Studies of the Atlantic world as an integrative process shaped by increasingly rapid movement of goods, ideas and peoples often have a celebratory tone. Increased integration can only be a good thing, right? Of course, in the integration of the Atlantic there were casualties, notably the native inhabitants of the Americas, devastated by disease. But we learned from Alfred Crosby and others that while the destruction of Indian cultures was undoubtedly a tragedy and probably a crime, the major cause of Indian decline – their unfortunate lack of immunity to European diseases – was mostly accidental. Certainly, given existing medical knowledge, it was unpreventable. Unthinking genocide, perhaps?

This “virgin soils” explanation of Indian decline and displacement is ever less tenable. Paul Kelton's excellent interpretative account of the interplay between epidemiology and English colonization in southeast America drives another nail into the virgin-soils coffin. He argues that major demographic catastrophe for native Americans in the southeast did not, as is customarily suggested, occur soon after contact with Spaniards, thus allowing English settlers to move into “widowed” lands, but happened only after Indians had become incorporated into Atlantic trading networks, principally through an expanding and intrusive slave trade, in the late seventeenth century. He focusses on the 1690s as a period of transition, with an epidemic of smallpox coinciding with heavy English pressure in on native autonomy South Carolina. It is a well-made argument and adds extra force to a growing conviction among scholars that the 1690s was not only the most troubled decade in American history but also the decade in which social and political patterns were developed that would shape British America until at least the Revolution. Not least among the achievements that the English made in that decade was gaining supremacy over native Americans. It took some time to work itself out but from the 1690s the die was cast: British America belonged to Europeans, not Indians. Native Americans, of course, resisted, not least in the ferocious Yamasee war, about which Kelton makes a number of insightful comments. But, as he suggests, despite the effort that native Americans put into that war, a war that might have destroyed the infant colony of South Carolina if the major Indian tribes had combined rather than warred with each other, the Yamasee war came too late to change essential historical trajectories. Provoked into war by continuing demographic disaster, native Americans were too weakened by the effects of catastrophic disease occasioned by increasingly close encounters with Europeans to be able to prevail against foes that they realized too late were more powerful and much more dangerous than they had thought. Kelton's tale is thus a tragic tale. The tragedy of native American displacement, of course, was compounded by what Europeans did next, which was to develop a vicious but highly effective plantation system in which Africans rather than Indians were the principal victims. The origins of the American South lay in the interplay between these man-created, entirely preventable tragedies.