32 Rare but legal English slavery: Guasco 2000:50–63; Friedman 1980. Slaves, mainly prisoners, were sent to England’s few galleys.
33 Indentured servants: Galenson 1984 (one-third to one-half, 1); Gemery 1980:esp. table A-7. Most went to Virginia, so the figure there was higher, perhaps “more than 75 percent” (Fischer 1991:227). See also, Tomlins 2001; Menard 1988:105–06.
34 Slaves in 1650: McCusker and Menard 1991:table 6.4; U.S. Census Bureau 1975:vol. 2, 1168.
35 Turn to slavery in 1680s, emergence of England as biggest slaver: Author’s interviews, Anderson, Thornton. Numbers: Berlin 2003:table 1; U.S. Census Bureau 1975:vol. 2, 1168. Economics: Menard 1988:108–11, 1977; Galenson 1984:9–13. See also, Eltis and Richardson 2010; Eltis et al. 2009–.
36 Size and profitability of slave trade: Eltis and Engerman 2000 (“tonnage,” 129; percent of GDP, 132–34; raw materials, 138). Eltis and Engerman argue that the profits were not oriented toward industrial investment, so the industry had no special role in the Industrial Revolution (136). This contradicts Blackburn’s conclusion that “exchanges with the slave plantations helped British capitalism to make a breakthrough to industrialization and global hegemony” (1997:572).
37 Free land and slavery: Smith 1979:vol. 2, 565 (“first master” [bk. 4, chap. 7, §b, ¶2]), Domar 1970. “Wide-open spaces exhibit a bimodal distribution: lots of freedom or coerced labor” (J. R. McNeill, pers. comm.). Morgan (2003:218–22) observes that farmers “solved” the problem by buying vast tracts of land.
38 Price rise in indentured servants as slavery cause: Morgan 2003:chap. 15; Galenson 1984. Morgan locates an effective price rise in increasing trouble with indentured servants in Virginia, Galenson an actual price rise from labor shortages in England.
39 Little Ice Age impact in Scotland: Lamb 1995:199–203; Gibson and Smout 1995:164–71; Flinn ed. 1977:164–86.
40 Scots in Panama: I rely on the fine account in McNeill 2010:106–23 (“of Panama,” 123—I have, with McNeill’s permission, slightly altered his words). Earlier studies are useful but, in McNeill’s phrase, “epidemiologically unaware” (106).
41 “the world”: Bannister ed. 1859:vol. 1, 158–59.
42 Founding Carolina: Wood 1996:13–20.
43 Mississippians become confederacies: Snyder 2010:chap. 1; Gallay 2002:23–24.
44 Slavery in Powhatan, confederacies, and colonists: Smith 2007b:287–88, 298 (examples); Rountree 1990:84, 121 (Powhatan); Snyder 2010:35–40 (Southeast); Woodward 1674:133 (Indians who sell slaves to Virginia). See also, Laubrich 1913:25–47.
45 Flintlocks vs. matchlocks: Snyder 2010:52–55; Chaplin 2001:111–12; Malone 2000:32–35, 64–65.
46 Spanish attack on Carolina: Bushnell 1994:136–38.
47 Carolina slave trade: I am summarizing the argument in Gallay 2002; see also Snyder 2010; Bossy 2009; Laubrich 1913:119–22.
48 Economics of trade: Snyder 2010:54–55 (160 deerskins, “Extreamly” [quoting Thomas Nairne]); Gallay 2002:200–01 (census), 299–308 (export estimate), 311–14 (prices).
49 Massachusetts and New Orleans (footnote): Gallay 2002:308–14 (France); Laubrich 1913:63–102 (France), 122–28 (Massachusetts).
50 Bans on slave imports: Gallay 2002:302–03 (all quotes).
51 Carolina and malaria: McNeill 2010:203–09; Packard 2007:56–61; Coclanis 1991:42–45 (more than three out of four); Wood 1996:63–79 (population, 152); Silver 1990:155–62; Dubisch 1985 (differential mortality, 642); Merrens and Terry 1984 (“ague,” 540; “hospital,” 549); U.S. Census Bureau 1975:vol. 2, 1168; Childs 1940 (arrival of malaria, chaps. 5–6); Ashe 1917:6 (“Complexions”); Archdale 1822:13. A somewhat similar process occurred in Georgia, which began in 1733 as a free colony (slavery was banned). Scurvy, beriberi, and dysentery, all related to inadequate or contaminated food, were common. Infectious disease was not. The colony became the crown’s property in 1752. Slavery was permitted. Malaria and yellow fever quickly followed. Soon it became hard to farm without slaves. The disparity in death rates shrank as Europeans survived and acquired immunities. But it didn’t go away. In the 1820s whites in South Carolina were still dying of intermittent, remittent, bilious, and country fevers—the terms then used for malaria—at rates more than four times higher than blacks (Cates 1980).
52 Indian disease deaths: Snyder 2010:65 (Chickasaw), 101–02 (Chakchiuma), 116 (“distressed tribes”); Gallay 2002:111–12 (Quapaw); Laubrich 1913:285–87; Archdale 1822:7 (“answer for”).
53 Duffy negativity: E-mail to author, Louis Miller; Webb 2009:21–27; Seixas et al. 2002; Carter and Mendis 2002:572–74; Miller et al. 1976.
54 Sickle-cell: Interviews and e-mail, Spielman; Carter and Mendis 2002:570–71; Livingstone 1971:44–48.
55 Immunities as pivot for slavery: Webb 2009:87–88; Coelho and McGuire 1997; Wood 1996:chap. 3; Dobson 1989; Menard 1977. Some economists have argued that there was little economy of scale in crops climatically suited for New England. But wheat was grown in Piedmont Virginia on big plantations with lots of slaves. Still others have argued that Africans couldn’t run away, because their appearance was too distinctive. The obvious retort is that slaves did run away all the time—and that in any case indentured servants could have been branded or tattooed, something already done for criminals. Ultimately, disease counted. “The decimation of a native labor supply in the face of disease, the weakness of the Europeans in their new disease environment and the apparent resistance of blacks to diseases of hot climates led to the massive importation and exploitation of African slaves” (Dobson 1989:291).
56 Arrival of falciparum: Rutman and Rutman 1980:64–65; idem 1976:42–45.
57 Comparisons of mortality rates: Curtin 1989; 1968:203–08 (48–67 percent, 203; “of the European,” 207); Hirsch 1883–86:vol. 1, 220 (malaria in Antilles). Many of the original figures are in Tulloch 1847, 1838.
58 Geography of malaria: My discussion follows McNeill 2010; Webb 2009:chap. 3; Packard 2007:54–78.
59 Falciparum line: Author’s interview, National Weather Service (temperatures); Strickman et al. 2000:221.
60 Plantations and South: The debate is summarized in Breeden 1988:5–6. Tara was supposedly in Georgia.
61 Intractable malaria regions: Duffy 1988:35–36; Faust and Hemphill 1948:table 1. Texas had more malaria cases, but also more people.
62 Quadrimaculatus habitat and housing: Author’s interview, Gaines; Goodwin and Love 1957. The hills don’t have to be tall; medical researcher Walter Reed observed that people in the uplands of Washington, D.C., just 200–250 feet above the Potomac, rarely contracted malaria, while “those who live on the low plateau bordering both the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers are affected annually by malarial diseases” (Gilmore 1955:348). See also, Kupperman 1984:233–34.
63 Malaria and culture: Rutman and Rutman 1980:56–58 (all quotes); Dubisch 1985:645–46. Fischer (1991:274–389 passim) makes an extended characterization of Virginia mores.
64 No initial awareness of immunity: Arguing that malaria resistance “must have done a great deal to reinforce the expanding rationale behind the enslavement of Africans,” Wood (1996:83–91, quote at 91) and Puckrein (1979:186–93) try to show that Carolina colonists regarded Africans in this way. By contrast, Rutman and Rutman “found no evidence in Virginia to substantiate Wood’s thesis” (1976:56). Most historians follow the Rutmans and believe that colonists’ views of African immunity came after the turn to slavery, not before.
65 Massachusetts disease, slavery: Romer 2009 (8 percent, 118); Dobson 1989:283–84 (health); Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641):art. 91 (available in many places online).
66 Slavery compared in Argentina and Brazil: Eltis et al. 2009– (2.2 million); Chace 1971 (220,000–330,000 slaves, 107–08; lack of establishment of African culture in Argentina, 121–22; half Argentina African, 126–27); Alden 1963 (half Rio, São Paulo African). Eltis et al. give 75,000 as the number of slaves entering the ports of the Rio Plata; Chace makes clear this is on
ly the registered “pieces,” which ignores the much bigger number of illegally imported slaves. By the end of the nineteenth century, Brazil’s great writer, Euclides da Cunha, was celebrating his nation’s mixed heritage (Hecht: forthcoming); meanwhile, Argentina’s ruling “Generation of Eighty” was boasting that Argentina was the “only great white nation of South America” (Chace 1971:2).
67 Yellow Jack: Much in this section comes from McNeill 2010.
68 Sugar comes to Barbados: McNeill 2010:23–26; Emmer 2006:9–27; Davis 2006:110–16; Blackburn 1997:187–213, 239–31 (slave prices, 230); Sheridan 1994:chap. 7, esp. 128–30; Beckles 1989; Galenson 1982 (slave prices, table 4). I am grateful to the plantation owners in Brazil who let me visit their land to see sugar work.
69 First yellow fever epidemic: McNeill 2010:35, 64 (“populations”); Beckles 1989:118–25; Findlay 1941 (six thousand dead and quarantine, 146); Ligon 1673:21, 25 (“dead,” 21).
70 Spread of sugar, ecological ravaging of Caribbean: McNeill 2010:23–33 (“for cultivation,” 29); Watts 1999:219–31, 392–402; Sheridan 1994 (production and population figures, 100–02, 122–23); Goodyear 1978:15 (Cuba). Ligon (1673) reported that when the first Europeans landed on Barbados the island was “so overgrown with Wood, as there could be found no Champions [fields], or Savannas for men to dwell in” (23).
71 A. albimanus: Grieco et al. 2005 (susceptibility to falciparum); Rejmankova et al. 1996 (algal habitat); Frederickson 1993 (habits). Frederickson suggests that it has a preference for cattle “1.6 to 2.1 times greater than that for humans” (14). The gradual replacement of Caribbean cattle by sugar thus increased the risk of malaria.
72 Fourth voyage: During Colón’s fourth voyage to the Americas (1502–04) the admiral’s nautical career effectively came to an end when he was forced to ground his worm-eaten, sinking ships on Jamaica. To obtain help from Santo Domingo, he asked a trusted lieutenant, Diego Mendez, to canoe 120 miles to Hispaniola. After a brutal journey in the Caribbean summer, Mendez’s party made it to shore. Most of the group was too sick to continue to Santo Domingo, Colón’s son Hernán wrote later. Mendez nonetheless “left in his canoe to go up the coast of Hispaniola, though suffering from quartan fever” (Colón 2004:322).
73 Environmental changes favor malaria and yellow fever: McNeill 2010:48–50, 55–57; Webb 2009:69–85ff.; Goodyear 1978:12–13 (pots).
74 Caribbean as lethal environment: McNeill 2010:65–68; Webb 2009:83 (“non-immunes”); Curtin 1989:25–30, fig. 1.2, table 1.5. Ligon, who came to Barbados two decades after the first English colonists, found (1673:23) that “few or none of them that first set there, were now living.” This may exaggerate. Not many colonists lasted more than a few years, as Ligon said. But that was not only because they died. Many fled to healthier places—Virginia, for one (Sheridan 1994:132–33).
75 Introduction of malaria into Amazon: Cruz et al. 2008 (Madeira survey); Hemming 2004a:268–70; Requena, F. 1782. Letter to Flóres, M. A. d., 25 Aug. In Quijano Otero 1881:188–97, at 191–95 passim; Orbigny 1835:vol. 3a, 13–36; Edwards 1847:195 (“one case”).
76 Guyane: Hecht forthcoming; Ladebat 2008 (coup deportees); Whitehead 1999. I am grateful to Susanna Hecht for drawing this history to my attention.
77 Sugar despotisms: Acemoglu et al. 2001, 2003. “Differences in mortality are not the only, or even the main, cause of variation in institutions. For our empirical approach to work, all we need is that they are a source of exogenous variation” (Acemoglu et al. 2001:1371). The counterargument is exemplified by Sheldon Watts’s claim that the turn to slavery was determined by the “general stagnation of Europe’s population growth.” In his view, “what really mattered were developments in the cosmopolitan core rather than the presence of the frightful country disease, yellow fever, in the Caribbean periphery” (1999:230–34, at 233). But he simply demonstrates that England’s population was increasing slowly in the late seventeenth century, not whether the resultant price increase for servants was actually big enough to have any impact. In my view, the contrary has been shown convincingly.
78 Fear of independent institutions: Acemoglu and Robinson forthcoming. After slavery ended in 1834, many sugar planters sold abandoned, marshy land to freed slaves at exorbitant prices. In the next decade, freed Africans created a series of prosperous, self-governing freeholds. Unhappily, they had never learned the techniques, pioneered by Guyana’s Indians, to drain the land for long-term cultivation. Because the “Village Movement” deprived British plantations of labor, the colonial government refused to provide the technology and engineering skills for building and maintaining dams and channels that it made available to elites. Unable to keep sugar fields dry, the Village Movement lost its economic base; the freed slaves were forced to return to their plantations (Moore 1999:131–35). Similarly, the wealthy elites feared the small shops opened by many freed slaves. To drive them back into the fields, they imported Portuguese merchants and financed their enterprises with low-interest loans, meanwhile denying all credit to ex-slaves. The ex-slaves soon went under (Wagner 1977:410–11).
79 Stagnation of extractive states: Acemoglu et al. 2002:1266–78 (discouraging settlement, 1271; “entrepreneurs,” 1273).
80 British Guyana and Booker Brothers: Rose 2002:157–90 (exports, 186–86); Hollett 1999:chap. 5 (Booker brothers); Moore 1999:136–37 (“their station”); Bacchus 1980:4–30, 217–19 (university); Daly 1975 (fear of education, 162–63, 233–34). On trial in 1823 for fomenting insurrection by teaching slaves the Bible, the missionary John Smith decried plantation owners who believed “that the diffusion of knowledge among the negroes will render them less valuable as property” (Anon. 1824:78). Indeed, he was charged with informing slaves about “the history of the deliverance of the Israelites” (ibid.:157) and teaching them to read.
81 Disease in U.S. Civil War: Barnes et al. 1990 (35 percent, table 6; 233 percent, table 30; 361,968, table 71; proportion of deaths, xxxviii).
82 “established institutions”: The Crittenden-Johnson resolution was adopted in July 1861 by a House vote of 119–2 and in slightly different form by a Senate vote of 30–5.
83 Malaria in American Revolution: Author’s interviews, McNeill; McNeill 2010:209–32 (“nearly ruined,” 215; “unhealthy swamp,” 220; troop levels, 226).
CHAPTER 4 / Shiploads of Money
1 Zheng He: Mote 2003:613–17; Levathes 1994 (suppression, 174–81); Finlay 1991 (survey of historians’ views, 297–99); Needham et al. 1954–:vol. 4, pt. 3, 486–528ff. (suppressed records, 525). In two books published in 2002 and 2008 a retired submarine commander named Gavin Menzies claimed that Chinese fleets went beyond Africa, reaching the Americas and Europe, dramatically changing world history along the way. Few historians have endorsed this thesis.
2 Chinese “insularity”: Author’s interviews, Goldstone, Kenneth Pomeranz; Jones 2003: 203–05 (“self-engrossment,” 205; “from the sea,” 203); Goldstone 2000:176–77 (“such voyages,” 177); Landes 1999 (“curiosity,” 96; “success,” 97); Finlay 1991. See also, Braudel 1981–84:vol. 2, 134, vol. 3, 32 (“In the race for world dominion, this [inward turn] was the moment when China lost her position in a contest she had entered without fully realizing it, when she had launched the first maritime expeditions from Nanking in the early fifteenth century”), 485–86, 528–29. Diamond argues that the decision exemplifies a fatal uniformity in China; in fragmented Europe, he says, such a blanket prohibition would have been impossible (Diamond 1999:412–16). As indicated below, China was hardly unified; the blanket prohibition did not stick. Landes charges that Zheng’s voyages “reeked of extravagance” (1999:97) as opposed to the more rational, bottom-line-oriented exploration of Europeans. He thus criticizes China’s rulers both for shutting down Zheng He’s voyages because they were unprofitable and for overspending on those same voyages.
3 Trade bans and tribute trade: Tsai 2002:123–24 (thirty-eight nations), 193–94; So 2000:119–20, 125–27; Deng 1999:118–28; Chang 1983:166–97 (tribute
trade), 200–17 (naval decline); Needham et al. 1954–:vol. 4, pt. 3, 527–28 (orders to destroy ships); Kuwabara 1935:97–100 (suppression of foreign families). Confucianism indeed was negative about commercial gain, assigning merchants to the lowest of the “four categories of the people.” But that scorn had relatively little impact in practice, in much the same way that Christian doctrinal scorn for moneylenders and usury did not prevent the emergence of powerful banks. Thus the emperor felt free to begin “tributary” relations with the Ryukyu Islands, an archipelago between Japan and Taiwan that was well known for having good mountain horses, by sending an official to obtain horses in exchange for a “gift” of, among other things, 69,000 pieces of porcelain, one hundred bolts of damask, and almost a thousand iron pots. The tributary gifts from Ryukyu also served as a way to launder Japanese and Southeast Asian goods that were politically inexpedient to acknowledge (Chang 1983:174–78). For the tribute trade with Japan, see Li 2006c:45–47.
4 Composition of wokou: Interviews, Li Jinming, Lin Renchuan, Dai Yefeng; Li 2001: 10–13; So 1975:17–36.
5 “were merchants”: Lin was referring to a well-known remark by Tang Shu, an official in the Jiajing emperor’s court: “Pirates and merchants are both people: when trade is open, pirates become merchants, and when trade is banned, merchants become pirates” (Hu 2006:11.4a–4b; see also, Chang 1983:234). Pirates had periodically plagued the region for two thousand years (Kuwabara 1935:41–42).
6 Fujian geography as factor in maritime trade: author’s visits; interviews, Lin, Li; Yang 2002; Clark 1990:51–56 (“be tilled,” 52); So 1975:126–27; Deng et al. eds. 1968:vol. 15, “Local Conditions” (The yearly harvest “rarely filled [Fujianese farmers’] bamboo baskets.… Therefore calculating individuals saw waves like paths between fields, and relied on masts and sails like ploughs. The wealthy used their riches, and the poor used their bodies, transporting China’s goods to countries in foreign lands and trading local products for up to ten times profit. Thus the people were content to place little value on their lives, and one after another rowed across the sea so that it eventually became a habit, and they say there is no better livelihood than this”). To this day many Fujianese are more comfortable in one form or another of Min, an ancient offshoot of Chinese, than standard Mandarin.