Epidemiology and the Slave Trade

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Abstract
Physical environment and climate obviously play a role, but epidemiological differences exist even where physical environment is the same. Childhood disease environment is the crucial factor in determining the immunities of a given adult population. On the shores of the pre-Columbian Atlantic, different immunities to disease were caused by different disease environments. Statistics on military mortality are the most useful source for the mortality of migration, since they make it possible to isolate groups moving from one disease environment to another. Whatever the seasoning process among the immigrants themselves, a new generation born and raised in the American tropics should have been relatively immune to the American disease environment. One would, therefore, expect the early slave trade and a trickle of European migrants to produce a tropical American population capable of growth by natural increase—if not immediately, at least within a century or so after the trade began.

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