This chapter explores how the evolving disease environments of the tropics shaped free and forced migration patterns at English sites. The globalization of forced labor markets and trade were catalysts in the spread of yellow fever and falciparum malaria, diseases that originated in Africa and that disproportionately weakened or killed English migrants to the tropics. These were the two deadliest mosquito-borne fevers that the English encountered in the tropics. The ways in which the English understood and responded to evolving tropical disease environments and their differential effects on European and non-European populations contributed to the rise of enslaved majorities in the tropics and informed ideas about human difference that would coalesce into nineteenth-century racism. The chapter will also show how epidemiology made English footholds in the tropics much more precarious and dependent on non-Europeans than the English footholds in other more temperate zones of the empire. The chapter relies on case studies of disease outbreaks in the Caribbean, on the West African Gold Coast, and in Sumatra at key points in the seventeenth century.

Small wars, or guerrilla wars, had an enormous impact in the age of Napoleon. Fought by peasants with access to land and resources, guerrilla wars in Haiti and Spain, in particular, reshaped the world in ways as profound as any of the major regular campaigns. They bled and demoralized the French and set the stage for the emergence of new nations in the Americas. This essay examines the two successful guerrilla wars in Haiti and Spain and compares them to two failed guerrilla wars in Calabria and the Tyrol in order to identify the key factors determining success or failure by guerrilla forces. Among the keys to success were: the geo-strategic importance of the theater of war; mobilizing ideologies; the presence of imperial troops for a long period of time with all of the resulting violence that implies; the reliance of imperial troops on requisitions in the countryside; the presence of strong allies; the impact of disease; and, above all, the presence of socio-economic conditions that both motivated peasants to take up arms to defend their families, land, and resources against long odds and that supplied peasants with the wherewithal to survive the French counterinsurgency.

Chapter 2 examines the environmental consequences of Veracruz’s 1599 relocation, drawing on hospital records, cabildo reports, and published traveler accounts. When Veracruz resettled at Ulúa, it was subject to many of the dangers the cabildo warned about in the sixteenth century: more mosquitoes, less arable land, and no stable supply of drinking water. These factors contributed to Veracruz’s reputation as an impoverished, insalubrious, and unwelcoming place. Such descriptions have inevitably contributed to the historical labeling of Veracruz as a “backwater,” but they also represent the deliberate efforts of early modern writers to spatially classify Veracruz as a part of the Caribbean world. In particular, white male European writers explicitly linked Veracruz’s ostensibly “poor” environment to its large African population, suggesting the city’s climate was suited for Africans, but not Europeans or indigenous people. By linking Veracruz’s climate with the skin color of its residents—even by means of a negative trope—European writers defined the city into a discrete environmental and phenotypical space distinct from both Europe and other parts of the Americas.

This chapter examines the strategies of producing and reproducing images of African Americans that subverted a culture of racist imagery created between 1810 and 1830. The portraits of four Black ministers – John Gloucester, Jeremiah Gloucester, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen – provide opportunities to explore political, religious, and cultural debates facing African Americans during these decades. The acts of commissioning and circulating images underscore these leaders’ claims of citizenship and their right to Black religious independence. The chapter situates their portraits within the derisive and much more popular images of African Americans. Two groups of images studied in the chapter – the “bobalition" prints and Edward Williams Clay's "Life in Philadelphia" series – mock Black success, antislavery work, and patriotism. Analyzing the circulation, intended viewership, and medium of the images examined in this chapter enables a richer understanding of how African Americans recognized that, as cultural producers, they held stakes in the portrayals of blackness. Furthermore, their images expanded and refined discourses of race in the first few decades of the nineteenth century.

During and immediately after the American Revolution, US writers described a salubrious national climate that would ensure the prosperity of the nation. Maintaining a good climate involved managing air quality through various forms of so-called improvement. In the 1790s, a series of yellow fever epidemics upended this fantasy and suggested that the US atmosphere might be either fundamentally toxic or incredibly vulnerable to foreign contagion. During this period, maintaining healthy air came to be understood as a national security issue. This discourse offers one point of origin for the contemporary militarization of climate to the benefit of some and at the expense of others. The heightened vulnerability of poor and nonwhite communities to airborne toxins can also be traced to the 1790s, when the government prioritized the health of white bodies at the expense of black people. This chapter traces this arc through Mercy Otis Warren’s anti-British plays, writing by and about Benjamin Franklin, and the novels of Charles Brockden Brown. The chapter closes by connecting this literary history to contemporary scholarship about air pollution.

This chapter delineates a crisis of public health that occurred throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It shows how it was in response to this crisis that the modern system of universal quarantine took shape. The chapter investigates the series of plague and yellow fever epidemics that breached the defenses of a string of Mediterranean islands and considers the response of European governments. The frequency with which armies and navies crossed the Mediterranean created a massive augmentation of quarantine traffic just as new epidemic threats emerged. Authorities recommitted to a robust approach to quarantine in light of these challenges. Despite wartime debacles that suggested the system might break down, Chapter 1 shows that it emerged stronger than ever. In this way, we see how a brutal series of wars and epidemics counterintuitively fostered transnational sanitary cooperation.

The introduction sets out the main themes of the book and establishes the context from which the West India Regiments emerged in the late eighteenth century. The British had successfully expanded their control in the Caribbean during the eighteenth century even though mortality in the army remained stubbornly high. On some campaigns enslaved people had been used in short-term auxiliary military roles, setting a precedent that would be followed to its logical conclusion after 1795. Slavery remained the bedrock of Caribbean society, and while racial concepts remained somewhat in flux during the eighteenth century, they were gradually hardening. West Indian physicians, however, generally agreed that black and white bodies were fundamentally the same.

While Darwin effectively undermined the idea of any kind of genesis with the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, the damage to the medical reputation of black people generally, and black soldiers in particular, had been done. Attention in the 1860s and 1870s turned to the performance of the West India Regiments in West Africa in campaigns against the Asante people. Military surgeons, steeped in the now-established medical orthodoxy of black vulnerability to a variety of diseases (particularly lung complaints), constantly grumbled that the West India Regiments were no longer medically fit for purpose. After the 1850s most West India Regiment soldiers were born in the West Indies, rather than in Africa, reducing the rates of acquired immunity to yellow fever. And while the men of the West India Regiments had never been immune to all forms of malaria, surgeons only now began to notice how many of them succumbed to tropical fevers. By the 1870s there was a growing belief that white soldiers should be preferred for campaigns in West Africa, as West India Regiment troops were not thought physically capable of withstanding the climate. Blackness had been transformed from conferring a medical advantage to being a medical liability.

Chapter 5 shows just how influential Tulloch’s work was by analysing its effect on the American School of ethnologists. Debates about the origins of man, and specifically about the unity of the human species, had been ongoing since the middle of the eighteenth century, but crystallised in the 1840s and 1850s into a debate between monogenists and polygenists. In their attempt to prove that black and white people were fundamentally and innately different, the polygenists turned to the publications of British military surgeons and particularly to those of Alexander Tulloch. His work proved, they thought, that races could not become assimilated to different climates and that black people had been made for the African climate, not shaped by it. As a publication of the British army, American polygenists asserted that Tulloch’s work offered vital and impartial support for their claim that Africans and Caucasians were of different species.

This chapter analyses the rationale behind the founding of the West India Regiments in 1795. It argues that, while various trial runs with black soldiers during the eighteenth century had created a fertile ground for the idea, what forced Britain’s hand was an outbreak of a new strain of yellow fever in 1793. Only those of African descent were believed to be resistant to the disease (many West Africans had experienced a childhood form of the disease and were therefore immune), and when faced with the French arming large numbers of black soldiers in St. Domingue, the British determined to do the same. The decision, however, was principally a medical one rather than simply a military one. European troops would be replaced by Africans – the only men whom physicians had stated were immune to yellow fever in the West Indies.

Alice Dunbar Nelson’s early short stories about New Orleans’s downriver, working-class neighborhoods focus, in particular, on the way the men in this environment can suffer forms of alienation sufficiently extreme to constitute social death. In two of these stories, a literal death comes to highlight the ways the main characters are already, from the standpoint of social relations, dead, and as such highlight the problems faced by the working poor in the distinctive environment of the final years of the nineteenth century in New Orleans. These stories, however, gave Dunbar Nelson a means of escaping this world, as, soon after they were published, she left for New York and became a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Recent research by climate scientists suggest that New Orleans, much of which is below sea level and protected from the sea only by a rapidly eroding marshland, may someday become uninhabitable. The city’s literature of the last few decades has been preoccupied with the theme of fatalism and apocalypse, and the deadly epidemics of the nineteenth century have provided rich symbolic terrain for figuring the troubles that “plague” the city and that will someday mean its end. Some recent work by women of color – notably Erna Brodber and Brenda Marie Osbey – delineates a different literary project, one appropriate to a post-apocalyptic diaspora, namely the work of remembering. Both the traditional fatalism and this emerging interest in memory will likely be central themes to watch for in the major literature associated with the New Orleans in coming decades.