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  • Conquest. The Destruction of the American Indios
  • Noble David Cook
Conquest. The Destruction of the American Indios. Massimo Livi Bacci. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008. xi and 317 pp., maps, diagrs., photos, notes, appendices, and index. $24.95 paper (ISBN-10: 0-7456-4001-X)

The author is a distinguished historical demographer at the University of Florence. His initial work in the early 1960s focused on Italian migration but by the late decade he shifted to fertility. In the 1970s he published two important books on Italian and Portuguese fertility. By the end of the decade and through the 1980s his interests shifted to mortality crises, then nutrition. He contributed manuals and well-known general histories of world population along the way. In the 1990s, he moved into new territory with monographs on the Americas, centering on the impact of Europeans on Amerindian society and economy. Whereas his earlier work was based firmly in the direct documentary evidence – the censuses and vital statistics of the areas studied - he was forced in his recent work on world and American population history to rely on the work of others. His analyses of world and American population history is therefore more of a synthesis and reevaluation than of original scholarship. [End Page 188]

The book is organized into eight largely chronologically flowing chapters. In the first Livi Bacci deals with the Columbus voyages and their impact, and concludes with an introduction to the major changes in the general population that come with the biological exchange. In the second he examines the widely divergent interpretations of the demographic transformations from several perspectives. In the next he weighs the impact of smallpox and other diseases as factors leading to population loss. We subsequently move in chapter four to the role of exploitative hard and dangerous labor, especially in the mines, on untimely deaths.

In the following chapter Livi Bacci engages the hotly disputed case of the Taino population of Hispaniola at time of contact. He concludes "the greatest probability" falls "between 200,000 and 300,000 (p. 105)." The range is within estimates of other investigators using similar techniques. Livi Bacci attributes the bulk of the catastrophic collapse of the Taino population before the smallpox epidemic of 1518 to the "shock" of conquest and the heavy burden placed on its inhabitants under the miners-encomenderos. The suggestion that smallpox and other Old World pathogens arrived earlier, as made by this reviewer, is rejected. I would suggest he re-read more carefully all the arguments in Revista de Indias 63: 227 (2003): 49-64. It is worth remembering that the variables of the preservation of the live smallpox virus, the length of time the virus is present in an infected person before the symptoms appear, and the possibility of a slow person to person spread by a chain of infection by contact with the virus is not engaged. Nor is the question of the number of adolescent European boys who had never come down with the virus and were also highly suspectable. It may not be well known, but there were normally many male teenagers on ships, serving in a variety of tasks, from cabin boys to lookouts. Smallpox was endemic in large European cities of the period, taking its normal toll on children. Smallpox became pandemic in the Americas. The high mortality on Hispaniola during the first years deserves further scrutiny by historical epidemiologists.

We move in the next chapter to the conquest of the Aztecs and destruction of Tenochtitlan. Here he weighs evidence of the relative impact of disease versus other factors leading to massive deaths. His evaluation of the population estimates, and the sources and techniques used by Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook, is especially thorough. Entering the "numbers game" Livi Bacci suggests that "an initial figure of 10 million seems plausible" (p. 154). Absent is an evaluation of medical historian Rodolfo Acuña-Soto's contention that some of the most severe epidemics hitting sixteenth century Mexico were not Old World in origin, rather they were caused by the indigenous hanta virus. Livi Bacci, in the subsequent chapter on the Inka population and reasons for its collapse size, does...

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