Good evening, everyone, and welcome, I'm Hal Jones, I'm the director of the rather more American Institute,
and it's a pleasure to have you all here for the two thousand nineteen Sir John Eliot lecture in Atlantic history.
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,
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.
And in recognition of of the service he provided in in being really a moving force behind the establishment of the AI in 2001.
And he's played a big part in the intellectual development of this institute,
and I think we want to pay this tribute to him for for his role in building up
the AI and in making sure that Atlantic history as a part of what we do here,
that we take a view of the United States in our work here on the history and culture and politics of America
and look beyond the borders of the U.S. at the wider Atlantic world and in the world more generally.
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,
and certainly that that tradition continues this year as we welcome John McNeil as our Elliott lecturer for 2019.
John McNeil is a university professor at Georgetown University. I'm sure he's known very well by many of you.
He holds appointments in both the Department of History and the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown,
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,
awards recognitions really too numerous to mention, including Fulbright Awards, MacArthur Grants, Guggenheim Fellowships.
His books include Something New Under The Sun,
which won the World History Association book Prise and Mosquito Empires on the role of Ecology and the disease environment of the Caribbean.
I think a theme we'll hear a bit more about this evening looking at Yellow Fever in the Caribbean Basin,
which won the beverage prise of the American Historical Association for the best book on the history of the Western Hemisphere.
He's a past president of the American Society for Environmental History and currently serving as the president of the American Historical Association.
So quite a distinguished figure in the field of Atlantic history,
in the field of global and environmental history, and really a leader in the profession more generally.
So I know John's been a visitor to Oxford in the past.
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.
All hand things over to you. Thank you.
So thank you very much to Hal Jones and the rather marry American Institute for the opportunity to return to Oxford this month.
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,
and it's also wonderful to be giving the Sir John Elliott lecture.
I am an occasional dabbler in Atlantic history, and like so many others, I'm paddling in St John's wake.
In this respect, it is. A great honour, I hope to be.
Halfway worthy of it. So this is my title. I'll explain the terms INDYMAC'S in just a moment.
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.
My topic is a book project that I'm embarked upon, together with a Latin American, a steward, shorts and colonial America.
Phil Morgan, both of whom have taken their work into the Caribbean.
And together we are doing a general three authored Environmental History of the Caribbean Basin.
Schwartz is working on hurricanes and earthquakes.
I'm working on disease environments, and Phil Morgan is going to bring it all together and make sense of the entirety of it.
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,
and a fragment of the new project and a fragment of what I'll be saying on this occasion derived from that book.
But most of it is different from what I attempted in that book.
So I'm taking on approximately seventy two hundred years of Caribbean disease ecology history.
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.
But first, I want to introduce you to one of the. Dramatis personae, or well,
perhaps not a persona of the endemic the vector for four major diseases in the Caribbean could be the world's most dangerous animal,
definitely the Caribbean's most dangerous animal. It is ship time.
What I'm doing also, I want to make clear, is not history of medicine.
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.
Rather, I'm mainly interested in the implications, especially for demography of health and disease.
Now, the last five hundred years or so are an old subject, and to some extent,
what I'm doing could be adequately described and dismissed as pouring old wine into a new bottle.
But the subject is an unstable one because new information is filtering through,
and some of the last five hundred years of health and disease history is necessarily understood best in the long term context.
The multi millennial context, which we knew almost nothing about ten years ago and we know a little bit more about.
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.
One is I'm relying on new information generated by geneticists.
Operating in the young field now called paleo genomics.
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,
not least of which is my own in expertise in handling the work of geneticists.
But that's by far the best avenue into the health and disease history of the pre-Columbian past.
So one doesn't have all that much choice. There are two main varieties of paleo genomics that are relevant.
One is so-called ancient DNA or a DNA excavated, so to speak, from normally human remains.
Beyond that, there are inferences that can be drawn from the distribution and prevalence of traits in living populations that
reflect upon the deeper past and using those two approaches simultaneously narrows the range of uncertainties.
But there's not a whole lot of a DNA to work with in the Caribbean under the moist, humid conditions that prevail.
Most of the time, they're decay is rapid.
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.
The second thing there's a little bit different is I am conscripting the concept of INDYMAC'S from medical anthropology.
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.
And it argues for understanding sustained ill health that involves simultaneous co-infection.
And social, environmental and perhaps political conditions that either, um,
intensify or in the first instance make possible this co-infection for multiple pathogens.
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,
the term and concepts in DMX have never been used to describe the past used only in the last decade or so to.
Help understand the HIV crisis and to help imagine possible future health crises.
So in short, I'm shamelessly stealing something from medical anthropology.
The third thing I'm doing that's slightly different from what is conventional is trying to understand Caribbean health and disease history.
Not so much in the context of the Americas, although I will be doing that.
But in the context of islands,
and I'll be making reference to Pacific Islands and to North Atlantic Islands that are in many respects extremely different from the Caribbean,
except for being islands, except for being long isolated, at least substantially isolated from the wider currents of humankind.
So I'll be contextualising the Caribbean in an unconventional fashion in order to revisit
what I describe here as two of the grimmest chapters in the annals of human health,
preceded by a cheerful one infused with foreboding, a cheerful one infused with foreboding is prior to fourteen ninety two.
So. Insofar as we know anything at all, it comes about the pre-Colombian health history of the Caribbean.
It comes from bio bio archaeology and paleo genomics and as I said,
conditions of preservation are not very good in the region and the number of skeletons that have been examined,
the number of distinct individuals for which their human remains that have been examined is in the hundreds.
Which is regrettably few. There probably will be more in the years to come.
So we don't know that much. And what we do know is surely incomplete in ways that we cannot fully fathom.
It is possible, for example, that there were important infections amongst these populations that we have no trace of,
conceivably infections from pathogens that have gone extinct.
That would be possible. Absolutely no evidence for that.
The story the cheerful story is one that is highly distinctive in world history,
not perhaps truly unique, but close to it for reasons that I will explain very shortly.
At any rate, if one considers the most important and buy important, I mean, dangerous and deadly infections in world history,
the Americas pre-Columbian had at most three of these, and the Caribbean at most two of these tuberculosis and possibly syphilis.
Very controversial. Nobody knows for sure the weight of expert opinion seems to be at the moment in favour of the proposition.
The pre-Columbian Caribbean populations did host some form of syphilis and, if not some very close cousin of syphilis.
And interestingly enough, the form of tuberculosis might be.
This is absolutely fascinating to me. Maybe to nobody else might be one acquired from Pacific fur seals.
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,
and I'll be referring to that in a moment. But it's also the case that humans have given infections to animals.
There's a swapping that has been going on back and forth for thousands of years, and it looks like the variety of TB.
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.
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.
And neither of these is in contrast to, let us say, yellow fever or smallpox or measles.
Typically acute and frequently lethal in the short term.
There are a few other things that the bio archaeology tells us that these populations suffered from.
None of them demographically significant. So why why were these populations so healthy?
OK. A large part of the answer is that the populations of the Americas as a whole were pretty healthy by global historical standards,
and that conventional explanations for that include the fact that there were no herd animals outside of the llamas and alpacas of the Andes,
which meant that the opportunity for species jumping pathogens.
Was reduced. Um.
Beyond that, humans entered the American hemisphere a long time ago.
Fifteen to twenty three thousand years ago and when they did so, nobody anywhere had domesticated any animals except for the dog.
And dogs did come across the Bering Land Bridge. But that too,
meant it was completely impossible for these populations entering the Americas to bring with them
the kind of pathogen load that populations subsequently got after the domestication of pigs,
cattle, sheep, etc, etc., etc. Beyond that, passing through the.
Beringia landscape was passing through something of a cold filter hostile to some, not all pathogens,
which meant that what they may have had in Siberia, least if it was further south.
Uh, some of it they left behind when passing through Beringia.
That's a hypothesis. There's some people who argue that that would not have been operative.
And then. Even though I've just argued that people came to the Americas a very long time ago,
I'm now about to argue that they didn't come all that long ago in comparison to other populations elsewhere.
Human beings have existed in Africa for 300000 years, according to the most recent estimates.
And they entered the Eurasian landmass somewhere between 70 and 100000 years ago, entered Australia roughly 60000 years ago in every case.
This gave pathogens in these landscapes a longer opportunity in which to learn, so to speak, how to colonise human bodies.
And it raised the probability of species jumping not from domesticated animals because there were none but from other kinds of animals,
which does occasionally happen. So for all these reasons, populations entering the Americas and subsequent to their entrance seem to have been.
Unusually healthy by global standards. Within the Caribbean, these factors operated with even greater force.
So the human history of the Caribbean begins approximately 70 200 years ago, some people would say as long as 8000 years ago,
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.
But certainly one, if not more than one from Central America, maybe from Yucatan.
And these came in different pulses separated by thousands of years.
Nobody was farming in the Caribbean until about twenty five hundred years ago.
And when they took up horticulture and some people would say I included agriculture.
They relied typically on cassava, which is.
Interesting because it's the only case in world history in which any societies
developed complex hierarchical structures based on cassava as opposed to rice,
wheat, maize, et cetera. And it's also.
At least moderately significant for health history, because cassava is great for calories and carbohydrates,
but poor in proteins and a whole lot of micronutrients.
So to the extent that one relies on cassava, what needs fruits, tubers, fish and supplements in order to avoid malnutrition?
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.
This looks a little bit like some of the pasta I've been eating in bologna, but.
At any rate, the remedy is even briefer of human occupation in the Caribbean.
The career of farming is brief briefer still, as I've said,
and there's no evidence by archaeological or otherwise of a decline in health in the Caribbean when people took up horticulture and agriculture,
which is interesting because in other parts of the world, there is a conspicuous decline in health.
In terms of stature, in terms of infections, as revealed in, uh, bones and teeth, particularly in Southwest Asia 11000 years ago,
but also in North America, when maize cultivation became routine, it was clear evidence of health decline that did not occur.
In the Caribbean, it might show up one day with more bio archaeology, but it hasn't shown up yet.
And again, the paucity of domestic animals, in short, an extreme version of the America's story.
One would think and almost hope that this would translate into visibly longer life expectancies in pre-Columbian Caribbean populations.
But the bio archaeology does not support that hypothesis, so other things were keeping lifespans.
Short of probably a little bit longer than global averages, but not by any significant margin.
It's unclear why that should be. OK.
That was the happy story. Now things get unrelentingly grim.
So the first scene that Mick is the Colombian catastrophe that eliminated a large proportion of the population of the Caribbean,
and that's typically understood and correctly understood as part of a larger, Americas wide Colombian catastrophe in population.
And on the America's scale,
should be understood as probably one of the two greatest population catastrophes in the history of our species in terms of scale and intensity,
the Black Death being the other. Nobody knows what American hemispheric populations were in 14 91, the range of expert opinion is wide.
It has been narrowing in recent decades. The absolute latest syntheses, particularly that of Massimo Butshe,
a very distinguished demographic historian from Florence, are pushing the numbers down lower.
I disagree. I like Linda Newsome's numbers better than any of the rival formulations,
and part of the reason for that is the very recent revelations from other parts of the Americas,
but potentially relevant to all parts of the tropical Americas of.
And in case you haven't encountered this.
It's an absolutely fascinating new development in archaeology that allows, so to speak, seeing under the forest canopies.
So it's been most useful in Amazonia and in Central America, especially of the Maya Lands.
And it's only in the last few years that this work has been done, especially the last two years,
and the revelations have been astounding about the density of settlement.
And especially in southern Amazonia and in the Pétain region of Guatemala.
But those are the regions where light our work has been concentrated when it is done over wider areas.
We are probably going to find that we've underestimated pre-colonial populations in broad expanses of the Americas.
Whether that applies to the Caribbean or not, I'm not sure.
My guess is that it will, but on a lesser scale than in Amazonia or the Maya lowlands, but we don't know yet.
At any rate, Caribbean estimates also range widely, and there are some recent ones that are fairly low.
I am towards the higher end of the spectrum in my guesses, but not far in that direction.
There's not all that much argument about the distribution of that pre-Colombian population.
Most authorities come up with a distribution featuring those three islands as the host of the largest.
The implications of these choices about guesses are considerable in the broader sense about the sophistication of these societies and.
The economic complexities and so forth, but they also have implications for our inferences about the health history of these societies,
if the numbers are bigger than the first endemic was bigger,
the loss is greater and that probably means that the proportion are what it means is the composition of the first endemic.
It's different and a bit more disease centric and a bit less violence centric.
If the numbers were bigger. At least that's what I think it means.
So those estimates are guesswork based substantially on archaeology, especially in the Caribbean.
But sometimes they're based on retro sections of counts taken by Spanish authorities.
A few of which are represented here and these are not terribly controversial amongst
the experts is just one at the size of population was before 40 ninety two.
That's terribly controversial. So there's no argument about the radical loss of population.
It's just how radical, how big it was to start with and.
By the middle of the 16th century, the numbers of people recognised as Indians as indigenous Americans was tiny on all the major islands,
a little bit larger in some cases on some of the smaller islands, lords and windward.
And on the mainland, also substantial mainland, I mean, the coastal lands around the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico.
Also, extreme declines, even in places where there was no discernable Spanish settlement in the first 50 or 80 years.
And here too, I'm following Linda Newsome. So.
Why did this happen the way that it did? How should we understand it?
There's a new scholarship that I'm not all that up.
Impressed by even though some of it is written by people I regard as friends of mine,
such as Paul Kelton and I'm sure Paul Kelton would say exactly the reverse.
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.
Carlton Associates are arguing that for a generation,
historians have overestimated the significance of disease in the radical loss of population
in the Americas and has systematically underplayed the significance of colonial violence,
dispossession and so forth.
I'm not arguing with Kelton and friends about North America, which is what the focus of their work is.
I am arguing with Kotlin friends when they speak of either the Caribbean or the Americas as a whole,
where they haven't really burrowed into the data the way that they have for North America.
Part of the appeal of their argument is that it restores sovereignty to human beings
over history instead of assigning agency to thoughtless microbes and insect vectors.
And there's a certain. Reassuring nature to that all, but I think inappropriately reassuring,
and I'm also not arguing that that there was not rampant violence in the early settlement history of the Caribbean,
there was and it's well-documented. And for historians who like to have things well documented,
is very tempting to assign a much larger role to violence than to microbes, which are much more poorly documented.
But. What I am saying is that. That pervasive violence was less demographically significant, far less than the less visible in the historical record.
Work of. Mindless microbes.
But these things are necessarily intertwined.
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,
when they are malnourished, and so that disentangling colonial violence and disease is awkward, even though.
I am arguing with Kelton and friends about that, and it is an attempt to disentangle.
Which, in a way, is contrary to the spirit of the concept of sin endemic.
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.
Colonial conquests are routine in world history, and to take just one example of a place that has been conquered eight or more
times Egypt by extremely violent and reasonably efficient armies of their time.
And yet one cannot find. Radical population in the demographic history of Egypt.
And there's actually a moderate one in the 14th century, more than moderate, but it has to do with a black death, probably.
On top of that, if you look and it's not that easy to get direct data about population in 16th century Morocco,
but that same generation of conquistadors who burst into the Caribbean,
their cousins burst into Morocco and approximately the same time, no shortage of violence.
And there's no radical deep population of miracle attendant upon that.
And then there's this one instance when the Spanish captain tried his best to keep indigenous Americans alive,
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.
Once they got to Spain, they were not violently treated.
The captain was. Trying to see that they survived, but could not.
All of these reasons nudge me in the direction of the anti-Clinton position that I have staked out.
There's a little controversy about which infections arrived when, and of course, retrospective diagnosis is fraught with difficulty.
These are the best guesses that I subscribe to.
Uh. And there's much less controversy about smallpox and measles than there is about a fourteen ninety three influenza outbreak on Hispaniola.
The malaria gas, I think, is pretty solid, um, but any rate within a little more than a human generation,
most of the important acute killing diseases of Africa and Eurasia had made it across the Atlantic to the Caribbean.
Amongst these, measles probably had outsized significance once it got established, which is probably by fifteen thirty one.
And the reason for that is that in modern populations don't actually know if this is true 500 years ago,
measles has insidious effect of wiping out memory in immune systems for two to three years.
So if one is in a situation where new infections are returning as old infections,
they act in measles survivors for two or three years, like new infections because one's immune system.
Does not recognise them, the memory of them has been wiped out.
So that would create a heightened vulnerability in a situation in which.
Smallpox and influenza and scarlet fever is over, are constantly being reintroduced by incoming ship traffic.
So that's why I think measles deserves particular attention in this story.
And it's extremely infectious to begin with because the droplets from your breath are so tiny.
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.
If people have left the room, um, you can still get it.
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,
and I'm going to speed up a little bit here in the interest of getting to the second syndromic.
So there are lots of cases somewhat better documented in Polynesia and Micronesia.
Of, uh, dramatic. Disease centric losses of population within a few generations after contact with, in this case, European mariners.
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.
And in the North Atlantic case, such as these most recent case in the Carolinas, no violence at all in that one.
And in the North Atlantic Islands situations, Iceland in 17 seven,
the Faroe Islands in eighteen forty six single epidemics of a single infection, well documented,
produced, uh, losses of population that are comparable to what one reads about in the skimpy documentation for early 16th century Caribbean islands.
Strengthening one's faith or I think they should strengthen one's faith in those accounts and in the power of these killing diseases,
even absent colonial violence, as in Iceland as in the Faroe Islands, which again, to reiterate, doesn't mean colonial violence didn't happen.
It just means it's not at the centre of the story the way Kelton and friends.
Claim it is. OK, so the Caribbean got it worse if the numbers are more reliable than just about anywhere on the mainland.
And why might that be so? Well, first of all,
Caribbean populations were in exactly the same situation as others in the Americas when it came
to the lack of acquired immunity to this whole range of infections from Eurasia and Africa.
So there's no explanation available in that category.
It could be that the colonial violence, malnutrition and so forth was more acute in the Caribbean than elsewhere.
I'm. I think that probably doesn't explain any difference between the mainland Americas and the Caribbean,
although it might explain some difference with the Pacific.
I think it's certainly the case that location hurt the Caribbean was downwind directly of voyages from both Europe
and West Africa so that it was most frequently and soonest visited by ships carrying loads of pathogens and vectors.
And much of the Caribbean lowland, humid, suitable for malarial vectors, and indeed had its own indigenous Anopheles mosquitoes populations,
some of which were competent vectors for malaria, yellow fever is not a possible explanation, in my view.
I don't think it existed in the Caribbean until 16 forty seven or if it did, it was trivial.
There is another argument that's really interesting.
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.
Indigenous Caribbean populations. This is not controversial display, very narrow.
Genetic diversity that's inferred from current populations and also from the recovered ancient DNA fragments.
This is true also of the indigenous American population as a whole.
The reason for this is small founding populations crossing Beringia and not all that much time for radiation and diversification.
Diversification since the crossing to the Americas and that applies are 43 to the Caribbean, where, as you know,
the occupation history is briefer and again small founding populations colonised beginning roughly 70 to 100 years ago.
So that by most measures. The pre-Columbian Caribbean population and the entire pre-Columbian American
population displays less genetic variability than the average African village.
Which sounds amazing, but apparently is true.
So what might this mean if people are very similar to one another?
Genetically speaking, their immune systems are very similar to one another, genetically speaking,
and that means that a given pathogen if it is by accident, calibrated to outwit.
My immune system is also calibrated probably to outwit the immune systems of my neighbours
because my neighbours are comparatively like me in terms of their immune systems.
There's a somewhat more complicated argument that is also relevant that I'm going to skip over, but any rate.
You got to understand here, this does not mean that the.
pre-Columbian Caribbean populations were genetically inferior, it does not mean that their immune systems are inferior to anybody else.
It means that the connectivity of their immune systems. Was inferior to that of many populations.
But the same was true of Icelanders, for example.
Because they too descended from small founding populations that set up shop at Iceland very recently.
Maybe, uh. Uh, about twelve hundred years ago now.
So. There are some people for whom arguments that enlist the the the word genetics are inherently racist.
I'm trying to emphasise that this is not the case,
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.
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.
It has been used by medical anthropologists to explain the dismal fate of Amazonian indigenous populations in the 20th century,
who also suffered grievously from unfamiliar infections.
And they, too, are very self similar, genetically speaking. OK, I need to speed up here.
The second is endemic. There's a brief lull after the Caribbean islands have been substantially depopulated.
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,
with immune systems that were reasonably well calibrated to the range of infection.
Now ricocheting around the Caribbean.
That happy instance ended with the installation of the plantation complex after about 16 40,
and here these are things that I did write about in the book Mosquito Empires.
The short version is that sugar plantations in particular were bad for everybody's health.
Part of the reason for that was that they were especially hospitable to the main yellow fever vector mosquito and beyond the plantations themselves,
the infrastructure of port cities. Water storage also made the Caribbean ports particularly good at hosting the vector for yellow fever.
Plantations are also good for the Anopheles mosquitoes that carry malaria.
So the plantation complex? Intensified or added to the vector borne mosquito borne disease burden of the Caribbean.
I can go on at great length about that particular story. It also was necessary for these two infections to take root,
as they did for populations to recover from the nadir of the late 60s and early 70s century,
which the plantation complex achieved by inspiring the in-migration of thousands and thousands of people, many of them enslaved Africans.
So you can see the numbers. Population growth of the island Caribbean down there.
And, of course, the plantation complex. Institutionalised, some of the social and political factors that made Cindy mix sin DMX.
Which presumably reduced immune system function amongst enslaved Africans.
I'm going to portray this second syndromic in three categories plantation cities and armies.
These are all institutions that just about everywhere in the world are hostile to populations.
They almost everywhere in the world produce higher death rates than birth rates, and in armies, that's particularly true.
But it's also true of cities and plantations. So the Caribbean, after 16 40, featured an unusual concentration of plantations.
An unusual concentration of armies and a pretty unusual concentration of cities, and all of these were unfortunate from the demographic point of view.
The roster of killing diseases in these three environments,
plantation cities and armies was essentially the same across them all, although in differing proportions at different times.
And it's also likely the case that dengue joined the mix in the late 18th century for all populations enslaved Africans,
European migrants of whatever status the first weeks and months in the Caribbean were the most dangerous,
and the death rates in the first 12 months were in the height of the plantation complex.
Extreme. Plantations themselves were classics INDYMAC'S in that terror and violence were central to the operation of plantations.
Malnutrition was frequent and there two particular aspects of plantation life that were relevant to this second endemic one was whipping,
which obviously opens up skins and invites certain kinds of infections and the sexual abuse primarily of female enslaved Africans,
which, as I write here, had suppressing effect on fertility in the plantation environment.
Sugar was the worst of all in terms of plantations exacted an extreme demographic penalty annual
declines from two to five percent different times in different places throughout the Caribbean,
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.
On an annualised basis? This was especially true in the first decades of a sugar plantations career.
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.
Interestingly, in some places, the demographic penalty of sugar outlasted slavery in most places.
The plantation penalty demographic penalty ended approximately the same time as abolition came.
But in some in the Danish West Indies, which are really well documented, that was not the case.
And the sugar plantation penalty lasted about four decades beyond abolition.
Why was sugar so bad? It's not entirely clear.
I think it has to do with more disease, but it could be,
especially in the early decades of a sugar plantations career that there is a more demanding work regime.
Let me push ahead cities, so in the 17th and 18th century,
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.
And everywhere, until the late 19th century, as I've said a moment ago,
cities were sinkholes for populations sustained only by influxes in the Caribbean.
This featured not just the usual waterborne diseases, breath borne diseases, but a very heavy prevalence of yellow fever,
which is well adapted to the urban environment because of water storage infrastructure and the peculiarities of the AIDS aegypti mosquito,
which likes artificial water containers.
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.
It affected the port, the plantations as well, but much, much less so.
So everywhere in the world, there was an urban demographic penalty well into the 19th century in the Caribbean.
It lasted a little bit longer than average by global standards.
Armies. This is the last piece, first of all, garrisons for which there's good documentation by the 19th century collected and actually published.
British Garrison Mortality and Jamaica and the Bahamas were particularly bad four times as deadly as Indian garrisons, 10 times as deadly as Canada.
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.
Large proportions of soldiers on garrison duty had come from Europe and were
immunologically entirely unprepared for parts of the Caribbean disease environment,
particularly malaria and yellow fever. Armies at war generated gigantic epidemics because they brought thousands and thousands of young men.
Who were immunologically unprepared within range of Caribbean mosquitoes that were competent vectors for malaria and yellow fever.
That's essentially what your mosquito empires was all about.
I counted up 21 military expeditions that had big disease losses to them.
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.
A few large scale examples Cartagena. Santiago de Cuba.
British siege, in which 71 percent of the forces committed died.
And almost all of them from disease, the Haitian Revolution.
The data are much poorer here. Archival record more disorganised.
But again, uh, maybe fifty five to 75 percent of the forces committed to try to suppress the Haitian revolution, uh, died in all.
And the proportion who died from disease. Sixty five to eighty percent.
A case that's not in mosquito empires, Spanish army intervening in independence ambitions, in what's now the Dominican Republic.
And a sizeable Spanish army of fifty one thousand fifty one thousand dead, Spanish army was roughly twice that size.
Almost all of them to disease. But the most amazing detail in all of this is a much smaller scale example from
the war that people from my country call the War of the American Revolution,
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,
outnumbering the casualties from the 11 deadliest battles of the American Revolution.
For the people who were raised in sort of patriotic U.S. tradition, this is a humbling thought.
But there it is. So the entire Caribbean region during the second Syndromic was operating like.
The city of London, it was killing people faster than others were the early modern city of London,
not London today, killing people faster than others were being born.
It was bigger in population than London until about 1850, and the reach from which the spatial reach the area,
the catchment area from which influxes made up those losses was much,
much larger because it extended, particularly to Atlantic Africa and the millions of involuntary migrants who came to the Caribbean.
Mostly young, mostly male, as was the case for.
The populations that topped up armies, as was the case for populations that topped most cities,
London is actually exceptional in having, in many periods, a female predominance small one.
And a result of the prevalence of domestic servitude.
All this is different from plantation society in North America,
in which the enslaved population was demographically self-sufficient by sometime in the early 18th century,
17 30 at the latest, whereas in the Caribbean, in Barbados, that happens as early as about 1810.
Everyone else does not happen until abolition at the soonest.
The U.S. slave population quadrupled after the transatlantic slave trade was legally outlawed in the United States.
It quadrupled in 50 some years. This is very different from the Caribbean experience.
One could suppose that the American plantation system was less oppressive and violent.
I think that's unlikely. It was less focussed on sugar.
I think that's significant. And. It had much less damage from yellow fever, malaria and other diseases as well, almost certainly.
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.
But I haven't tried to look yet, and I probably won't get around to it to the data,
even though Stuart Schwartz could sort that out for me very quickly.
The second is endemic in the Caribbean, I think is probably unique in world history.
For its durability and its scale, I wracked by brains to think of other situations in which for two hundred or so years,
population loss was as acute and had to be compensated for by large scale influxes.
And I can't really think of one. You can think of smaller scale examples every city in the world.
So these two syndromic taken together, the first thing to remember for all the analytical points that I might wish to
make for all the arguments I might wish to launch against friends of mine.
The thing to remember, first and foremost, is that this constituted.
At least 350 years of acute suffering and ill health for millions and millions of people.
And sometimes I lose sight of that,
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.
But one shouldn't lose sight of it. That said, I'm about to lose sight of it.
This is a story in which disease environments are constructed environments, all disease environments are at least to some extent, built environments.
These two are the first and second systemic. Much more so than most, and they should be understood as.
Human artefacts, as well as an outgrowth of mosquito ecology and the behaviour of 20 or more different kinds of pathogens.
There is a geopolitical result I have convinced myself this is the argument of mosquito empires.
I'm not sure if anybody else on the face of the Earth has agreed with me on this,
but I think that the army's at war component of what I've just presented to you.
Substantially explains why the Spanish empire in the Caribbean lasted, as well as it did and why big parts of it were not seised.
Durably particularly by the British Empire.
I also think it goes a long way towards explaining why, beginning with the Haitian Revolution and actually.
My analysis, beginning with the American Revolution in South Carolina and Virginia.
But let's leave that aside. Why revolutions generated by locally born and raised populations with immune
systems calibrated to the environments of the Caribbean were successful against.
Armies sent out to quell their revolutions composed of young men whose immune systems were not prepared for what they were exposed to.
And as many people have argued, these two INDYMAC'S taken together explain why they go a long way towards explaining
why the human population of the Caribbean is as it is why it is to borrow.
A phrase that Alfred Crosby did not use,
but might have used a Neo Africa in the Americas and the indigenous population of the Caribbean was demographically,
genetically and culturally marginalised, not extinguished as some people carelessly have said, but marginalised.
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.
Deal with Karl's quibbles, questions, fundamental challenges.