Thread by @natterjee

Our second plague is an #envhist classic: yellow fever. The great disease of the transatlantic slave trade, it was a key symptom of our entry into a new, environmentally ruinous era of commodification and homogenization—what some have called the “Plantationocene" #10plagues (1/n)

Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne virus native to tropical West Africa. Many get a mild case. But a minority become jaundiced and develop haemorrhagic fever—giving the disease one of its charming 150+ nicknames, vómito negro. 50% of C19th victims died, screaming in agony (2/n)

“Can the mosquito speak?” asked Timothy Mitchell. He meant the malarial Anopheles. But another 🦟 exercised equal agency: Aedes aegypti. The female prefers to bite humans and relishes city living. She brought yellow fever out of jungle primates to produce urban epidemics (3/n)

Thanks to A. aegypti, yellow fever was endemic in West Africa. Most locals survived a mild case in childhood to gain lifelong immunity. But when concentrated non-immune groups of Europeans began arriving, epidemics erupted. It was, said Philip Curtin, a “strangers’ disease”
(4/n)

This rep as the White Man’s Grave—up to 660/thousand died yearly—led Acemoglu et al. to speculate: "In places where Europeans faced high mortality rates, they could not settle & were more likely to set up extractive institutions. These institutions persisted to the present” (5/n)

Those lovable Europeans shipped 🦟 with them in water kegs, feasting on infected slaves. In the transformed landscape of the sugar plantation, predators were few & standing water ample. The 1st recorded epidemic hit Yucatán in 1648. A transatlantic reign of terror had begun (6/n)

Yellow fever became a regular visitor in ports from Suriname to the Chesapeake, striking from Buenos Aires all the way to Boston. The flags of quarantined ships off the American coast—and in the Mediterranean, + even Swansea!—gave the disease its other nickname, yellow jack (8/n)

Yellow fever’s particular epidemiology shaped Caribbean geopolitics. Local populations built up differential resistance that outsiders lacked. So the disease became “a crucial part of Spain’s imperial defense", as French and British would-be invaders died in their thousands (9/n)

But A. aegypti was a tiny revolutionary at heart! “Generals June, July, and August”—the worst months for yellow fever—protected independence movements from imperial vengeance. The Haitian Revolution, Cuban independence, even the US Revolutionary War owed much to mosquitoes (10/n)

Troop losses to yellow fever helped convince Napoleon to agree the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. This vast expansion accelerated the United States’ emergence as an imperial power, shows @GregGrandin, driving its “permanent revolution” of war and acquisition on the frontier (11/n)

The white men’s vulnerability to disease confounds familiar narratives of racial capitalism. As black women defiantly chanted at a British traveller arriving in Jamaica in 1807:

New-come buckra [white dude/master/demon],
He get sick,
He tak fever,
He be die;
He be die.

(12/n)

Yellow fever could strike the heart of power. In 1793, perhaps brought from a failed British anti-slavery colony, it hit the US capital, Philadelphia, sending President Washington fleeing. Those who stayed smoked tobacco nonstop and even fired cannon to disperse the miasma (13/n)

But yellow fever reshaped rather than levelled hierarchies. @katolivarius argues white male survivors in New Orleans gained “immunocapital” across the slaveholding “disease diaspora”: social acceptance, bank loans, & political voice as they were judged to have “acclimated" (14/n)

Immunocapital was so valuable that some newcomers actively sought illness: “the VALUE OF ACCLIMATION IS WORTH THE RISK!” declared one New Orleans public health official in 1841.

What kind of sick, unhinged regime would countenance such a system of perverse incentives?! (15/n)

This hierarchy was racialized, shows @katolivarius. Black people were considered naturally resistant and “seasoned” slaves sold for more—a form of negative immunocapital. Indeed, pro-slavery theorists claimed slavery was humanitarian...to protect whites (16/n) (h/t @faridahzaman)

In mid-C19th Brazil, too, yellow fever was racialized, seen as "negrophile & xenophobic". Fighting it became a state obsession in order to attract white immigrants, argues Sidney Chalhoub: a project of environmental mastery designed to eliminate Brazil’s African heritage (17/n)

The postbellum US—after a bizarre plot to assassinate Lincoln with yellow fever—was growing sick of the toll. In 1878 an outbreak reduced Memphis’s population by ½. It even threatened the grand Panama Canal scheme to connect Atlantic & Pacific trade, as the French fled (18/n)

The Spanish-American War provided the ideal pretext to seize the Caribbean yellow fever capital: Cuba. The US even succeeded in instilling its power of health intervention into the new Cuban constitution, taking over again in 1905. Neocolonialism and public health aligned (19/n)

During the US occupation, scientists famously demonstrated the role of mosquitoes in the disease’s spread. The US army began sweeping sanitation measures to destroy 🦟 breeding grounds, swiftly copied across the region. This 1905 postcard celebrates the army's intervention (20/n)

Not everyone was impressed. In 1900 @washingtonpost wrote: "Of all the silly & nonsensical rigmarole of yellow fever that has yet found its way into print—&there has been enough of it to build a fleet—the silliest beyond compare is to be found in the...mosquito hypothesis” (21/n)

As yellow fever periodically escapes jungles, mosquito control alone was not enough. To cut a long, gory story short: in 1937 a vaccine was finally developed, and hastily rolled out among Allied troops despite awkward side effects like hepatitis, encephalitis, and death (22/n)

Delineating endemic areas and standardizing vaccines was one of the first duties of the new United Nations Relief & Rehabilitation Administration after 1944. Mass vaccination campaigns across Africa and Latin America cut global death rates down to c. 30,000 annually. w00t! (23/n)

BUT yellow fever is risen again. Aedes aegypti again flies widely, thanks to climate change, neglected mosquito control, and declining vaccine stocks. Outbreaks struck Angola and DRC in 2016, Brazil in 2018.

"This," said one Dr Anthony Fauci in 2017, "is a wake-up call." (/end)