|
|
|
Virgin Soils Revisited
David S. Jones
| The decimation of American Indian populations that followed European arrival in the Americas was one of the most shocking demographic events of the last millennium. Indian populations declined by as much as 95 percent in the first century after the arrival of Christopher Columbus, prompting one historian to conclude that "early America was a catastrophe—a horror story, not an epic."1 This collapse established the foundation for the subsequent social and political developments of American history. Since the earliest encounters of colonization, colonists and their descendants have struggled to explain how and why depopulation occurred. They have debated the role of race, politics, and even genocide. All have concluded that infectious diseases, introduced by Europeans and Africans, played a decisive role. American Indians suffered terrible mortality from smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, and many other diseases. Their susceptibility led to American Indian decline even as European populations thrived. |
1
|
|
Discussions of the epidemiological vulnerability of American Indians rose to prominence with the work of William McNeill and Alfred W. Crosby in the 1970s. Both argued that the depopulation of the Americas was the inevitable result of contact between disease-experienced Old World populations and the "virgin" populations of the Americas. As Crosby defined them in 1976, "Virgin soil epidemics are those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless." His theory provided a powerful explanation for the outcomes of encounter between Europeans and indigenous groups, not just in the Americas but throughout the world. Since Crosby's analysis of virgin soil epidemics appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, countless writers have cited his definition and attributed the devastation of American Indian populations to their immunologic inadequacy. As argued in Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, "The main killers were Old World germs to which Indians had never been exposed, and against which they therefore had neither immune nor genetic resistance." Such assertions, which apply the intuitive appeal of natural selection to the demographic history of the Americas, dominate academic and popular discussions of depopulation.2 |
2
|
|
Even as Crosby's model of virgin soil epidemics remains a central theme of the historiography of the Americas, it has been misunderstood and misrepresented. Crosby actually down played the "genetic weakness hypothesis" and instead emphasized the many environmental factors that might have contributed to American Indian susceptibility to Old World diseases, including lack of childhood exposure, malnutrition, and the social chaos generated by European colonization.3 Subsequent historians, however, have often reduced the complexity of Crosby's model to vague claims that American Indians had "no immunity" to the new epidemics. These claims obscure crucial distinctions between different mechanisms that might have left American Indians vulnerable. Did American Indians lack specific genes that made Europeans and Africans, after generations of natural selection, more resistant to smallpox and tuberculosis? Did they lack antibodies that their Eurasian counterparts acquired during childhood exposure to endemic infections? Were their immune systems compromised by the malnutrition, exhaustion, and stress created by European colonization? These different explanations, blurred within simple claims of no immunity, have very different implications for our understanding of what was responsible for this demographic catastrophe. |
. . . |
There are about 17945 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
