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

Part 2 highlights the social and military impacts of yellow fever before and after the 166Os. [J. R. McNeill] demonstrates that A. aegypti did not have sufficient human hosts in appropriate densities nor were there the correct landscape conditions to spread yellow fever before 1640. Thus, it is no c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies 2011-01, Vol.36 (71), p.290-292
Main Author: Offen, Karl
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Armed forces
Book publishing
Caribbean
Caribbean studies
Dutch language
Ecology
English
Epidemics
French language
Historical analysis
Infectious diseases
McNeill, J R
Nonfiction
Occupations
REVIEWS / RECENSIONS
Spanish
War
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Summary:Part 2 highlights the social and military impacts of yellow fever before and after the 166Os. [J. R. McNeill] demonstrates that A. aegypti did not have sufficient human hosts in appropriate densities nor were there the correct landscape conditions to spread yellow fever before 1640. Thus, it is no coincidence that yellow fever did not deter the Dutch from taking northeastern Brazil in 1630 nor did it affect the English in their conquest of Spanish Jamaica in 1655 - although the English were lucky and just missed a Caribbean epidemic. In effect, after 1660, yellow fever underpinned Spanish imperial control. These two early and successful cases of imperial territorial transfer are contrasted with the later devastating impacts of yellow fever among the Scottish settlers at Darien and the French at Kourou in today's French Guiana. Of the 14,000 French settlers that came to Kourou in 1764-65, 85-90% died from yellow fever. McNeill then shows how British ambitions in Cartagena in 1741 and in Havana in 1762 were altered by yellow fever, revealing how the Spanish consciously relied on "climate" to work its magic on foreign troops. And work it did. Without the toll from yellow fever in 1741, the British would have taken Cartagena. Meanwhile, the British lost more soldiers in two months of peaceful occupation in Havana than they had lost in the entire Seven Years' War in all of North America. In short, we learn that a "new ecological-military order" had been established in the West Indies (101). Without it, the history of the Americas would have been very different.
ISSN:0826-3663
2333-1461