A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in Global Perspective (review)

Alchon's is yet another history about the epidemiology and demography of Native Americans. Why, after Noble David Cook, Born to Die (New York, 1998), Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival (Norman, 1987), and a dozen similar books do we need another? Because new documents and new studies are constantly appearing? Yes, but chiefly because the experience of indigenous Americans needs periodic reassessment. It is a politically hot subject and the pendulum of interpretation always seems to be swinging too far in one direction or the other.

Alchon takes us on the now-familiar tour of the Greater Antillian chiefdoms, the Mesoamerican and the Andean high civilizations, and their conquests by the conquistadores. She does the same for Brazil and North America, totting up the epidemics and the population crashes. She provides neat summaries of the more renowned demographic studies of the subjects, along with quick consideration of the scholarly debates, and finishes the book with her own informed and sober judgment.

But so have several other scholars in the past few decades. Does she have anything new to offer? In a word, "yes." She points out that the American Indians' population crash was not caused by distinctive weaknesses of their societies or immune systems. Their medical cultures were not very different from those of Spain or China, and they reacted to epidemics like Old World peoples did. Their demographic tragedy was that they were afflicted not by one new imported disease (like Europeans by plague, the Black Death, in the fourteenth century), but by three, four, and more new diseases. At the same time, they had to endure European conquest, seizures of land, slave raids, and general exploitation. Many Native American peoples, cultures, and languages did not survive, but many did and persist from the Arctic Ocean to Tierra del Fuego.

This is a valuable study, especially for non-specialists, but it has its flaws. The author rehearses the tired old story about Jeffrey Amherst allegedly distributing blankets infected with smallpox among American Indians during the French and Indian War, explaining that this sort of thing happened all the time. Maybe it did, but the evidence is sparse. Proponents of this theory argue that it is sparse because the Europeans and Euro-Americans were ashamed of what they were doing and concealed it. The truth is, however, that they were probably bare-faced racists and would have been proud. Anyway, most Euro-Americans would have opposed such tactics because those born in America, where smallpox was epidemic, not endemic, were as susceptible to smallpox as the Indians.

The author's source for her paragraph on this subject is a New York Times article. Journalists are supposed to consult historians about the past, and not the other way around.