The English West Indies : Environmental Transformation and Insect Ecology in the Early Modern Caribbean
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Authors
Knight, Ella J.
Issue Date
2022-01-01
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
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Abstract
This paper will focus on landscape changes to the English West Indian islands of Barbados, Jamaica, Montserrat, and St. Kitts. The purpose of this paper is not to extrapolate on how mosquitoes affected the politics and societies of early modern Caribbean islands as previously demonstrated, but to show how environmental transformations through human population changes, deforestation, and erosion created an increase in breeding habitats for mosquitoes. A greater understanding of how mosquito populations affected the lives of colonizers increases the inferred niche that mosquitoes occupied in Caribbean history. This paper aims to combine multiple disciplines including biology, ecology, parasitology, environmental studies, and history. In doing so, modern-day biological knowledge of mosquito behaviors and their blood-host preferences can be reflected on the surviving historical record to give a more advanced understanding of how insects and the environment played a role in the developing islands of the early modern Caribbean. Thus, the significance of this research is to show that European colonizers not only fell victim to diseases vectored by mosquitoes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but by changing Caribbean landscapes through deforestation and urban development, they unknowingly created more suitable habitats for mosquito population growth. Therefore, in their quest for wealth, power, and supremacy, European deaths by mosquito-vectored diseases were in some ways the product of their own making. Despite the fact that multiple species of mosquitoes could have played a role in disease transmission in the early modern Caribbean, I will examine two species of mosquitoes throughout this paper: Anopheles gambiae and Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Since Anopheles gambiae and Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are vectors of malaria and yellow fever respectively, and they are anthropophilic (they prefer human habitation and human blood-meals), current research on these mosquitoes can be used to infer the importance that mosquitoes had in spreading disease in the early modern Caribbean. I have also chosen to use these specific species because modern-day scientific genetic-tracing capabilities have made it possible to ascertain that Anopheles gambiae and Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were introduced to the Caribbean in the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries respectively. Current research has also shown that these two species of mosquitoes are affected by changes in the environment. Since these insects were indiscriminate between indigenous peoples, Europeans, and Africans as blood-hosts and they respond to changes in the landscape, they can be used to understand the extent that mosquitoes had in spreading disease in the early modern Caribbean.
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58 p.
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