Disease and Discrimination: Poverty and Pestilence in Colonial Atlantic America

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“Fascinating yet sobering, this volume highlights the important role that social and political causes of poverty and poor living conditions, beyond the presence of infectious pathogens themselves, play in disease epidemics and high mortality.”—Megan A. Perry, editor of Bioarchaeology and Behavior: The People of the Ancient Near East “Hutchinson effectively argues that disease is not an event but a process and then wonderfully illustrates how the interaction of culture and illness shaped the history of the eastern seaboard from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.”—Marie Danforth, University of Southern Mississippi Disease and discrimination are processes linked to class in the early American colonies. Many early colonists fell victim to mass sickness as Old and New World systems collided and new social, political, economic, and ecological dynamics allowed disease to spread. Dale Hutchinson argues that most colonists, slaves, servants, and nearby Native Americans suffered significant health risks due to their lower economic and social status. With examples ranging from indentured servitude in the Chesapeake to the housing and sewage systems of New York to the effects of conflict between European powers, Hutchinson posits that poverty and living conditions, more so than microbes, were often at the root of epidemics. Cover......Page 1 Disease and Discrimination......Page 2 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 CONTENTS......Page 6 List of Figures......Page 8 List of Maps......Page 10 List of Tables......Page 11 Acknowledgments......Page 12 Timeline......Page 14 Prologue......Page 18 PART I. OF APPLES AND EDENS......Page 20 1. The Transformation of Native America......Page 22 2. Of Plagues and Peoples......Page 33 3. Virginity and Virulence......Page 47 Part II. NATIVES AND NEWCOMERS......Page 62 4. Merchants and Maladies......Page 64 5. Commerce and Consequence......Page 80 6. Contested Colonies......Page 95 PART III. PLANTERS AND PESTILENCE......Page 118 7. Landscapes and Liabilities......Page 120 8. Poverty and Pestilence beyond the Big House......Page 142 PART IV. MEASURING THE LANDS......Page 168 9. Measured Lands and Multitudes......Page 170 Epilogue......Page 201 Notes......Page 206 References Cited......Page 238 Index......Page 262