Mosquito Empires

Landon He

Professor Soluri

79-104 Global Histories

15 October 2012

Mosquito Empires

Environmental history has been the study of the harmonized cause and effect relationship of man onto nature, and nature onto man. It is without a doubt that the fundamentals of earth's existence, and its habitats, have shaped the progression of humans and the civilizations which they have created. Cities are built around rivers; farms are built where the soil is fertile and rich. It is also without a doubt, however, that man, once endowed with the power to affect mother nature, will affect it in drastic ways. On the sixteenth of July, 1945, in the Jornada del Muerto desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico, the first atomic bomb exploded. The white light pierced the sky with such intensity that a blind girl claimed to see the flash from a hundred miles away. After the explosion, the Los Alamos director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted a fragment of the Bhagavad Gita, declaring, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." With the verse, Oppenheimer contributed a commentary on the realization and fear that humans had become endowed with the power to annihilate both themselves and nature, a seemingly great imbalance.

It is appropriate, therefore, to believe that nature too can drastically affect the course of civilization. In the book Mosquito Empires, John McNeill, the author, argues that two diseases, namely yellow fever and malaria carried by the mosquito vector, drastically changed the course of civilization in the West Indies and Greater Caribbean throughout many centuries. In McNeill's argument, one finds that the differential immunity towards these diseases, specifically that the natives, Spanish, and later Americans had an advantage by being immune, was a strong force of repulsion against the New World conquistadors, who did not receive the same immunity and would die off in large numbers. In addition, McNeill realizes how yellow fever and malaria became "revolutionary fevers," biological weapons, in a sense, that aided native uprisings against European dominance in the area. Moreover, as nature constantly evolves, so too did these strains of disease. Differential immunity became more differential, and the disease itself, which could only be described as "random" in nature, became more tamed. What makes McNeill's argument most interesting, however, is his realization that man had likewise created the vehicle of proliferation of the diseases. That is, the transformation of land to support sugar cane and other agriculture had created ideal ecologies for mosquitoes and the diseases they carried. Overall, McNeill's argument