"Corruption of the Air": Yellow Fever and Malaria in the Rise of English Caribbean Slavery

abstract:The yellow fever epidemic that struck Barbados in 1647 was a hinge point in the development of English slavery. European newcomers to the tropics were more likely than West Africans to succumb to the effects of both yellow fever and malaria, diseases that originated in Africa and became more prevalent in the Americas with the expansion of the slave trade. The "Africanization" of the Caribbean disease environment after 1647 hastened the transition to slave economies. The impact of the first Barbadian yellow fever epidemic and the spread of yellow fever and falciparum malaria through the sugar islands has been underemphasized in the specialist literature on the rise of slavery in English Caribbean. The change in the disease environment shaped many aspects of slave societies. It played a role in the trajectory of the sugar frontier, in the development of gang labor, in the rise of large integrated planation units, and in colonial debates about the classification and inheritance of slave property.