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Mosquito Empires: Ecology and war in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 J.R. McNeill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
In this impressive book, accomplished environmental historian J.R. McNeill seeks to answer how yellow fever and malaria shaped geopolitics in the Greater Caribbean over a period of three centuries. McNeill defines the Greater Caribbean as the low-lying coastal regions from the Guyanas to the Chesapeake Bay, including the Caribbean islands and Central America. From the mid-seventeenth century the Greater Caribbean was shaped by a plantation system that relied on the constant importation of large numbers of African slaves as a work force. The transformation of the Greater Caribbean enabled the emergence in the region of malaria and yellow fever, two deadly mosquito-borne diseases from tropical Africa. According to McNeill, this ecological process has been underappreciated by historians as a major factor shaping the outcome of European imperial rivalries in the Greater Caribbean as well as the independence struggles of Haiti, the United States, Colombia, and Venezuela.
The book is organized in three parts and an introductory chapter where McNeill discusses his main argument. The first part details the origins of the deadly disease environment in the Greater Caribbean, the development of European rivalries, and the sad state of medical care available to victims of yellow fever and malaria. McNeill's discussion of the rise of yellow fever, the deadlier of the two diseases, in the Greater Caribbean is complex but fascinating. The rapid growth of sugar plantations in the region during the first half of the seventeenth century created the perfect conditions for yellow fever. The virus itself arrived in the Caribbean with West African slaves. Traveling with the virus and the slaves were the African mosquito species Aedes aegypti, the female of which infects humans with yellow fever. Conditions for yellow fever further improved with widespread deforestation due to the large amounts of firewood needed to boil cane for the sugar mills. This resulted in the loss of habitat for birds, the main predators of the mosquitoes. Additionally, mosquitoes such as...