| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Suzanne Austin Alchon. A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective. (Diálogos.) Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2003. Pp. ix, 214. Cloth $45.00, paper $22.95.

As Suzanne Austin Alchon points out, explanations for the catastrophic decline in Native American populations after 1492 focused, until relatively recently, on Spanish violence: the so-called Black Legend of Spanish cruelty. But during the past three decades or so, the impact of diseases on "virgin soil" peoples has received most of the credit for the demographic disaster. Common sense dictated the shift. The Black Legend may have been a handy political stick for Spain's enemies, but it did nothing to explain why Native Americans perished at high or even higher rates in the New World colonies of those enemies than they did in Spain's. By contrast, pathogenic activity could serve as an explanation, and some historians took a crash course in epidemiology. But now Alchon fears that epidemiological explanations have gone too far and that Native American dislocation and despair, along with European (and not just Spanish) colonial practices, must be joined with disease susceptibility to provide a satisfactory explanation. She also wants to redress the notions that, prior to the Columbian voyages, the Americas were some sort of disease-free "Garden of Eden" and that Native Americans were unique in their susceptibility to the diseases that came in the wake of those voyages.

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