Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715 (Indians of the Southeast)

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Description

Epidemics and Enslavement is a groundbreaking examination of the relationship between the Indian slave trade and the spread of Old World diseases within the colonial southeastern United States. Paul Kelton scrupulously traces the pathology of early European encounters with Native peoples of the Southeast and concludes that, at the same time as indigenous peoples suffered from an array of ailments before contact, Natives had their most significant experience with new germs long after initial contacts within the sixteenth century. If truth be told, Kelton places the first region-wide epidemic of smallpox within the 1690s and attributes its spread to the Indian slave trade.
 
From 1696 to 1700, Native communities from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi Valley suffered catastrophic death tolls as a result of smallpox. The other diseases that then followed in smallpox’s wake devastated the indigenous societies. Kelton found, on the other hand, that such biological catastrophes didn’t occur simply since the region’s Natives lacked immunity. During the last half of the seventeenth century, the colonies of Virginia and South Carolina had integrated the Southeast into a larger Atlantic world that carried an unprecedented volume of people, goods, and in the end germs into indigenous villages. Kelton shows that English commerce in Native slaves in particular facilitated the spread of smallpox and made indigenous peoples especially liable to infection and mortality as intense violence forced malnourished refugees to huddle in germ-ridden, compact settlements. By 1715 the Native population had plummeted, causing a collapse within the very trade that had facilitated such massive depopulation.

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