On Mosquito Empires

I read this book around a year ago, but decided to pick it up again after reading the author’s father’s book, Plagues and People. I remembered this work being a particularly good example of why the history of disease is both desirable and necessary.

In short, McNeill argues that mosquitoes—through Yellow Fever and Malaria—were crucial to the history of the Greater Caribbean between the introduction of these diseases from West Africa in the 1640s to the outbreak of World War I. Essentially, he finds that those who lived in the Caribbean often had an immunity to these diseases as a result of facing them in their childhood. As a result, territory in the Caribbean rarely changed hands between empires, as outsiders would frequently fall ill to these diseases and perish. More than anything else, mosquitoes permitted a conserving of the political status quo. However, by the late 18th-early 19th century, those fighting against the Spanish empire (in a more particular case) were generally no longer outsiders, but imperial subjects. To quash these rebellions, Spain was forced to dispatch soldiers from Iberia who did not have the same resistance as imperial subjects, leading Spanish might to crumble.

I have not read enough history of disease to evaluate how this work stands compared to that of other scholars, but it seems to me that this is a monumental work of environmental history. It really is crucial to understanding why the Spanish empire managed to last so long, as well as making sense of the environmental aspects of the American and Haitian revolutions.