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2 The Other Invaders Deadly Diseases and Extraordinary Animals

      European colonists did not arrive alone in the Americas. They brought a great deal of baggage, some of it unintentionally. Many of the most significant changes in America’s natural environments came about through autonomous workings of natural organisms that accompanied colonists and traders. These included disease-causing microbes, or pathogens, domesticated animals such as cows, sheep, and horses, and also weeds, or plants – many of them imported – that grew in conditions of disturbance brought on by plowing, grazing, or other colonial activities.

      The impact of these organisms was enormous. Together, they remade much of American nature to better suit the new arrivals from Europe. While all of them had different effects, which varied from one region to the next, it is fair to say that without these small, often microscopic “co-invaders,” it is unlikely that Europeans would have conquered those vast sections of the Americas which their descendants now dominate.

In the material presented below, we see how the linking of the Americas to the rest of the world in the early colonial period (and even after) meant that the nature of the New World was suddenly attached to the nature of the Old World, often with astounding consequences. Alfred Crosby explores the impact of microscopic germs, viruses, and plasmodia on American Indians, and particularly the impact of smallpox and its role in the conquest of the Americas and Australia. This piece is taken from one of Crosby’s most famous books, but some of his terms need to be explained. Crosby refers to “Pangaea,” which is the name scholars give to the world’s single great land mass before it broke into continents millions of years ago, long before people existed. In part, Crosby argues that after the world split into separate continents, different disease environments eventually emerged in different places. To cross the ocean becomes, in Crosby’s narrative, to cross “the seams of Pangaea.”

      The people who cross the ocean, sailors, he occasionally refers to by their Portuguese name, marinheiros, because many of the earliest European sailors and explorers were Portuguese. And finally, he refers to “neo-Europes,” by which he means those parts of the world outside Europe where the marinheiros and other Europeans settled and successfully transformed the natural environment into some approximation of European nature. These include the temperate zones of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of southern Africa, among others. In Crosby’s analysis, the process of making a strange new environment into a “neo-Europe” was the key to success for any European colonial regime.

      In this excerpt, keep a close eye on how the diseases mentioned come to the Americas, and pay special attention to the way in which long isolation from the disease environments of Eurasia makes American Indians especially vulnerable at the time of contact. Why did Europeans bring diseases to Indians, without Indians having diseases of their own to kill Europeans? Also, you might ask why disease did not play the same role in the Europeans’ attempted conquest of Africa, where pathogens worked in the opposite direction, often undermining the power of the colonists. Does the fact that natural organisms often worked to European and Euro-American advantage mean that the conquest was “natural?” Or were settlers who took the land from dying Indians merely exploiting the environmental conditions they had created, intentionally or otherwise?

It is important to remember that as important as biological change can be, it never determines the totality of history. In other words, we must resist what is called biological or environmental determinism – the belief that nature determines history. Instead, we should try always to keep in mind that people make their histories from a range of possibilities within any environmental setting. Indian responses СКАЧАТЬ