Among the gems:
---The Mason-Dixon line delineates exactly the northern limit of the anopheles mosquito, and therefore malaria. The white European indentured servants tended to die from it; the African slaves had a level of immunity to it. The slave plantations tended to be the more successful; the slave economy grew by natural selection. The same thing happened in South America; south of a certain point in Brazil, say Uruguay and Argentina, black slavery was rare.
---It was looting, then working, the silver mines of the Andes that opened China to the Europeans--until then, the West had very little the Chinese were interested in trading for. The city of Cerro Rico, in what's now Bolivia, grew to 150,000 people, bigger than London.
---Along with fossil fuels and iron/steel, the Industrial Revolution required one more thing---rubber, for belts and gaskets. The Amazon saw dictatorships arise upriver; occasionally the West had to send gunboats to assure the supply of this essential key to prosperity.
---Europe got a taste of sugar along the eastern Mediterranean during the Crusades. The most suitable place to grow it themselves turned out to be the Caribbean, and black slavery, again because of malaria, is the most cost-effective way for entrepreneurs to man the sugar trade, away from the prying eyes of more conscientious Europeans, who ban slavery on their home turf.
---And no potatoes, no popery! Listen to the whole thing...
2 comments:
Nice find, TVD.
Disease environments and their impact on human's have been an interesting perspective on history ever since Wm. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples.
Not sure how cognizant 17th century colonists were of this fact or the role it played in decision making. The English, of course, were well acquainted with Spanish/Port. use of Indians and Africans as slaves. According to Richard Dunn in Sugar and Slaves, Dutch traders, after their expulsion from Brazil, helped the English introduce sugar into the Caribbean in return for the rights to transport and sell in Amsterdam. They even took some British planters to Brazil to observe sugar processing first hand--manned by African slaves.
I think, too, that the turn from indentures to slaves had much to do with competition from other colonies. With competition from new establishments such as PA,DE, NY, NJ especially, fewer people were willing to go to the Caribbean or to the Chesapeake. Hense to the gradual expansion of slave labor. became
Thx, Lee.
Thinking about yr reply, I think it's even more significant: The indentured servant model worked, both morally and economically. Above the Mason-Dixon line---above the Malaria Line, this was the norm that quickly emerged.
Only where malaria thwarted that model did African slavery survive--and compared to the North, it didn't "thrive." It merely survived.
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