When fever fuelled slavery
How the introduction of yellow fever to the New World created the impetus for the transatlantic slave trade
Slavery has existed for thousands of years, but its association with skin colour emerged only in the past few centuries. When the Spanish arrived in the Caribbean, they realised that the warm, humid climate and volcanic soil were ideal for growing sugar cane. But the Conquistadors needed to find workers to cultivate, harvest and process the crop – and indigenous populations had been devastated by infectious diseases. For centuries, Spain had used as slave labour Muslims captured during the so-called reconquest of alAndalus. After the fall of the Emirate of Granada in 1492, merchants turned instead to west Africa – a move that inadvertently set the American tropics on the path toward racialised slavery.
The Aedes aegypti mosquito, and the yellow fever virus it carries, hitched a ride across the Atlantic on slave ships. Caribbean sugar-cane plantations provided ideal conditions for the mosquito to reproduce.
Yellow fever wasn’t a problem for enslaved west Africans who had been infected in childhood and acquired lifelong immunity, but European adults died in such high numbers that it was not viable to use them as labourers.
In the 1620s, the English established the colony of Barbados to cash in on the demand for sugar back home. Plantation owners initially employed indentured servants from Britain and Ireland to work on their plantations. After all, the agricultural revolution had created a glut of landless labourers looking for gainful employment. But after a yellow fever epidemic killed half of the island’s population in the mid-17th century, the plantation owners turned to enslaved Africans instead.
Something similar happened in Britain’s North American colonies. Initially, the vast majority of labourers were indentured servants from Europe. In 1680, for example, black Americans accounted for less than 5 per cent of the population. It was only after falciparum malaria made its way to the southern colonies in the mid-1680s that enslaved people from west Africa, who had developed immunity to that strain of malaria, began to form the majority of labourers. By 1750, black Americans accounted for 61 per cent of South Carolina’s population, and 44 per cent in Virginia. In the northern colonies, where the climate was too cold for malaria, employers continued to prefer free Europeans over enslaved Africans.
More than 12 million Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic to be sold into slavery, and their descendants still suffer greatly from the pseudoscientific racist ideology that was developed to justify this iniquitous system.