Epidemics & Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast 1492–1715 (review)

Despite the best efforts of many scholars in history and anthropology, deterministic virgin soil theories still dominate academic and popular writings about colonial history. The depopulation of American Indians, it is argued, was the inevitable outcome of encounters between disease-experienced Europeans and immunologically virgin Indians. The persistence of this theory has deep implications for how we understand both past and present health inequalities. Paul Kelton offers a much-needed corrective for this state of affairs. In his history of encounter and disease in the American Southeast, he makes two crucial arguments. First, Indian depopulation was not a consequence of innate susceptibility but a product of the social disruptions that followed colonization. Second, the most important aspect of this process was the enslavement of Indians, which disrupted and weakened Indian societies and spread new pathogens among them: "the English slave trade gave the Atlantic world's diseases the agency they needed to produce the stunning biological catastrophes that forever changed the historical trajectories of both Natives and newcomers" (p. xxii).

Kelton's first argument is not new. Linda Newson, Stephen Kunitz, and many others (myself included) have argued that Indian depopulation was a contingent process: Indians were not born vulnerable; they were made vulnerable. Kelton's real contribution is the skill and thoroughness with which he documents his second argument. By providing an incredibly detailed account of the Native American Southeast, Kelton has produced perhaps the best-documented example of the contingency of epidemics and depopulation. He begins with the precontact period and the diverse mix of worms, viruses, and bacterial pathogens that left many natives with an astonishingly low life expectancy. When Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the sixteenth century, they did not trigger a wave of virgin soil epidemics. With only modest contact between Spaniards and Indians, and with long-standing buffer zones between Indian polities, European pathogens could not spread easily. Indian mortality did increase after Spanish arrival, but this was largely because Spaniards exacerbated existing disease ecologies, especially malnutrition and endemic infections. Thus the sixteenth century was but "the false dawn of colonialism's biological nightmare" (p. 98).

Things changed dramatically in the late seventeenth century with the advent of the Indian slave trade based in Virginia and then South Carolina. English traders and the Indian raiders who supplied them with slaves traveled throughout the river valleys of southeastern America, triggering warfare and refugee migrations. Fearing capture, Indians crowded into fortified settlements, where disrupted subsistence and inadequate sanitation increased vulnerabilities to disease. Such turbulence opened the door to disease: "It was into this new social landscape—one dramatically altered by nonepidemiological aspects of colonialism—that smallpox did the most damage it would ever do to the region and its people" (p. 102). The ensuing outbreak, the Great Southeastern Smallpox Epidemic of 1696–1700, devastated countless groups. Population losses triggered continuing consolidation, realignments, and warfare, enabling a series of epidemic aftershocks. Resentment over slave raids and epidemics fueled the Yamasee War of 1715, which nearly annihilated South Carolina. English reprisals left the coastal lowlands essentially void of Indians. Only in the interior highlands did a series of new Native polities—the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw—survive. The slave trade, at least, came to an end, the result of decimated populations and changing colonial politics.

Kelton's mastery of Indian history poses a challenge to his readers, who must navigate countless (and changing) tribal names and obscure river valleys to follow his narrative closely. Moreover, the data needed to clinch his arguments simply do not exist, forcing him to patch together a range of uncertain, though plausible, estimates and assumptions about the behavior of pathogens in varied colonial regimes. Finally, despite his stated goal of providing a critical reassessment of virgin soil theory, Kelton occasionally succumbs to its allure and asserts the vulnerability of virgin populations (e.g., pp. 153, 157, 177, and 178...