The Bridge Connecting Silkworms to Mosquitos

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197555583.003.0009 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 143-159

Author(s):

Robert N. Wiedenmann ◽

J. Ray Fisher

Keyword(s):

Yellow Fever ◽

Mediterranean Islands ◽

Slave Labor ◽

African Slave ◽

Western Asia ◽

Slave Ships ◽

History Of ◽

Economic Collapse ◽

The Caribbean ◽

Atlantic Island

This chapter relates the history of sugar, a thread that links the Silk Roads, Portuguese sailors, Atlantic islands, endangered seals, the African slave trade, and yellow fever, all because of our physiological need for glucose, which we satisfy with sugar. The chapter tells how from its origin in Southeast Asia, sugarcane, later called “Creole cane” and processing technology moved along the Silk Roads to Western Asia, then to Mediterranean islands. To begin with, Portuguese colonists transformed the Atlantic island of Madeira into a large sugar producer using slave labor until ecological and economic collapse forced production to move to São Tomé, using Angolan slave labor. After Portugal discovered Brazil, colonists took sugarcane with them, creating large plantations and initiating the enslavement and trans-Atlantic movement of millions of Africans. As the chapter shows, sugar production moved into the Caribbean and Central America, and African slave ships inadvertently carried yellow fever and yellow fever mosquito to the Americas.

Download Full-text

Coffee and Rural Proletarianization in Puerto Rico, 1840–1898

Journal of Latin American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0022216x00009573 ◽

1983 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 83-100 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Laird W. Bergad

Keyword(s):

Puerto Rico ◽

Labor Force ◽

Puerto Rican ◽

19Th Century ◽

Historical Research ◽

The Other ◽

Slave Labor ◽

History Of ◽

The Caribbean

The development of a labor force has become an important focus of recent historical research on 19th-century Puerto Rico. One center of investigation has been slavery and its linkages to sugar culture.1 Until recently historians had consistently stressed the relative insignificance of slave labor in Puerto Rico.2 However, by focusing at the municipal, or even hacienda level, scholars have begun to generate a more analytical view of 19th-century Puerto Rican slavery. It has been shown that slaves were critical for Puerto Rican planters during the period of rapid sugar expansion in the 1820s and 1830s, and continued as an important source of labor until abolition in 1873. Contrary to prior interpretations, the history of slavery in Puerto Rico differed little from that of the other sugar producing islands of the Caribbean

Download Full-text

1. The Atlantic slave trade

American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction ◽

10.1093/actrade/9780199922680.003.0001 ◽

2014 ◽

pp. 1-16

Author(s):

Heather Andrea Williams

Keyword(s):

South America ◽

Slave Trade ◽

Middle Passage ◽

Slave Labor ◽

Christopher Columbus ◽

History Of ◽

The Caribbean ◽

Atlantic Slave Trade ◽

North And South America ◽

North And South

Slavery had long existed in Europe and Africa, but the history of the Atlantic slave trade begins in the 1440s with Portuguese exploration of West Africa. ‘The Atlantic slave trade’ charts the increased demand for slave labor in Portugal and the Christian justification of African enslavement. In the 1490s, the journeys of Christopher Columbus to the Caribbean and North and South America opened up mineral-rich and fertile lands on which European countries planted their flags and the Christian cross. More than 12 million Africans boarded the ships, but nearly 2 million died during the Middle Passage. Of those who survived, only about 5 percent went to North America, with most going to South America and the Caribbean.

Download Full-text

Yellow Fever

Viruses, Plagues, and History ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190056780.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 89-122

Author(s):

Michael B. A. Oldstone

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Yellow Fever ◽

American Indians ◽

New World ◽

The United States ◽

Westward Expansion ◽

Black African ◽

African Slaves ◽

History Of ◽

The Caribbean

This chapter examines the history of yellow fever, the role it played in shaping slavery in the United States, and its part in the country’s westward expansion. Yellow fever was an endemic disease of West Africa that traveled to the New World and elsewhere aboard trading ships with their cargoes of slaves. The black African peoples, although easily infected, nevertheless withstood the effects in that fewer died from the infection than Caucasians, American Indians, or Asians. Ironically, as smallpox and measles devastated natives along the Caribbean coast and islands, growing numbers of African slaves were brought to replace those plantation laborers. When the value of Africans over natives became apparent, by virtue of the blacks’ resistance to yellow fever, the importation of these Africans increased still further. Because it was so lethal to susceptible humans, yellow fever actually disrupted exploration into the Caribbean. In fact, American expansion became possible only after a team led by Walter Reed arrived in Cuba to combat the disease and prove it was transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

Download Full-text

Ras Kimono, the Relics of Slavery and the African Diaspora: A Study on the Socio-Cultural Factors in the Haitian-Biafran Relations

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities ◽

10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.18 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (3) ◽

Author(s):

Ibenekwu Ikpechukwuka E. ◽

◽

Uche Uwaezuoke Okonkwo ◽

Efobi Ifesinachi ◽

◽

...

Keyword(s):

African Diaspora ◽

New World ◽

African Descent ◽

Slave Narratives ◽

Cultural Factors ◽

African Slave ◽

Southeastern Nigeria ◽

History Of ◽

The Caribbean ◽

Nigerian Civil War

It is no longer news that people of African descent were enslaved to the new world via: Caribbean, America and Europe for more than four hundred years. Rastafari movement has always engaged in the history of memory especially to reminiscence about slave experiences. Bob Marley songs are replete with such freedom chants. For example, Marley’s Redemption song and Buffalo Soldier are strong lyrics about the horrors of slavery. The cultural linkage between the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria and Haiti in the Caribbean is examined, especially the nexus between Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the Haitian support to the Biafran struggle during the Nigerian Civil War 1967-1970 re-echoes the African slave narratives as Kimono recorded in his song.

Download Full-text

A Concise History of the Caribbean

10.1017/cbo9780511976131 ◽

2009 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

B. W. Higman

Keyword(s):

History Of ◽

The Caribbean

Download Full-text

White Zombie as Captivity Narrative and the Death of Certainty

The International Visual Culture Review ◽

10.37467/gka-visualrev.v2.2191 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 2 ◽

pp. 19-25

Author(s):

Mark C Anderson

Keyword(s):

American Indians ◽

American Slavery ◽

Captivity Narrative ◽

Early American ◽

Arts And Culture ◽

History Of ◽

American Black ◽

The Caribbean ◽

American Society ◽

Black Other

Horror films such as White Zombie (1932) reveal viewers to themselves by narrating in the currency of audience anxiety. Such movies evoke fright because they recapitulate fear and trauma that audiences have already internalized or continue to experience, even if they are not aware of it. White Zombie’s particular tack conjures up an updated captivity narrative wherein a virginal white damsel is abducted by a savage Other. The shell of the captivity story, of course, is as old as America. In its earliest incarnation it featured American Indians in the role as savage Other, fiendishly imagined as having been desperate to get their clutches on white females and all that hey symbolized. In this way, it generated much of the emotional heat stoking Manifest Destiny, that is, American imperial conquest both of the continent and then, later, as in the case of Haiti, of the Caribbean Basin. White Zombie must of course be understood in the context of the American invasion and occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). As it revisits the terrain inhabited by the American black Other, it also speaks to the history of American slavery. The Other here is African-American, not surprisingly given the date and nature of American society of the day, typically imagined in wildly pejorative fashion in early American arts and culture. This essay explores White Zombie as a modified captivity narrative, pace Last of the Mohicans through John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), the Rambo trilogy (1982, 1985, 1988), the Taken trilogy (2008, 1012, 2014), even Mario and Luigi’s efforts to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser.

Download Full-text

Searching for Justice After the Holocaust

10.1093/oso/9780190923068.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Michael J. Bazyler ◽

Kathryn Lee Boyd ◽

Kristen L. Nelson ◽

Rajika L. Shah

Keyword(s):

Best Practices ◽

Legal History ◽

Holocaust Survivors ◽

European Parliament ◽

Slave Labor ◽

Insurance Policies ◽

The Holocaust ◽

History Of ◽

Nazi Era ◽

Property Restitution

The Nazis and their cohorts stole mercilessly from the Jews of Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, returning survivors had to navigate unclear and hostile legal paths to recover their stolen property from governments and neighbors who often had been complicit in their persecution and theft. While the return of Nazi-looted art and recent legal settlements involving dormant Swiss bank accounts, unpaid insurance policies and use of slave labor by German companies have been well-publicized, efforts by Holocaust survivors and heirs over the last 70 years to recover stolen land and buildings were forgotten. In 2009, 47 countries convened in Prague to deal with the lingering problem of restitution of prewar private, communal, and heirless property stolen during the Holocaust. The outcome was the Terezin Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues, aiming to “rectify the consequences” of the wrongful Nazi-era immovable property seizures. This book sets forth the legal history of Holocaust immovable property restitution in each of the Terezin Declaration signatory states. It also analyzes how each of the 47 countries has fulfilled the standards of the Guidelines and Best Practices of the Terezin Declaration. These standards were issued in 2010 in conjunction with the establishment of the European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI), a state-sponsored NGO created to monitor compliance. The book is based on the Holocaust (Shoah) Immovable Property Restitution Study commissioned by ESLI, written by the authors and issued in Brussels in 2017 before the European Parliament.

Download Full-text

The History of Yellow Fever: An Essay on the Birth of Tropical Medicine

Journal of Interdisciplinary History ◽

10.2307/204998 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 22 (3) ◽

pp. 499

Author(s):

John Duffy ◽

Francois Delaporte

Keyword(s):

Yellow Fever ◽

Tropical Medicine ◽

History Of

Download Full-text

Extensive introgression and mosaic genomes of Mediterranean endemic lizards

Nature Communications ◽

10.1038/s41467-021-22949-9 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Weizhao Yang ◽

Nathalie Feiner ◽

Catarina Pinho ◽

Geoffrey M. While ◽

Antigoni Kaliontzopoulou ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Evolutionary History ◽

Mediterranean Islands ◽

The Past ◽

Island Endemics ◽

Extant Species ◽

Mediterranean Island ◽

History Of ◽

Entire History ◽

The Mediterranean ◽

The Mediterranean Basin

AbstractThe Mediterranean basin is a hotspot of biodiversity, fuelled by climatic oscillation and geological change over the past 20 million years. Wall lizards of the genus Podarcis are among the most abundant, diverse, and conspicuous Mediterranean fauna. Here, we unravel the remarkably entangled evolutionary history of wall lizards by sequencing genomes of 34 major lineages covering 26 species. We demonstrate an early (>11 MYA) separation into two clades centred on the Iberian and Balkan Peninsulas, and two clades of Mediterranean island endemics. Diversification within these clades was pronounced between 6.5–4.0 MYA, a period spanning the Messinian Salinity Crisis, during which the Mediterranean Sea nearly dried up before rapidly refilling. However, genetic exchange between lineages has been a pervasive feature throughout the entire history of wall lizards. This has resulted in a highly reticulated pattern of evolution across the group, characterised by mosaic genomes with major contributions from two or more parental taxa. These hybrid lineages gave rise to several of the extant species that are endemic to Mediterranean islands. The mosaic genomes of island endemics may have promoted their extraordinary adaptability and striking diversity in body size, shape and colouration, which have puzzled biologists for centuries.

Download Full-text