Tag Archives: colonialism

The most annoying noise to make and break history

So I’m sure by now you will have heard of the Zika virus. An obscure virus discovered in the late 40s, it has sky-rocketed to everyone’s attention recently with its potential links to the birth-defect microcephaly and the neurological disorder Guillain-Barre syndrome. In response, a number of South American nations have asked women to not get pregnant, apparently taking a leaf from the the US’s famously successful absitence campaign.

Yes, I had to double-check that this was just a costume.
Yes, I had to double-check that this was just a costume.
Credit: Marie Carianna CC2.0

In response, some are predicting that the extremely conservative governments in the region will have to loosen their restrictions on abortion. If this were to occur, it would be a large change for the region. It would not, however, be the first time mosquitoes have played a significant role in the course of history.

One of the most deadly mosquito borne diseases is Yellow Fever. These days, 85% of those who contract it have no or mild symptoms. For the other 15%, there is no treatment and even with modern medicine, up to 50% will die. Horribly. Vomiting blood, which one scholar describes as looking “like coffee grounds” (p. 110). Charming.

Mmm... Enjoy that next cup.
Mmm… Enjoy that next cup.
Nevertheless, whilst unfortunate for sufferers, that symptom is great for historians as it is distinctive.1 This allows historians to track its effects across history, particularly in the Caribbean.

For our purposes, the most important thing about Yellow fever is that although it has a high mortality rate, if you manage to live through it, you will be immune to it for life. This, combined with the fact that children generally only get minor symptoms of the disease, means that any population that has grown up around it will largely be immune, whilst any population that enters a Yellow Fever area is going to have a bad time. This is broadly similar to malaria where, while you don’t get immunity for life, each time you get it, you become a little more resistant to the disease.

What does this mean for history? In the Early Modern Period,2 for a variety of reasons that I don’t have time to go into here, the British Empire was waxing in the Americas, whilst the Spanish Empire was waning. Nevertheless, gold and silver were still flooding out of Spain’s colonies.

One its key possessions was Cartagena in Colombia, a bustling port city. Knowing it was a prime target, the Spaniards had the city well defended. Fortifications were layered, with troops able to give ground in pieces during the course of the siege. This was crucial, for while the fortifications at Cartagena were strong, the British were arriving with 29,000 men against just over 4,000 Spaniards, of which just over half were professional soldiers.

This isn't even the city. This is just one of the forts protecting the city.
This isn’t even the city. This is just one of the forts protecting the city.
By Martin St-Amant (S23678) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6384027

The attack began on the 13th of March 1741. At first the British out gunned the Spanish, blasting two minor forts into submission. Then they began to falter. The British forces launched a spectacularly inept assault against the key fort guarding the city. Many of the soldiers abandoned their ladders on the trek through the jungle. Those that did bring their ladders quickly found that they weren’t tall enough to scale the walls.

Even so, it was disease that took the real toll. By the time the fighting ceased, the British had lost over 8,000 men, and McNeill estimates that only 6% of casualties were due to fighting. And things only got worse. After retreating from Cartagena, “unaccountably undeterred” (p. 166) the British forces attempted to raid several other Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. Again, disease continued to scour the British ranks. By the time the British returned home, of the 29,000 in the force, 22,000 are thought to have perished. Only 1,000 of them are thought to have been direct casualties of war.

Remember, amidst that compassion, that the preferred treatment for Yellow Fever was still blood letting (Yes, this photo is from much later, but it's one of the few known photos of the procedure).
Remember, amidst that compassion, that the preferred treatment for Yellow Fever was still blood letting (Yes, this photo is from much later, but it’s one of the few known photos of the procedure).
The Burns Archive – Burns Archive via Newsweek, 2.4.2011., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14762725.
Possibly the most astounding aspect of the whole affair is, despite Erica Charters’s counter-claim, the utter lack of compassion shown for the rank and file. Admittedly, they did often build hospitals and, where possible, provided fresh fruit. Though as pointed out by Harrison, this was largely for reasons of economics more than anything else—as warfare became more specialised, training new troops became more expensive. Nevertheless, such mortality was generally seen as “the inevitable cost of war and commerce in a hot climate” (p. 16).

Whilst this has been a single example of the effects of mosquito borne viruses on history, it is far from the only one. Mosquitoes proved a valuable ally to the home side in almost every conflict in the Caribbean, from assaults on the French possessions of Martinique and Guadeloupe, to the American Revolution itself. Even when the British were victorious, such as with the invasion of Havana in 1762, after victory, the troops garrisoned there lost so many men to disease during the occupation, that Britain had to trade it back as a concession after the war had ended.

And to think, all of that didn’t even include the fact that mosquitoes make the single most annoying sound in the world. Nevertheless, they serve as an excellent reminder that for all we tend to focus on the movers and shakers of history, often the smallest things can have gigantic impacts.

EEEEeeeEeEEeEEEEEe
¡Por la patria!

Academic Sources

Charter, E 2014, Disease, war, and the imperial state : the welfare of the British armed forces during the Seven Years’ War, University of Chicago Press, London.

Harrison, M 2010, Medicine in an age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and its Tropical Colonies 1660-1830, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

McNeill, JR 2013, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914, Cambridge University Press, New York.

McNeill, JR 2013, “Mosquito Revolutions: Disease, War, and Independence in the U.S. South, Haiti, and Venezuela, 1776-1825”, Juniata, vol. 14, 2014, pp. 107-123.

  1. I’m going to fess up and say I owe a great debt to that article. It’s not quite what I’d consider academic standard, but it does an excellent job of whittling down the central arguments of his book into something more wieldy. It’s also a good read, if you’ve got a moment.
  2. Strictly speaking, the late Early Modern period, but that sounds ridiculous.

Environmentalism’s dark, troubled past

So this time I'm writing from the perspective that this isn't a total charade.
So this time I’m writing from the perspective that this isn’t a total charade.

In last week’s post, in response to the Paris Climate Change Conference, I looked at some of the historic origins for our environmental troubles—basically, why humanity has spent so much of its time not caring about the environment. Before I move onto another topic, I feel I should balance it out with the other side of the coin: If we’ve cared so little for the environment for so long, where do we find the motivation for conferences like Paris—times when our nations’ governments come together and actually think they can do something about the environment? Surely there can’t be that much hot air in the world, or else the greenhouse effect would already be far more progressed.

Many, including CNN apparently, seem to believe the environmental movement began in the 60s. To be fair, if you click on that article, it opens with the story of a river so polluted it literally catches fire. That sticks out in your memory.

Others, such as the illustrious Encyclopaedia Britannica, are willing to trace modern environmentalism back to the Industrial Revolution.1 People who are choking to death under the pollution from the factories they’re working in wanting to clean things up a little? That seems pretty accurate and intuitive to me.

Sorry, what's wrong with living here? Credit:  explorePAhistory.com
Sorry, what’s wrong with living here?
Credit: explorePAhistory.com
So instead, I’d like to talk about a much lesser known influence on environmentalism—colonialism.

Now, one of the hallmarks of modern environmentalism—that the state has an important role to play in protecting the environment via regulation and legislation—is literally ancient. Rome, for instance, had laws around the protection of water sources that were so elaborate that apparently we’re still discussing their finer legal ramifications today. Though this seems a little redundant, as they managed to pollute the Tiber River to the point where it was undrinkable. These were relatively piecemeal however, not even conceiving of the environment as a whole, let alone attempting to tackle environmental degradation holistically or systematically.

Richard Grove places large importance on the early colonial experience of tropical islands.2 He talks quite romantically about the experiences of the tropical paradises and the differences between utopias, edens, etc.. I’d explain the difference, but to be honest I skipped over it. His main argument, however, is basically this: as Western powers colonised tropical islands and exploited their resources, they devastated the local environment. Hardly controversial. Grove’s novel insight is that due to a variety of factors, most prominently that said islands were seen as self-contained paradises (or edens, or utopias—I lose track), colonial authorities, particularly those of a scientific bent, were suddenly able to imagine this devastation on a worldwide scale (or a quater-of-the-worldwide scale, in the case of the English). In fact, due to the widespread belief at the time that trees encouraged rainfall, this forms one what seems to be one of the earliest antecedents for modern conceptions of climate change, certainly on a global scale.

I'm not even going to try for a joke.
I’m not even going to try for a joke. Just go to Old Maps Online. Seriously, it’s a really cool website.
In response, according to Grove, the wide-ranging practice of forestry was established. Mauritius is the example he uses, as it’s where the “early environmental debate reached its most comprehensive form” and where local authorities displayed “the kind of rigorous scientific empiricism associated with mid-eighteenth-century French Enlightenment botany” (p. 9). Which is big surprise, as early-eighteenth-century French Enlightenment botany is renowned for its slap-dash scientific empiricism. Nevertheless, credit where credit’s due, local authorities did introduce a level of planning around land use hitherto unseen, with very specific restrictions on how much land could be felled and where.

At a time when a new scientific understanding of the world was expected to sweep-away old superstitious beliefs and usher in an age of Enlightenment, the idea that these great (white, middle-aged, wealthy) men could exert supreme control over their environment and in doing so save the civilised world held an understandably strong appeal (for white, middle-aged, wealthy men). Subsequently, via rather indirect routes, this trend of practising forestry and conservation spread to colonial authorities in India, where one of the largest-scale programs of forest conservation was undertaken. Truly, the amount of area set aside for this was phenomenal. According to Barton, in 1936 the British Empire covered a quarter of the land surface of the world, and a quarter of the Empire was set aside as forest reserves (the word “forest” here is fairly all-encompassing). I question his maths, but he finally offers us the figure of 8% of the world’s land surface being theoretically protected by the British Empire alone.

If you can imagine his hands spreading seeds rather than telephone wires, I think this gives a decent impression—Rhodes' boots stomping down on Africa are certainly accurate.
If you can imagine his hands spreading seeds rather than telephone wires, I think this gives a decent impression—Rhodes’ boots stomping down on Africa are certainly accurate.

In this way, colonialism forms an important, if unacknowledged, precedent for the modern environmental movement in the role it gave the state in creating “scientifically sound” plans around land and environmental use to preserve the environment and avoid catastrophic environmental disasters and even climate change (please do remember we’re talking about 18th century science, so “scientifically sound” is definitely a relative term in this context). Now, if only we could somehow gloss over the way colonial authorities used this somewhat noble ideal for oppression and social control

Academic Sources
Barton, GA 2002. Empire forestry and the origins of environmentalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Grove, RH 1996. Green imperialism: colonial expansion, tropical island edens and the origins of environmentalism, 1600-1860, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Guha, R & Gadgil M 1989. “State forestry and social conflict in British India”, Past & Present, no. 123, pp. 141-177.

Hughes, JD 1997. “Rome’s decline and fall: ecological mistakes?”, Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 121-125.

Wacke, A 2000. “Protection of the environment in Roman law”, Fundamina, vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 1-24.

  1. Jokes aside, that’s actually a really great page for a summary of environmentalism, its many aspect and history.
  2. A note on some of the authors I’m looking at today: Grove and Barton both read as strong apologists for colonialism, and this is coming from someone who’s happy to argue that colonialism=evil is a gross oversimplification. Nevertheless, I think within their works they raise some interesting issues that are well worth addressing.