Until recently, historical accounts of conquest and imperialism in the Americas have largely ignored the role of mosquito-borne diseases. J. R. McNeill’s Mosquito empires deftly conveys the reciprocal relationship between humans and nature, shown through entanglements with yellow fever (and, to a lesser extent, malaria) in colonial and imperial regimes in the Greater Caribbean.
The conception of the ‘Greater Caribbean’ as a geopolitical space that includes ‘the Atlantic coastal regions of South, Central, and North America, as well as the Caribbean islands themselves, that in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became plantation zones’ (p. 2) will no doubt shape future historical studies of disease of this region. This sub-region of the Atlantic World presents an area of study that is based on ecological coherence rather than political boundaries. Additionally, it provides a useful framework for studying social and cultural developments in the area that were shaped by disease and the environment.
In the same vein as Alfred Crosby’s pioneering work in The Columbian exchange and Ecological imperialism, McNeill unveils the role of disease in the next phase of colonial and imperial warfare in the Greater Caribbean. Most histories of the Spanish conquest of the Americas recognize the impact of infectious diseases, but the role of mosquito-borne diseases in sustaining and eventually undermining Spanish power has eluded the majority of historical accounts. McNeill shows how, just as smallpox paved the way for Spanish imperial control in the Americas, yellow fever helped to protect Spanish possessions from mid-eighteenth-century British incursions. By the nineteenth century, however, yellow fever and malaria helped creole elites to gain independence from the Spanish empire.
This study is particularly effective in revealing the role of yellow fever in the revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century, in the American and Haitian revolutions. By this time, the disease environments in the colonies of North America and Saint-Domingue had transformed, and native inhabitants in both regions developed resistance or immunity as a result of long-term exposure to malaria and yellow fever. Like the creole elites of Spanish America, generations of natives in what would become the United States and Haiti adapted to the region’s ecological changes. By contrast, the relative susceptibility of Spanish, French, and British troops made them vulnerable to the revolutionary ambitions of native insurgents.
The book’s argument hinges on the concepts of ‘differential immunity’ to yellow fever and ‘differential resistance’ to malaria. According to McNeill, native Africans and inhabitants of the Greater Caribbean benefited from acquired and possibly inherited immunity and/or resistance to yellow fever and malaria, which in turn shaped the outcomes of revolutions and empires. McNeill avoids the pitfalls of race-based disease determinism by noting that heritable immunity is not crucial to the argument. Since survivors of yellow fever become immune to contracting the virus, and individuals infected with malaria develop resistance to the parasite, Africans and Americans who were exposed to these diseases would have developed immunity or resistance. However, McNeill’s assessment that heritable resistance to yellow fever ‘probably does exist’ (p. 46) is highly speculative, and remains unproven.
By explicating the relationship between environmental history and political/military history, the analysis presented in Mosquito empires fosters a better understanding of causes and outcomes in both fields. While it emphasizes the role of malaria in the United States during the American Revolution, the book fails to account for the role of malaria and yellow fever in the American Civil War. While these diseases did not ultimately provide an advantage for the Confederacy, their role in shaping military strategy merits some attention. McNeill’s nearly exclusive focus on military engagements also leaves little room for a social or cultural analysis of yellow fever and malaria. With a few exceptions, women are left out of the narrative altogether, indicated by McNeill in his assertion that ‘the tiny female An. quadrimaculatus stands tall among the founding mothers of the United States’ (p. 234). Similarly, his fanciful description of female mosquitoes as ‘tiny amazons’ (p. 5) is striking, and draws attention to the lack of human females in the narrative.
McNeill’s nuanced approach prevents the argument from being too environmentally deterministic. He shows how yellow fever and malaria had varying impacts in military conflicts, which were also determined by political cohesiveness and military strength. For instance, despite epidemiological advantages, Suriname’s maroons were unable to overthrow the political order that was established by the Dutch. McNeill emphasizes the ‘mutual and reciprocal impacts of geopolitics and ecology’, which he describes as ‘an ongoing process, a cotillion of human evolution’ (p. 7). Human agency, through acts such as the conquest and settlement of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade, brought yellow fever and malaria to the Americas, and revolutionary political movements paved the way for these diseases to drive out European imperial control.
The book leaves us at the next stage of interaction between humans and disease, as successful disease prevention campaigns at the turn of the century enabled the United States to emerge as a dominant imperial power in the Greater Caribbean. It raises questions about the longevity of the ‘golden age of health’ (p. 313) that wealthy states and societies have experienced, in the face of global warming and the evolution of mosquitoes, parasites, and viruses.
