Booknotes: Epidemics and Enslavement by Paul Kelton

Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast 1492-1715

by Paul Kelton

Finished 4/18/20

I’ve had this book for years, and have started it a few times, but never read past the first few pages. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, I saw it on my shelf and somehow it just seemed the right time. I was not disappointed.

The book is ultimately an exploration of colonialism and its impacts. Kelton is primarily interested in the contstellation of people, objects, and diseases that made up the “Columbian Exchange” as coined by historian Alfred Crosby. He situates himself in the tradition of scholars who have investigated the impact of diseases on Indigenous populations of the Americas, generally glossed as the “Virgin Soil Hypothesis.” The basis of this hypothesis is that Europeans brought diseases for which Native people were biologically or genetically unprepared, and therefore these diseases were especially virulent and deadly. Stronger versions of this argument present the story of European colonialism as a tragic but villainless story in which overall well-meaning Europeans take over land whose inhabitants were already decimated by the diseases they unknowingly carried. Colonialism becames a story whose primary forces are pathogenic, and not based on power, violence, or conflict.

Kelton’s book puts a stake through the heart of this story. The essence of his argument is that the most significant of the Columbian exchange diseases–smallpox–was as deadly as it was because one of the central planks of European (particularly English) colonialism was the enslavement of Indigenous people, and this project spurred greater disease spread, encouraged violence and social dislocation, reduced Indigenous sustenance and nutrition, and broadened the morbidity of secondary diseases that would decrease the likelihood of survival. In short, English attempts to enslave Indigenous people created the conditions conducive to a deadly epidemic, rather than some kind of genetic predisposition or a pure exposure to previously unknown pathogens.

Kelton begins by surveying the disease ecology of the pre-contact period, drawing heavily (and vocally) on archaeological and bio-anthropological evidence. What he finds is that, rather than being some diseaseless eden, Indigenous populations in North American had long exposure to wide range of nasty and virulent diseases, and that they had lived with and socially adapted to diseases over milennia. Kelton also highlights the diversity of impacts that diseases had between mobile and sedentary Indigenous peoples, a key point often glossed over in the generalizations of Native people as all “hunters and gatherers.” Kelton is even-handed in his reading of some conjectural evidence, discussing how complex pathgens like Typhoid and Tuberculosis may or may not have had a pre-Columbian origin point. As an archaeologist who was frequently frustrated with Historians burying important archaeological insights in footnotes, it was nice to see Kelton champion archaeological data as useful.

Kelton then takes this backdrop and explores how Indigenous disease ecology in the Southeastern United States adapted to the first visitors from Europe, namely the Spanish who arrived in 1492 and began to colonize what became Florida in 1513. Under the strong version of the Virgin Soil Hypothesis, Spanish colonists should have brought unfamiliar diseases with them and decimated Indigenous peoples they encountered, but Kelton’s careful reading of historical and archaeological evidence suggests that Spanish incursions into Native space may have exascerbated some pre-existing diseases, and spurred some social dislocation and migration, but that a large-scale strong “virgin soil” type epidemic does not fit. In part, the Spanish were so interested in finding gold and establishing Catholic missions that they managed to keep reasonable distance from the Indigenous people they encountered, prohibiting widespread disease transmission.

However, the English, who arrived in the Southeast in 1607 had a different agenda. English plantations in the Caribbean required massive amounts of back-breaking labor, and the English sought such labor by enslaving Indigenous people they encountered in the Old Dominion and Carolinian colonies of the Southeast. Kelton argues that the violence of enslavement, along with the much more regular, widespread and visceral encounters necessitated by slavery made the transmission of diseases much easier. As the English allied with certain Native groups, participated in slaving raids into the interior of Indigenous lands, and spread a mercantile empire based on debt into the Southeast, they created a network of disease, while also spurring other factors that made diseases more virulent.These included the fortification of Native communities for defensive purposes increasing the likelihood of transmission, increasing starvation which limits the ability of the body to fight off infection and disease, and the taking of women and children as slaves which made population-level replacement of disease mortality much more difficult. This meant that when smallpox finally did sweep through North American in the 1690s, it encountered a Native population that was far less able to resist it due to the social stress of violent enslavement than it otherwise might have been.Kelton even argues that the two violent White-Native conflicts of the early 18th century–the Tuscarora War of 1711-1715 and the Yamasee War of 1715-16 were a direct result of the collision of the explosive trajectories of English enslavement and Euro-Native disease expansion that emerged in its wake.The outcome of these wars was the conclusion of English attempts at Indigenous enslavement, and a turn towards Africa as a greater source of enslaved labor.

I am not an expert in Southeastern Indigenous Culture history, and was a bit overwhelmed by the complex social geography that Kelton sketches. But what he makes clear is that English colonialism and enslavement spurred widespread social disintigration, migration, and coalescing of a myriad of Indigenous communities in the region over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. Commonly-known contemporary Indigenous communities such as the Cherokee and the Creek emerged as powerful political and social collectives during this time as groups fled raids, sought safety with powerful allies, and found refuge from diseases.

The central theme of the book is that all societies can adapt to and survive diseases (even if individuals may not), unless there is some significant structural force that inhibits their adaptive strategies. Kelton forcefully argues that a Virgin Soil model cannot explain the dramatic depopulation of North American Indigenous people and that we have to take into account the role of slavery and colonial violence in our conception of the Columbian exchange. It’s hard not to see lessons in our handling of COVID-19 in the United States, where we have essentially siloed and defunded public health under a rubric of belt-tightening and cost-cutting, while simultaneously relying on a for-profit medical system that treats symptoms over causes, requires patients to be consumers and customers, and makes systemic health interventions almost impossible.Obviously the contexts (17th century Colonial North America and 21st Century US) are not comparable, but I found myself ruminating on the social forces that structure disease and how diseases in turn impact social structures.

All in all a fascinating and rich book that taught me a lot about aspects of US history with which I was unfamiliar, and gave me a lot to think about regarding health, power, and society.