires

Andrew John Kinney

This was more of a skim than a read, but I learned quite a bit about the influence of yellow fever and malaria on the course of history in the Americas and the Caribbean. The mortality from these diseases in tropical and subtropical parts of these regions was astonishing, ranging from 30% to 90% death rates among newly arrived Europeans. The normal annual death rate from tropical diseases among British citizens and soldiers in the Caribbean was 15 to 25%, which meant that the British Army had to maintain a constant stream of replacement soldiers to its colonies there. The death rate varied based on several factors, including nutrition and the length of the rainy season, but the primary factor was whether an individual was newly arrived, without immunity to yellow fever, from Europe. These extremely high death rates influenced the outcomes of wars and defeated attempts at colonization, such as the attempted British colonization of Panama.

Over time, the survivors who remained alive in the Americas passed on their genetic propensity for immunity to their children, so the overall death rate among natives of the region was lower as decades passed. Also, those of West African descent had a much higher survival rate because of the genetic superiority of their immune systems with regard to yellow fever and malaria, which are endemic in West Africa. Indeed, Toussaint Louverture understood this advantage, and actively used it by avoiding combat with the French and British, waiting for yellow fever to do the work for him. It was common in Haiti for disease to kill ten times as many European soldiers as deaths from actual combat.

The defeat of yellow fever followed Walter Reed's discovery that the disease was caused by mosquito bites, and William Gorgas' dogged work to eradicate mosquitos in the Panama Canal Zone, which ended yellow fever there by 1906 and malaria a few years later. His public health systems became standard in the US after initial resistance because of the cost of them. It was many years later that a vaccine was developed for yellow fever - General Gorgas used the brute force method of eliminating the vector - the mosquitos, which was also the method used by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930's to eliminate malaria in the south central US. Personal note: my mother was born before the TVA's efforts bore fruit, and she had malaria as a child in southern Missouri as a result. 

This book is an interesting addition to the historical record, giving mosquito-borne disease its proper credit for the outcome of many of the grand plans of world leaders in the Western Hemisphere.

Mosquito Empires Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914

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