1 00:00:14,340 --> 00:00:18,600 Good evening, everyone, and welcome, I'm Hal Jones, I'm the director of the rather more American Institute, 2 00:00:18,600 --> 00:00:26,280 and it's a pleasure to have you all here for the two thousand nineteen Sir John Eliot lecture in Atlantic history. 3 00:00:26,280 --> 00:00:33,750 This is an event we've been very pleased, very proud to host over the last several years in honour of Professor Sir John Elliott, 4 00:00:33,750 --> 00:00:41,760 who we're very delighted to have have him here with us tonight as a tribute to his contributions to the field of Atlantic history. 5 00:00:41,760 --> 00:00:51,540 And in recognition of of the service he provided in in being really a moving force behind the establishment of the AI in 2001. 6 00:00:51,540 --> 00:00:55,950 And he's played a big part in the intellectual development of this institute, 7 00:00:55,950 --> 00:01:02,550 and I think we want to pay this tribute to him for for his role in building up 8 00:01:02,550 --> 00:01:08,430 the AI and in making sure that Atlantic history as a part of what we do here, 9 00:01:08,430 --> 00:01:15,990 that we take a view of the United States in our work here on the history and culture and politics of America 10 00:01:15,990 --> 00:01:24,690 and look beyond the borders of the U.S. at the wider Atlantic world and in the world more generally. 11 00:01:24,690 --> 00:01:34,560 We've been very fortunate over the last number of years holding this lecture to be able to host a number of very distinguished figures in the field, 12 00:01:34,560 --> 00:01:44,580 and certainly that that tradition continues this year as we welcome John McNeil as our Elliott lecturer for 2019. 13 00:01:44,580 --> 00:01:51,990 John McNeil is a university professor at Georgetown University. I'm sure he's known very well by many of you. 14 00:01:51,990 --> 00:01:56,400 He holds appointments in both the Department of History and the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, 15 00:01:56,400 --> 00:02:08,550 and he's been there at Georgetown since 1985. He's the author of a number of books on environmental history, world history and has won fellowships, 16 00:02:08,550 --> 00:02:17,670 awards recognitions really too numerous to mention, including Fulbright Awards, MacArthur Grants, Guggenheim Fellowships. 17 00:02:17,670 --> 00:02:19,740 His books include Something New Under The Sun, 18 00:02:19,740 --> 00:02:28,680 which won the World History Association book Prise and Mosquito Empires on the role of Ecology and the disease environment of the Caribbean. 19 00:02:28,680 --> 00:02:35,700 I think a theme we'll hear a bit more about this evening looking at Yellow Fever in the Caribbean Basin, 20 00:02:35,700 --> 00:02:41,850 which won the beverage prise of the American Historical Association for the best book on the history of the Western Hemisphere. 21 00:02:41,850 --> 00:02:49,570 He's a past president of the American Society for Environmental History and currently serving as the president of the American Historical Association. 22 00:02:49,570 --> 00:02:53,460 So quite a distinguished figure in the field of Atlantic history, 23 00:02:53,460 --> 00:03:00,030 in the field of global and environmental history, and really a leader in the profession more generally. 24 00:03:00,030 --> 00:03:04,440 So I know John's been a visitor to Oxford in the past. 25 00:03:04,440 --> 00:03:11,070 It's a pleasure to have you back and we're delighted that you are our speaker this this evening for the Eliot lecture in Atlantic history. 26 00:03:11,070 --> 00:03:22,750 All hand things over to you. Thank you. 27 00:03:22,750 --> 00:03:35,140 So thank you very much to Hal Jones and the rather marry American Institute for the opportunity to return to Oxford this month. 28 00:03:35,140 --> 00:03:46,870 I'm at the University of Bologna in Italy. Founded in ten eighty eight, so it's good to be at a young UP-AND-COMING university like Oxford, 29 00:03:46,870 --> 00:03:52,720 and it's also wonderful to be giving the Sir John Elliott lecture. 30 00:03:52,720 --> 00:04:03,010 I am an occasional dabbler in Atlantic history, and like so many others, I'm paddling in St John's wake. 31 00:04:03,010 --> 00:04:11,120 In this respect, it is. A great honour, I hope to be. 32 00:04:11,120 --> 00:04:18,580 Halfway worthy of it. So this is my title. I'll explain the terms INDYMAC'S in just a moment. 33 00:04:18,580 --> 00:04:30,980 The. Topic this evening, and I thank you all for coming out on a sunny, late afternoon, early evening when I'm sure there were many temptations. 34 00:04:30,980 --> 00:04:43,250 My topic is a book project that I'm embarked upon, together with a Latin American, a steward, shorts and colonial America. 35 00:04:43,250 --> 00:04:48,470 Phil Morgan, both of whom have taken their work into the Caribbean. 36 00:04:48,470 --> 00:04:58,070 And together we are doing a general three authored Environmental History of the Caribbean Basin. 37 00:04:58,070 --> 00:05:02,960 Schwartz is working on hurricanes and earthquakes. 38 00:05:02,960 --> 00:05:11,540 I'm working on disease environments, and Phil Morgan is going to bring it all together and make sense of the entirety of it. 39 00:05:11,540 --> 00:05:21,860 So it's part of a new book that is also an outgrowth of an old book Mosquito Empires that Hal mentioned, published now nine long years ago, 40 00:05:21,860 --> 00:05:30,650 and a fragment of the new project and a fragment of what I'll be saying on this occasion derived from that book. 41 00:05:30,650 --> 00:05:38,740 But most of it is different from what I attempted in that book. 42 00:05:38,740 --> 00:05:49,480 So I'm taking on approximately seventy two hundred years of Caribbean disease ecology history. 43 00:05:49,480 --> 00:06:04,780 And packaging the latter five hundred or so years into the concept of INDYMAC'S, which, as I promised, I'm going to explain to you. 44 00:06:04,780 --> 00:06:12,740 But first, I want to introduce you to one of the. Dramatis personae, or well, 45 00:06:12,740 --> 00:06:23,450 perhaps not a persona of the endemic the vector for four major diseases in the Caribbean could be the world's most dangerous animal, 46 00:06:23,450 --> 00:06:29,570 definitely the Caribbean's most dangerous animal. It is ship time. 47 00:06:29,570 --> 00:06:34,220 What I'm doing also, I want to make clear, is not history of medicine. 48 00:06:34,220 --> 00:06:45,290 I'm not in this project. As interested as I should be in what people think about health and disease and what people do about health and disease. 49 00:06:45,290 --> 00:06:55,250 Rather, I'm mainly interested in the implications, especially for demography of health and disease. 50 00:06:55,250 --> 00:07:01,880 Now, the last five hundred years or so are an old subject, and to some extent, 51 00:07:01,880 --> 00:07:13,190 what I'm doing could be adequately described and dismissed as pouring old wine into a new bottle. 52 00:07:13,190 --> 00:07:21,590 But the subject is an unstable one because new information is filtering through, 53 00:07:21,590 --> 00:07:32,390 and some of the last five hundred years of health and disease history is necessarily understood best in the long term context. 54 00:07:32,390 --> 00:07:42,310 The multi millennial context, which we knew almost nothing about ten years ago and we know a little bit more about. 55 00:07:42,310 --> 00:07:57,610 Today, so here I'm going to explain some of the few things that I'm doing differently with his old subject that I hope justify the whole enterprise. 56 00:07:57,610 --> 00:08:06,880 One is I'm relying on new information generated by geneticists. 57 00:08:06,880 --> 00:08:12,280 Operating in the young field now called paleo genomics. 58 00:08:12,280 --> 00:08:25,000 And this I'm using not only for the pre-Colombian pass, but to some extent for the post Colombian past that entails all sorts of dangers, 59 00:08:25,000 --> 00:08:32,380 not least of which is my own in expertise in handling the work of geneticists. 60 00:08:32,380 --> 00:08:40,600 But that's by far the best avenue into the health and disease history of the pre-Columbian past. 61 00:08:40,600 --> 00:08:46,810 So one doesn't have all that much choice. There are two main varieties of paleo genomics that are relevant. 62 00:08:46,810 --> 00:08:59,320 One is so-called ancient DNA or a DNA excavated, so to speak, from normally human remains. 63 00:08:59,320 --> 00:09:10,660 Beyond that, there are inferences that can be drawn from the distribution and prevalence of traits in living populations that 64 00:09:10,660 --> 00:09:19,780 reflect upon the deeper past and using those two approaches simultaneously narrows the range of uncertainties. 65 00:09:19,780 --> 00:09:27,670 But there's not a whole lot of a DNA to work with in the Caribbean under the moist, humid conditions that prevail. 66 00:09:27,670 --> 00:09:34,050 Most of the time, they're decay is rapid. 67 00:09:34,050 --> 00:09:40,080 So that's one thing I'm doing, that's a little bit different from the way this subject has been approached in the past. 68 00:09:40,080 --> 00:09:49,560 The second thing there's a little bit different is I am conscripting the concept of INDYMAC'S from medical anthropology. 69 00:09:49,560 --> 00:10:07,230 So IndyMac's which, as far as I know, was coined by this guy, Merrill Singer is an attempt to make sense of the HIV crisis of the last 30 or so years. 70 00:10:07,230 --> 00:10:19,290 And it argues for understanding sustained ill health that involves simultaneous co-infection. 71 00:10:19,290 --> 00:10:27,450 And social, environmental and perhaps political conditions that either, um, 72 00:10:27,450 --> 00:10:37,030 intensify or in the first instance make possible this co-infection for multiple pathogens. 73 00:10:37,030 --> 00:10:46,210 So it gives a name to a circumstance that is not all that rare in the past, even though as far as I'm aware, 74 00:10:46,210 --> 00:10:57,000 the term and concepts in DMX have never been used to describe the past used only in the last decade or so to. 75 00:10:57,000 --> 00:11:09,320 Help understand the HIV crisis and to help imagine possible future health crises. 76 00:11:09,320 --> 00:11:13,580 So in short, I'm shamelessly stealing something from medical anthropology. 77 00:11:13,580 --> 00:11:21,860 The third thing I'm doing that's slightly different from what is conventional is trying to understand Caribbean health and disease history. 78 00:11:21,860 --> 00:11:26,930 Not so much in the context of the Americas, although I will be doing that. 79 00:11:26,930 --> 00:11:29,960 But in the context of islands, 80 00:11:29,960 --> 00:11:39,410 and I'll be making reference to Pacific Islands and to North Atlantic Islands that are in many respects extremely different from the Caribbean, 81 00:11:39,410 --> 00:11:52,250 except for being islands, except for being long isolated, at least substantially isolated from the wider currents of humankind. 82 00:11:52,250 --> 00:12:01,340 So I'll be contextualising the Caribbean in an unconventional fashion in order to revisit 83 00:12:01,340 --> 00:12:07,640 what I describe here as two of the grimmest chapters in the annals of human health, 84 00:12:07,640 --> 00:12:20,390 preceded by a cheerful one infused with foreboding, a cheerful one infused with foreboding is prior to fourteen ninety two. 85 00:12:20,390 --> 00:12:29,530 So. Insofar as we know anything at all, it comes about the pre-Colombian health history of the Caribbean. 86 00:12:29,530 --> 00:12:36,760 It comes from bio bio archaeology and paleo genomics and as I said, 87 00:12:36,760 --> 00:12:46,120 conditions of preservation are not very good in the region and the number of skeletons that have been examined, 88 00:12:46,120 --> 00:12:54,540 the number of distinct individuals for which their human remains that have been examined is in the hundreds. 89 00:12:54,540 --> 00:13:02,890 Which is regrettably few. There probably will be more in the years to come. 90 00:13:02,890 --> 00:13:12,640 So we don't know that much. And what we do know is surely incomplete in ways that we cannot fully fathom. 91 00:13:12,640 --> 00:13:20,560 It is possible, for example, that there were important infections amongst these populations that we have no trace of, 92 00:13:20,560 --> 00:13:25,900 conceivably infections from pathogens that have gone extinct. 93 00:13:25,900 --> 00:13:31,950 That would be possible. Absolutely no evidence for that. 94 00:13:31,950 --> 00:13:40,440 The story the cheerful story is one that is highly distinctive in world history, 95 00:13:40,440 --> 00:13:50,160 not perhaps truly unique, but close to it for reasons that I will explain very shortly. 96 00:13:50,160 --> 00:13:59,880 At any rate, if one considers the most important and buy important, I mean, dangerous and deadly infections in world history, 97 00:13:59,880 --> 00:14:13,950 the Americas pre-Columbian had at most three of these, and the Caribbean at most two of these tuberculosis and possibly syphilis. 98 00:14:13,950 --> 00:14:20,470 Very controversial. Nobody knows for sure the weight of expert opinion seems to be at the moment in favour of the proposition. 99 00:14:20,470 --> 00:14:30,120 The pre-Columbian Caribbean populations did host some form of syphilis and, if not some very close cousin of syphilis. 100 00:14:30,120 --> 00:14:33,840 And interestingly enough, the form of tuberculosis might be. 101 00:14:33,840 --> 00:14:42,150 This is absolutely fascinating to me. Maybe to nobody else might be one acquired from Pacific fur seals. 102 00:14:42,150 --> 00:14:52,440 You're probably aware that many of the acute viral infections that bedevil the human race are species jumpers that have come from herd animals, 103 00:14:52,440 --> 00:14:58,990 and I'll be referring to that in a moment. But it's also the case that humans have given infections to animals. 104 00:14:58,990 --> 00:15:07,770 There's a swapping that has been going on back and forth for thousands of years, and it looks like the variety of TB. 105 00:15:07,770 --> 00:15:18,450 That's why it is spread in the pre-Columbian Americas is one that people got from fur seals as uncertain, but that's what it looks like. 106 00:15:18,450 --> 00:15:33,300 At any rate, if this was the extent of pre-Columbian Caribbean infections amongst the twenty five most important ones, that's a tiny load. 107 00:15:33,300 --> 00:15:45,060 And neither of these is in contrast to, let us say, yellow fever or smallpox or measles. 108 00:15:45,060 --> 00:15:50,040 Typically acute and frequently lethal in the short term. 109 00:15:50,040 --> 00:15:58,790 There are a few other things that the bio archaeology tells us that these populations suffered from. 110 00:15:58,790 --> 00:16:09,470 None of them demographically significant. So why why were these populations so healthy? 111 00:16:09,470 --> 00:16:20,200 OK. A large part of the answer is that the populations of the Americas as a whole were pretty healthy by global historical standards, 112 00:16:20,200 --> 00:16:34,330 and that conventional explanations for that include the fact that there were no herd animals outside of the llamas and alpacas of the Andes, 113 00:16:34,330 --> 00:16:42,220 which meant that the opportunity for species jumping pathogens. 114 00:16:42,220 --> 00:16:47,630 Was reduced. Um. 115 00:16:47,630 --> 00:16:54,110 Beyond that, humans entered the American hemisphere a long time ago. 116 00:16:54,110 --> 00:17:04,340 Fifteen to twenty three thousand years ago and when they did so, nobody anywhere had domesticated any animals except for the dog. 117 00:17:04,340 --> 00:17:09,440 And dogs did come across the Bering Land Bridge. But that too, 118 00:17:09,440 --> 00:17:15,770 meant it was completely impossible for these populations entering the Americas to bring with them 119 00:17:15,770 --> 00:17:24,890 the kind of pathogen load that populations subsequently got after the domestication of pigs, 120 00:17:24,890 --> 00:17:32,010 cattle, sheep, etc, etc., etc. Beyond that, passing through the. 121 00:17:32,010 --> 00:17:40,080 Beringia landscape was passing through something of a cold filter hostile to some, not all pathogens, 122 00:17:40,080 --> 00:17:46,700 which meant that what they may have had in Siberia, least if it was further south. 123 00:17:46,700 --> 00:17:51,690 Uh, some of it they left behind when passing through Beringia. 124 00:17:51,690 --> 00:17:59,480 That's a hypothesis. There's some people who argue that that would not have been operative. 125 00:17:59,480 --> 00:18:06,180 And then. Even though I've just argued that people came to the Americas a very long time ago, 126 00:18:06,180 --> 00:18:16,690 I'm now about to argue that they didn't come all that long ago in comparison to other populations elsewhere. 127 00:18:16,690 --> 00:18:25,390 Human beings have existed in Africa for 300000 years, according to the most recent estimates. 128 00:18:25,390 --> 00:18:34,930 And they entered the Eurasian landmass somewhere between 70 and 100000 years ago, entered Australia roughly 60000 years ago in every case. 129 00:18:34,930 --> 00:18:45,880 This gave pathogens in these landscapes a longer opportunity in which to learn, so to speak, how to colonise human bodies. 130 00:18:45,880 --> 00:18:57,250 And it raised the probability of species jumping not from domesticated animals because there were none but from other kinds of animals, 131 00:18:57,250 --> 00:19:08,710 which does occasionally happen. So for all these reasons, populations entering the Americas and subsequent to their entrance seem to have been. 132 00:19:08,710 --> 00:19:22,640 Unusually healthy by global standards. Within the Caribbean, these factors operated with even greater force. 133 00:19:22,640 --> 00:19:30,290 So the human history of the Caribbean begins approximately 70 200 years ago, some people would say as long as 8000 years ago, 134 00:19:30,290 --> 00:19:43,250 but there's not much diversity of expert opinion in that a handful of pulses of colonisation, most of them from the South American mainland here. 135 00:19:43,250 --> 00:19:49,500 But certainly one, if not more than one from Central America, maybe from Yucatan. 136 00:19:49,500 --> 00:19:57,150 And these came in different pulses separated by thousands of years. 137 00:19:57,150 --> 00:20:02,700 Nobody was farming in the Caribbean until about twenty five hundred years ago. 138 00:20:02,700 --> 00:20:10,260 And when they took up horticulture and some people would say I included agriculture. 139 00:20:10,260 --> 00:20:17,430 They relied typically on cassava, which is. 140 00:20:17,430 --> 00:20:24,930 Interesting because it's the only case in world history in which any societies 141 00:20:24,930 --> 00:20:30,660 developed complex hierarchical structures based on cassava as opposed to rice, 142 00:20:30,660 --> 00:20:35,550 wheat, maize, et cetera. And it's also. 143 00:20:35,550 --> 00:20:43,320 At least moderately significant for health history, because cassava is great for calories and carbohydrates, 144 00:20:43,320 --> 00:20:48,030 but poor in proteins and a whole lot of micronutrients. 145 00:20:48,030 --> 00:21:05,350 So to the extent that one relies on cassava, what needs fruits, tubers, fish and supplements in order to avoid malnutrition? 146 00:21:05,350 --> 00:21:17,170 So, as I said, the reasons for good health here were similar to those in the Americas as a whole, but a little bit stronger. 147 00:21:17,170 --> 00:21:24,840 This looks a little bit like some of the pasta I've been eating in bologna, but. 148 00:21:24,840 --> 00:21:32,190 At any rate, the remedy is even briefer of human occupation in the Caribbean. 149 00:21:32,190 --> 00:21:38,730 The career of farming is brief briefer still, as I've said, 150 00:21:38,730 --> 00:21:50,220 and there's no evidence by archaeological or otherwise of a decline in health in the Caribbean when people took up horticulture and agriculture, 151 00:21:50,220 --> 00:21:56,410 which is interesting because in other parts of the world, there is a conspicuous decline in health. 152 00:21:56,410 --> 00:22:08,950 In terms of stature, in terms of infections, as revealed in, uh, bones and teeth, particularly in Southwest Asia 11000 years ago, 153 00:22:08,950 --> 00:22:19,140 but also in North America, when maize cultivation became routine, it was clear evidence of health decline that did not occur. 154 00:22:19,140 --> 00:22:27,890 In the Caribbean, it might show up one day with more bio archaeology, but it hasn't shown up yet. 155 00:22:27,890 --> 00:22:37,070 And again, the paucity of domestic animals, in short, an extreme version of the America's story. 156 00:22:37,070 --> 00:22:46,970 One would think and almost hope that this would translate into visibly longer life expectancies in pre-Columbian Caribbean populations. 157 00:22:46,970 --> 00:22:58,010 But the bio archaeology does not support that hypothesis, so other things were keeping lifespans. 158 00:22:58,010 --> 00:23:06,260 Short of probably a little bit longer than global averages, but not by any significant margin. 159 00:23:06,260 --> 00:23:10,370 It's unclear why that should be. OK. 160 00:23:10,370 --> 00:23:17,160 That was the happy story. Now things get unrelentingly grim. 161 00:23:17,160 --> 00:23:32,760 So the first scene that Mick is the Colombian catastrophe that eliminated a large proportion of the population of the Caribbean, 162 00:23:32,760 --> 00:23:44,320 and that's typically understood and correctly understood as part of a larger, Americas wide Colombian catastrophe in population. 163 00:23:44,320 --> 00:23:46,330 And on the America's scale, 164 00:23:46,330 --> 00:23:57,550 should be understood as probably one of the two greatest population catastrophes in the history of our species in terms of scale and intensity, 165 00:23:57,550 --> 00:24:09,630 the Black Death being the other. Nobody knows what American hemispheric populations were in 14 91, the range of expert opinion is wide. 166 00:24:09,630 --> 00:24:20,170 It has been narrowing in recent decades. The absolute latest syntheses, particularly that of Massimo Butshe, 167 00:24:20,170 --> 00:24:27,850 a very distinguished demographic historian from Florence, are pushing the numbers down lower. 168 00:24:27,850 --> 00:24:37,480 I disagree. I like Linda Newsome's numbers better than any of the rival formulations, 169 00:24:37,480 --> 00:24:48,820 and part of the reason for that is the very recent revelations from other parts of the Americas, 170 00:24:48,820 --> 00:24:54,220 but potentially relevant to all parts of the tropical Americas of. 171 00:24:54,220 --> 00:24:58,100 And in case you haven't encountered this. 172 00:24:58,100 --> 00:25:10,100 It's an absolutely fascinating new development in archaeology that allows, so to speak, seeing under the forest canopies. 173 00:25:10,100 --> 00:25:17,570 So it's been most useful in Amazonia and in Central America, especially of the Maya Lands. 174 00:25:17,570 --> 00:25:23,000 And it's only in the last few years that this work has been done, especially the last two years, 175 00:25:23,000 --> 00:25:31,030 and the revelations have been astounding about the density of settlement. 176 00:25:31,030 --> 00:25:38,230 And especially in southern Amazonia and in the Pétain region of Guatemala. 177 00:25:38,230 --> 00:25:46,780 But those are the regions where light our work has been concentrated when it is done over wider areas. 178 00:25:46,780 --> 00:25:56,680 We are probably going to find that we've underestimated pre-colonial populations in broad expanses of the Americas. 179 00:25:56,680 --> 00:26:00,520 Whether that applies to the Caribbean or not, I'm not sure. 180 00:26:00,520 --> 00:26:12,370 My guess is that it will, but on a lesser scale than in Amazonia or the Maya lowlands, but we don't know yet. 181 00:26:12,370 --> 00:26:21,290 At any rate, Caribbean estimates also range widely, and there are some recent ones that are fairly low. 182 00:26:21,290 --> 00:26:32,330 I am towards the higher end of the spectrum in my guesses, but not far in that direction. 183 00:26:32,330 --> 00:26:36,830 There's not all that much argument about the distribution of that pre-Colombian population. 184 00:26:36,830 --> 00:26:47,030 Most authorities come up with a distribution featuring those three islands as the host of the largest. 185 00:26:47,030 --> 00:26:59,530 The implications of these choices about guesses are considerable in the broader sense about the sophistication of these societies and. 186 00:26:59,530 --> 00:27:10,510 The economic complexities and so forth, but they also have implications for our inferences about the health history of these societies, 187 00:27:10,510 --> 00:27:14,980 if the numbers are bigger than the first endemic was bigger, 188 00:27:14,980 --> 00:27:25,250 the loss is greater and that probably means that the proportion are what it means is the composition of the first endemic. 189 00:27:25,250 --> 00:27:31,430 It's different and a bit more disease centric and a bit less violence centric. 190 00:27:31,430 --> 00:27:38,140 If the numbers were bigger. At least that's what I think it means. 191 00:27:38,140 --> 00:27:49,180 So those estimates are guesswork based substantially on archaeology, especially in the Caribbean. 192 00:27:49,180 --> 00:27:56,350 But sometimes they're based on retro sections of counts taken by Spanish authorities. 193 00:27:56,350 --> 00:28:04,210 A few of which are represented here and these are not terribly controversial amongst 194 00:28:04,210 --> 00:28:09,520 the experts is just one at the size of population was before 40 ninety two. 195 00:28:09,520 --> 00:28:16,060 That's terribly controversial. So there's no argument about the radical loss of population. 196 00:28:16,060 --> 00:28:21,560 It's just how radical, how big it was to start with and. 197 00:28:21,560 --> 00:28:34,670 By the middle of the 16th century, the numbers of people recognised as Indians as indigenous Americans was tiny on all the major islands, 198 00:28:34,670 --> 00:28:41,980 a little bit larger in some cases on some of the smaller islands, lords and windward. 199 00:28:41,980 --> 00:28:53,520 And on the mainland, also substantial mainland, I mean, the coastal lands around the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico. 200 00:28:53,520 --> 00:29:05,730 Also, extreme declines, even in places where there was no discernable Spanish settlement in the first 50 or 80 years. 201 00:29:05,730 --> 00:29:15,430 And here too, I'm following Linda Newsome. So. 202 00:29:15,430 --> 00:29:21,720 Why did this happen the way that it did? How should we understand it? 203 00:29:21,720 --> 00:29:28,720 There's a new scholarship that I'm not all that up. 204 00:29:28,720 --> 00:29:33,940 Impressed by even though some of it is written by people I regard as friends of mine, 205 00:29:33,940 --> 00:29:40,390 such as Paul Kelton and I'm sure Paul Kelton would say exactly the reverse. 206 00:29:40,390 --> 00:29:48,320 He's not too impressed with some of the things I say, and I hope he would regard me as a friend of his in any way. 207 00:29:48,320 --> 00:29:53,260 Carlton Associates are arguing that for a generation, 208 00:29:53,260 --> 00:29:59,320 historians have overestimated the significance of disease in the radical loss of population 209 00:29:59,320 --> 00:30:06,010 in the Americas and has systematically underplayed the significance of colonial violence, 210 00:30:06,010 --> 00:30:11,050 dispossession and so forth. 211 00:30:11,050 --> 00:30:20,500 I'm not arguing with Kelton and friends about North America, which is what the focus of their work is. 212 00:30:20,500 --> 00:30:28,630 I am arguing with Kotlin friends when they speak of either the Caribbean or the Americas as a whole, 213 00:30:28,630 --> 00:30:37,130 where they haven't really burrowed into the data the way that they have for North America. 214 00:30:37,130 --> 00:30:45,320 Part of the appeal of their argument is that it restores sovereignty to human beings 215 00:30:45,320 --> 00:30:55,340 over history instead of assigning agency to thoughtless microbes and insect vectors. 216 00:30:55,340 --> 00:31:05,170 And there's a certain. Reassuring nature to that all, but I think inappropriately reassuring, 217 00:31:05,170 --> 00:31:15,730 and I'm also not arguing that that there was not rampant violence in the early settlement history of the Caribbean, 218 00:31:15,730 --> 00:31:21,880 there was and it's well-documented. And for historians who like to have things well documented, 219 00:31:21,880 --> 00:31:31,210 is very tempting to assign a much larger role to violence than to microbes, which are much more poorly documented. 220 00:31:31,210 --> 00:31:49,110 But. What I am saying is that. That pervasive violence was less demographically significant, far less than the less visible in the historical record. 221 00:31:49,110 --> 00:31:54,750 Work of. Mindless microbes. 222 00:31:54,750 --> 00:31:58,500 But these things are necessarily intertwined. 223 00:31:58,500 --> 00:32:10,740 That's the whole logic of the term sin demick, that people's immune systems are less effective when they are under acute psychological stress, 224 00:32:10,740 --> 00:32:24,450 when they are malnourished, and so that disentangling colonial violence and disease is awkward, even though. 225 00:32:24,450 --> 00:32:33,280 I am arguing with Kelton and friends about that, and it is an attempt to disentangle. 226 00:32:33,280 --> 00:32:39,600 Which, in a way, is contrary to the spirit of the concept of sin endemic. 227 00:32:39,600 --> 00:33:00,950 Part of the reason that I think I think the way I think is from some contextual data and one snippet of, to my mind, eloquent data, so. 228 00:33:00,950 --> 00:33:14,360 Colonial conquests are routine in world history, and to take just one example of a place that has been conquered eight or more 229 00:33:14,360 --> 00:33:22,910 times Egypt by extremely violent and reasonably efficient armies of their time. 230 00:33:22,910 --> 00:33:33,080 And yet one cannot find. Radical population in the demographic history of Egypt. 231 00:33:33,080 --> 00:33:46,140 And there's actually a moderate one in the 14th century, more than moderate, but it has to do with a black death, probably. 232 00:33:46,140 --> 00:33:53,700 On top of that, if you look and it's not that easy to get direct data about population in 16th century Morocco, 233 00:33:53,700 --> 00:33:59,190 but that same generation of conquistadors who burst into the Caribbean, 234 00:33:59,190 --> 00:34:08,250 their cousins burst into Morocco and approximately the same time, no shortage of violence. 235 00:34:08,250 --> 00:34:14,990 And there's no radical deep population of miracle attendant upon that. 236 00:34:14,990 --> 00:34:26,660 And then there's this one instance when the Spanish captain tried his best to keep indigenous Americans alive, 237 00:34:26,660 --> 00:34:35,540 transporting them from the Caribbean to Spain, and thirty seven percent of them died in a several week long voyage and more of them died. 238 00:34:35,540 --> 00:34:39,880 Once they got to Spain, they were not violently treated. 239 00:34:39,880 --> 00:34:48,290 The captain was. Trying to see that they survived, but could not. 240 00:34:48,290 --> 00:35:00,520 All of these reasons nudge me in the direction of the anti-Clinton position that I have staked out. 241 00:35:00,520 --> 00:35:09,250 There's a little controversy about which infections arrived when, and of course, retrospective diagnosis is fraught with difficulty. 242 00:35:09,250 --> 00:35:13,660 These are the best guesses that I subscribe to. 243 00:35:13,660 --> 00:35:22,930 Uh. And there's much less controversy about smallpox and measles than there is about a fourteen ninety three influenza outbreak on Hispaniola. 244 00:35:22,930 --> 00:35:31,870 The malaria gas, I think, is pretty solid, um, but any rate within a little more than a human generation, 245 00:35:31,870 --> 00:35:43,090 most of the important acute killing diseases of Africa and Eurasia had made it across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. 246 00:35:43,090 --> 00:35:54,180 Amongst these, measles probably had outsized significance once it got established, which is probably by fifteen thirty one. 247 00:35:54,180 --> 00:36:01,530 And the reason for that is that in modern populations don't actually know if this is true 500 years ago, 248 00:36:01,530 --> 00:36:10,110 measles has insidious effect of wiping out memory in immune systems for two to three years. 249 00:36:10,110 --> 00:36:17,070 So if one is in a situation where new infections are returning as old infections, 250 00:36:17,070 --> 00:36:26,010 they act in measles survivors for two or three years, like new infections because one's immune system. 251 00:36:26,010 --> 00:36:30,610 Does not recognise them, the memory of them has been wiped out. 252 00:36:30,610 --> 00:36:39,220 So that would create a heightened vulnerability in a situation in which. 253 00:36:39,220 --> 00:36:51,130 Smallpox and influenza and scarlet fever is over, are constantly being reintroduced by incoming ship traffic. 254 00:36:51,130 --> 00:36:58,270 So that's why I think measles deserves particular attention in this story. 255 00:36:58,270 --> 00:37:06,950 And it's extremely infectious to begin with because the droplets from your breath are so tiny. 256 00:37:06,950 --> 00:37:18,080 I think if I remember correctly that you can get measles, um, not just my face to face contact, but two to three hours later. 257 00:37:18,080 --> 00:37:23,940 If people have left the room, um, you can still get it. 258 00:37:23,940 --> 00:37:37,230 From them. Another reason why I think I think the way I think is because of the record of some other islands elsewhere around the world, 259 00:37:37,230 --> 00:37:44,070 and I'm going to speed up a little bit here in the interest of getting to the second syndromic. 260 00:37:44,070 --> 00:37:50,070 So there are lots of cases somewhat better documented in Polynesia and Micronesia. 261 00:37:50,070 --> 00:38:07,210 Of, uh, dramatic. Disease centric losses of population within a few generations after contact with, in this case, European mariners. 262 00:38:07,210 --> 00:38:16,960 These are Cindy Mix two. There is a certain amount of violence and dispossession and some islands, but in some other islands, very little of that. 263 00:38:16,960 --> 00:38:26,030 And in the North Atlantic case, such as these most recent case in the Carolinas, no violence at all in that one. 264 00:38:26,030 --> 00:38:31,790 And in the North Atlantic Islands situations, Iceland in 17 seven, 265 00:38:31,790 --> 00:38:39,200 the Faroe Islands in eighteen forty six single epidemics of a single infection, well documented, 266 00:38:39,200 --> 00:38:51,980 produced, uh, losses of population that are comparable to what one reads about in the skimpy documentation for early 16th century Caribbean islands. 267 00:38:51,980 --> 00:39:03,050 Strengthening one's faith or I think they should strengthen one's faith in those accounts and in the power of these killing diseases, 268 00:39:03,050 --> 00:39:13,100 even absent colonial violence, as in Iceland as in the Faroe Islands, which again, to reiterate, doesn't mean colonial violence didn't happen. 269 00:39:13,100 --> 00:39:19,810 It just means it's not at the centre of the story the way Kelton and friends. 270 00:39:19,810 --> 00:39:33,270 Claim it is. OK, so the Caribbean got it worse if the numbers are more reliable than just about anywhere on the mainland. 271 00:39:33,270 --> 00:39:37,890 And why might that be so? Well, first of all, 272 00:39:37,890 --> 00:39:42,960 Caribbean populations were in exactly the same situation as others in the Americas when it came 273 00:39:42,960 --> 00:39:52,630 to the lack of acquired immunity to this whole range of infections from Eurasia and Africa. 274 00:39:52,630 --> 00:39:57,360 So there's no explanation available in that category. 275 00:39:57,360 --> 00:40:10,020 It could be that the colonial violence, malnutrition and so forth was more acute in the Caribbean than elsewhere. 276 00:40:10,020 --> 00:40:18,070 I'm. I think that probably doesn't explain any difference between the mainland Americas and the Caribbean, 277 00:40:18,070 --> 00:40:22,480 although it might explain some difference with the Pacific. 278 00:40:22,480 --> 00:40:31,780 I think it's certainly the case that location hurt the Caribbean was downwind directly of voyages from both Europe 279 00:40:31,780 --> 00:40:42,740 and West Africa so that it was most frequently and soonest visited by ships carrying loads of pathogens and vectors. 280 00:40:42,740 --> 00:40:53,570 And much of the Caribbean lowland, humid, suitable for malarial vectors, and indeed had its own indigenous Anopheles mosquitoes populations, 281 00:40:53,570 --> 00:41:00,170 some of which were competent vectors for malaria, yellow fever is not a possible explanation, in my view. 282 00:41:00,170 --> 00:41:06,650 I don't think it existed in the Caribbean until 16 forty seven or if it did, it was trivial. 283 00:41:06,650 --> 00:41:09,890 There is another argument that's really interesting. 284 00:41:09,890 --> 00:41:21,370 I'm I don't think it carries all that much weight, but I'm not well placed to say, let me explain this as briefly as I can. 285 00:41:21,370 --> 00:41:27,640 Indigenous Caribbean populations. This is not controversial display, very narrow. 286 00:41:27,640 --> 00:41:38,020 Genetic diversity that's inferred from current populations and also from the recovered ancient DNA fragments. 287 00:41:38,020 --> 00:41:43,810 This is true also of the indigenous American population as a whole. 288 00:41:43,810 --> 00:41:53,350 The reason for this is small founding populations crossing Beringia and not all that much time for radiation and diversification. 289 00:41:53,350 --> 00:42:03,670 Diversification since the crossing to the Americas and that applies are 43 to the Caribbean, where, as you know, 290 00:42:03,670 --> 00:42:13,990 the occupation history is briefer and again small founding populations colonised beginning roughly 70 to 100 years ago. 291 00:42:13,990 --> 00:42:22,990 So that by most measures. The pre-Columbian Caribbean population and the entire pre-Columbian American 292 00:42:22,990 --> 00:42:30,180 population displays less genetic variability than the average African village. 293 00:42:30,180 --> 00:42:35,700 Which sounds amazing, but apparently is true. 294 00:42:35,700 --> 00:42:40,740 So what might this mean if people are very similar to one another? 295 00:42:40,740 --> 00:42:45,030 Genetically speaking, their immune systems are very similar to one another, genetically speaking, 296 00:42:45,030 --> 00:42:52,730 and that means that a given pathogen if it is by accident, calibrated to outwit. 297 00:42:52,730 --> 00:43:00,260 My immune system is also calibrated probably to outwit the immune systems of my neighbours 298 00:43:00,260 --> 00:43:08,860 because my neighbours are comparatively like me in terms of their immune systems. 299 00:43:08,860 --> 00:43:17,090 There's a somewhat more complicated argument that is also relevant that I'm going to skip over, but any rate. 300 00:43:17,090 --> 00:43:22,590 You got to understand here, this does not mean that the. 301 00:43:22,590 --> 00:43:31,650 pre-Columbian Caribbean populations were genetically inferior, it does not mean that their immune systems are inferior to anybody else. 302 00:43:31,650 --> 00:43:39,530 It means that the connectivity of their immune systems. Was inferior to that of many populations. 303 00:43:39,530 --> 00:43:44,310 But the same was true of Icelanders, for example. 304 00:43:44,310 --> 00:43:54,680 Because they too descended from small founding populations that set up shop at Iceland very recently. 305 00:43:54,680 --> 00:44:00,790 Maybe, uh. Uh, about twelve hundred years ago now. 306 00:44:00,790 --> 00:44:11,290 So. There are some people for whom arguments that enlist the the the word genetics are inherently racist. 307 00:44:11,290 --> 00:44:14,170 I'm trying to emphasise that this is not the case, 308 00:44:14,170 --> 00:44:30,890 that one can use paleo genomic data and recognise that it does not have any bearing upon the categories that we conventionally identify as races. 309 00:44:30,890 --> 00:44:42,650 Again, I don't know how powerful, if powerful at all this effect was is never as far as I can tell, been applied to explain anything in the Caribbean. 310 00:44:42,650 --> 00:44:54,920 It has been used by medical anthropologists to explain the dismal fate of Amazonian indigenous populations in the 20th century, 311 00:44:54,920 --> 00:45:00,820 who also suffered grievously from unfamiliar infections. 312 00:45:00,820 --> 00:45:07,630 And they, too, are very self similar, genetically speaking. OK, I need to speed up here. 313 00:45:07,630 --> 00:45:14,890 The second is endemic. There's a brief lull after the Caribbean islands have been substantially depopulated. 314 00:45:14,890 --> 00:45:26,680 There weren't that many people left. Most of those people were not descended from the pre-Columbian populations, but were either African or European, 315 00:45:26,680 --> 00:45:31,420 with immune systems that were reasonably well calibrated to the range of infection. 316 00:45:31,420 --> 00:45:36,700 Now ricocheting around the Caribbean. 317 00:45:36,700 --> 00:45:47,320 That happy instance ended with the installation of the plantation complex after about 16 40, 318 00:45:47,320 --> 00:45:52,810 and here these are things that I did write about in the book Mosquito Empires. 319 00:45:52,810 --> 00:45:59,350 The short version is that sugar plantations in particular were bad for everybody's health. 320 00:45:59,350 --> 00:46:13,330 Part of the reason for that was that they were especially hospitable to the main yellow fever vector mosquito and beyond the plantations themselves, 321 00:46:13,330 --> 00:46:26,710 the infrastructure of port cities. Water storage also made the Caribbean ports particularly good at hosting the vector for yellow fever. 322 00:46:26,710 --> 00:46:32,500 Plantations are also good for the Anopheles mosquitoes that carry malaria. 323 00:46:32,500 --> 00:46:45,150 So the plantation complex? Intensified or added to the vector borne mosquito borne disease burden of the Caribbean. 324 00:46:45,150 --> 00:46:54,540 I can go on at great length about that particular story. It also was necessary for these two infections to take root, 325 00:46:54,540 --> 00:47:02,160 as they did for populations to recover from the nadir of the late 60s and early 70s century, 326 00:47:02,160 --> 00:47:17,560 which the plantation complex achieved by inspiring the in-migration of thousands and thousands of people, many of them enslaved Africans. 327 00:47:17,560 --> 00:47:24,420 So you can see the numbers. Population growth of the island Caribbean down there. 328 00:47:24,420 --> 00:47:38,060 And, of course, the plantation complex. Institutionalised, some of the social and political factors that made Cindy mix sin DMX. 329 00:47:38,060 --> 00:47:46,950 Which presumably reduced immune system function amongst enslaved Africans. 330 00:47:46,950 --> 00:47:56,370 I'm going to portray this second syndromic in three categories plantation cities and armies. 331 00:47:56,370 --> 00:48:05,210 These are all institutions that just about everywhere in the world are hostile to populations. 332 00:48:05,210 --> 00:48:18,350 They almost everywhere in the world produce higher death rates than birth rates, and in armies, that's particularly true. 333 00:48:18,350 --> 00:48:30,070 But it's also true of cities and plantations. So the Caribbean, after 16 40, featured an unusual concentration of plantations. 334 00:48:30,070 --> 00:48:42,520 An unusual concentration of armies and a pretty unusual concentration of cities, and all of these were unfortunate from the demographic point of view. 335 00:48:42,520 --> 00:48:47,440 The roster of killing diseases in these three environments, 336 00:48:47,440 --> 00:48:55,390 plantation cities and armies was essentially the same across them all, although in differing proportions at different times. 337 00:48:55,390 --> 00:49:06,400 And it's also likely the case that dengue joined the mix in the late 18th century for all populations enslaved Africans, 338 00:49:06,400 --> 00:49:14,800 European migrants of whatever status the first weeks and months in the Caribbean were the most dangerous, 339 00:49:14,800 --> 00:49:24,070 and the death rates in the first 12 months were in the height of the plantation complex. 340 00:49:24,070 --> 00:49:39,010 Extreme. Plantations themselves were classics INDYMAC'S in that terror and violence were central to the operation of plantations. 341 00:49:39,010 --> 00:49:53,410 Malnutrition was frequent and there two particular aspects of plantation life that were relevant to this second endemic one was whipping, 342 00:49:53,410 --> 00:50:05,950 which obviously opens up skins and invites certain kinds of infections and the sexual abuse primarily of female enslaved Africans, 343 00:50:05,950 --> 00:50:15,100 which, as I write here, had suppressing effect on fertility in the plantation environment. 344 00:50:15,100 --> 00:50:23,560 Sugar was the worst of all in terms of plantations exacted an extreme demographic penalty annual 345 00:50:23,560 --> 00:50:28,930 declines from two to five percent different times in different places throughout the Caribbean, 346 00:50:28,930 --> 00:50:40,480 which, if we can trust the latest work on the gulag in the Soviet Union, means that sugar plantations were more inimical to life than the Gulag. 347 00:50:40,480 --> 00:50:49,760 On an annualised basis? This was especially true in the first decades of a sugar plantations career. 348 00:50:49,760 --> 00:51:02,340 And of all parts of the Caribbean, it was least true in Barbados, which did not have malaria because the relevant mosquitoes never colonised Barbados. 349 00:51:02,340 --> 00:51:09,570 Interestingly, in some places, the demographic penalty of sugar outlasted slavery in most places. 350 00:51:09,570 --> 00:51:18,570 The plantation penalty demographic penalty ended approximately the same time as abolition came. 351 00:51:18,570 --> 00:51:24,360 But in some in the Danish West Indies, which are really well documented, that was not the case. 352 00:51:24,360 --> 00:51:31,360 And the sugar plantation penalty lasted about four decades beyond abolition. 353 00:51:31,360 --> 00:51:36,160 Why was sugar so bad? It's not entirely clear. 354 00:51:36,160 --> 00:51:39,850 I think it has to do with more disease, but it could be, 355 00:51:39,850 --> 00:51:47,450 especially in the early decades of a sugar plantations career that there is a more demanding work regime. 356 00:51:47,450 --> 00:51:55,190 Let me push ahead cities, so in the 17th and 18th century, 357 00:51:55,190 --> 00:52:05,920 most of the world is about three to five percent urbanised the Caribbean more like five to 10 percent, so it's a bit more urban than most places. 358 00:52:05,920 --> 00:52:10,090 And everywhere, until the late 19th century, as I've said a moment ago, 359 00:52:10,090 --> 00:52:18,850 cities were sinkholes for populations sustained only by influxes in the Caribbean. 360 00:52:18,850 --> 00:52:28,720 This featured not just the usual waterborne diseases, breath borne diseases, but a very heavy prevalence of yellow fever, 361 00:52:28,720 --> 00:52:39,010 which is well adapted to the urban environment because of water storage infrastructure and the peculiarities of the AIDS aegypti mosquito, 362 00:52:39,010 --> 00:52:43,410 which likes artificial water containers. 363 00:52:43,410 --> 00:52:55,740 On top of that, cholera beginning in 1832 took a gigantic chunk out of Caribbean populations, as it did in a few other parts of the world. 364 00:52:55,740 --> 00:53:01,730 It affected the port, the plantations as well, but much, much less so. 365 00:53:01,730 --> 00:53:10,260 So everywhere in the world, there was an urban demographic penalty well into the 19th century in the Caribbean. 366 00:53:10,260 --> 00:53:16,210 It lasted a little bit longer than average by global standards. 367 00:53:16,210 --> 00:53:29,050 Armies. This is the last piece, first of all, garrisons for which there's good documentation by the 19th century collected and actually published. 368 00:53:29,050 --> 00:53:42,250 British Garrison Mortality and Jamaica and the Bahamas were particularly bad four times as deadly as Indian garrisons, 10 times as deadly as Canada. 369 00:53:42,250 --> 00:53:57,440 The wind was in the Lords, which tended to have a little lighter disease burden, also more deadly than India and Canada, but less so. 370 00:53:57,440 --> 00:54:04,910 Large proportions of soldiers on garrison duty had come from Europe and were 371 00:54:04,910 --> 00:54:10,160 immunologically entirely unprepared for parts of the Caribbean disease environment, 372 00:54:10,160 --> 00:54:22,920 particularly malaria and yellow fever. Armies at war generated gigantic epidemics because they brought thousands and thousands of young men. 373 00:54:22,920 --> 00:54:33,390 Who were immunologically unprepared within range of Caribbean mosquitoes that were competent vectors for malaria and yellow fever. 374 00:54:33,390 --> 00:54:39,600 That's essentially what your mosquito empires was all about. 375 00:54:39,600 --> 00:54:47,340 I counted up 21 military expeditions that had big disease losses to them. 376 00:54:47,340 --> 00:54:58,350 The range of big disease losses is extremely variable and the duration of them also extremely variable, so it's hard to be all that specific. 377 00:54:58,350 --> 00:55:03,490 A few large scale examples Cartagena. Santiago de Cuba. 378 00:55:03,490 --> 00:55:10,740 British siege, in which 71 percent of the forces committed died. 379 00:55:10,740 --> 00:55:14,490 And almost all of them from disease, the Haitian Revolution. 380 00:55:14,490 --> 00:55:21,720 The data are much poorer here. Archival record more disorganised. 381 00:55:21,720 --> 00:55:32,410 But again, uh, maybe fifty five to 75 percent of the forces committed to try to suppress the Haitian revolution, uh, died in all. 382 00:55:32,410 --> 00:55:37,140 And the proportion who died from disease. Sixty five to eighty percent. 383 00:55:37,140 --> 00:55:48,740 A case that's not in mosquito empires, Spanish army intervening in independence ambitions, in what's now the Dominican Republic. 384 00:55:48,740 --> 00:55:57,680 And a sizeable Spanish army of fifty one thousand fifty one thousand dead, Spanish army was roughly twice that size. 385 00:55:57,680 --> 00:56:07,130 Almost all of them to disease. But the most amazing detail in all of this is a much smaller scale example from 386 00:56:07,130 --> 00:56:11,750 the war that people from my country call the War of the American Revolution, 387 00:56:11,750 --> 00:56:25,070 in which US mid-sized British forces tried to attack a Spanish fort in Nicaragua, lost 90 percent of its men in a matter of weeks, 388 00:56:25,070 --> 00:56:32,940 outnumbering the casualties from the 11 deadliest battles of the American Revolution. 389 00:56:32,940 --> 00:56:39,150 For the people who were raised in sort of patriotic U.S. tradition, this is a humbling thought. 390 00:56:39,150 --> 00:56:49,060 But there it is. So the entire Caribbean region during the second Syndromic was operating like. 391 00:56:49,060 --> 00:56:54,940 The city of London, it was killing people faster than others were the early modern city of London, 392 00:56:54,940 --> 00:57:02,200 not London today, killing people faster than others were being born. 393 00:57:02,200 --> 00:57:11,260 It was bigger in population than London until about 1850, and the reach from which the spatial reach the area, 394 00:57:11,260 --> 00:57:17,710 the catchment area from which influxes made up those losses was much, 395 00:57:17,710 --> 00:57:31,000 much larger because it extended, particularly to Atlantic Africa and the millions of involuntary migrants who came to the Caribbean. 396 00:57:31,000 --> 00:57:37,290 Mostly young, mostly male, as was the case for. 397 00:57:37,290 --> 00:57:44,940 The populations that topped up armies, as was the case for populations that topped most cities, 398 00:57:44,940 --> 00:57:52,800 London is actually exceptional in having, in many periods, a female predominance small one. 399 00:57:52,800 --> 00:57:59,060 And a result of the prevalence of domestic servitude. 400 00:57:59,060 --> 00:58:03,170 All this is different from plantation society in North America, 401 00:58:03,170 --> 00:58:11,150 in which the enslaved population was demographically self-sufficient by sometime in the early 18th century, 402 00:58:11,150 --> 00:58:18,650 17 30 at the latest, whereas in the Caribbean, in Barbados, that happens as early as about 1810. 403 00:58:18,650 --> 00:58:25,410 Everyone else does not happen until abolition at the soonest. 404 00:58:25,410 --> 00:58:35,160 The U.S. slave population quadrupled after the transatlantic slave trade was legally outlawed in the United States. 405 00:58:35,160 --> 00:58:41,970 It quadrupled in 50 some years. This is very different from the Caribbean experience. 406 00:58:41,970 --> 00:58:47,340 One could suppose that the American plantation system was less oppressive and violent. 407 00:58:47,340 --> 00:58:50,850 I think that's unlikely. It was less focussed on sugar. 408 00:58:50,850 --> 00:59:04,380 I think that's significant. And. It had much less damage from yellow fever, malaria and other diseases as well, almost certainly. 409 00:59:04,380 --> 00:59:14,670 Brazil is an interesting case that I haven't looked into properly. My guess is there is a big second endemic in Brazil that's closer to the Caribbean. 410 00:59:14,670 --> 00:59:20,550 But I haven't tried to look yet, and I probably won't get around to it to the data, 411 00:59:20,550 --> 00:59:25,620 even though Stuart Schwartz could sort that out for me very quickly. 412 00:59:25,620 --> 00:59:31,200 The second is endemic in the Caribbean, I think is probably unique in world history. 413 00:59:31,200 --> 00:59:41,400 For its durability and its scale, I wracked by brains to think of other situations in which for two hundred or so years, 414 00:59:41,400 --> 00:59:51,780 population loss was as acute and had to be compensated for by large scale influxes. 415 00:59:51,780 --> 01:00:00,640 And I can't really think of one. You can think of smaller scale examples every city in the world. 416 01:00:00,640 --> 01:00:07,930 So these two syndromic taken together, the first thing to remember for all the analytical points that I might wish to 417 01:00:07,930 --> 01:00:14,650 make for all the arguments I might wish to launch against friends of mine. 418 01:00:14,650 --> 01:00:20,040 The thing to remember, first and foremost, is that this constituted. 419 01:00:20,040 --> 01:00:31,540 At least 350 years of acute suffering and ill health for millions and millions of people. 420 01:00:31,540 --> 01:00:33,760 And sometimes I lose sight of that, 421 01:00:33,760 --> 01:00:41,080 sometimes one lose sight loses sight of that one trying to think about how to explain things and why things turned out the way that they did. 422 01:00:41,080 --> 01:00:48,080 But one shouldn't lose sight of it. That said, I'm about to lose sight of it. 423 01:00:48,080 --> 01:00:58,760 This is a story in which disease environments are constructed environments, all disease environments are at least to some extent, built environments. 424 01:00:58,760 --> 01:01:06,030 These two are the first and second systemic. Much more so than most, and they should be understood as. 425 01:01:06,030 --> 01:01:19,600 Human artefacts, as well as an outgrowth of mosquito ecology and the behaviour of 20 or more different kinds of pathogens. 426 01:01:19,600 --> 01:01:24,880 There is a geopolitical result I have convinced myself this is the argument of mosquito empires. 427 01:01:24,880 --> 01:01:30,820 I'm not sure if anybody else on the face of the Earth has agreed with me on this, 428 01:01:30,820 --> 01:01:41,440 but I think that the army's at war component of what I've just presented to you. 429 01:01:41,440 --> 01:01:50,410 Substantially explains why the Spanish empire in the Caribbean lasted, as well as it did and why big parts of it were not seised. 430 01:01:50,410 --> 01:01:56,330 Durably particularly by the British Empire. 431 01:01:56,330 --> 01:02:06,410 I also think it goes a long way towards explaining why, beginning with the Haitian Revolution and actually. 432 01:02:06,410 --> 01:02:11,960 My analysis, beginning with the American Revolution in South Carolina and Virginia. 433 01:02:11,960 --> 01:02:20,960 But let's leave that aside. Why revolutions generated by locally born and raised populations with immune 434 01:02:20,960 --> 01:02:29,300 systems calibrated to the environments of the Caribbean were successful against. 435 01:02:29,300 --> 01:02:40,500 Armies sent out to quell their revolutions composed of young men whose immune systems were not prepared for what they were exposed to. 436 01:02:40,500 --> 01:02:51,090 And as many people have argued, these two INDYMAC'S taken together explain why they go a long way towards explaining 437 01:02:51,090 --> 01:02:59,200 why the human population of the Caribbean is as it is why it is to borrow. 438 01:02:59,200 --> 01:03:01,510 A phrase that Alfred Crosby did not use, 439 01:03:01,510 --> 01:03:11,650 but might have used a Neo Africa in the Americas and the indigenous population of the Caribbean was demographically, 440 01:03:11,650 --> 01:03:22,300 genetically and culturally marginalised, not extinguished as some people carelessly have said, but marginalised. 441 01:03:22,300 --> 01:03:32,050 So that, I believe, is the end. I thank you for your patience, and depending on whether Halle says we have time or not, I'll do what I can to. 442 01:03:32,050 --> 01:03:43,338 Deal with Karl's quibbles, questions, fundamental challenges.