Bullets for the Battle

Globalization: 17th Century Style
By Ruth Ann Stites

In an article in the May, 2007, National Geographic, “America Found and Lost: Legacy of Jamestown” by Charles C. Mann, the author examines the changes the arrival of settlers had on America and the world. Chronicling the movement of species, called the Columbian exchange, from the old to new world and visa versa, the article provides a new perspective on the changes colonization brought. While looking specifically at Jamestown, a much wider picture emerges, a global one. In one sense, the global economy we live in began with the first European settlements of the 1500 and 1600’s.

One import in particular provides an example of the scope of this globalization – the malaria parasite. The Indians did not understand that there were a vast number of settlers waiting in the old world for a chance of life in the new. They did not understand the forces they faced nor the hidden dangers presented by these people.

… records suggest a substantial fraction – as much as a third – of the immigrants in Virginia before 1640 were from the marshes of southern and eastern England. In the 17th century, these areas were rampant with malaria. It was not unusual for 10 to 20 percent of the marsh population to die in a single year according to Mary Dobson, a medical historian. In contrast to the rest of England, burials outstripped baptisms during much of the 17th and 18th centuries. Little wonder people from these areas wanted to emigrate to the Americas.

Due to its complex lifecycle, the plasmodium parasite moved rapidly from humans to new world mosquitoes. “This type of malaria rarely kills victims directly, but leaves them weak for months until the body gradually fights if off.” This weakening effect, as well as leaving the victims susceptible to other diseases, may very well have sapped the strength and vitality of the Indian efforts to drive out the settlers once the danger they represented to the Indian way of life became clear.

Contemporary reports indicate that malaria was well established as far north as the Massachusetts Bay Colony by 1640. “Since many more early colonists went to Virginia than Massachusetts, malaria could have been stalking the Tidewater there as early as the 1620’s.” The abuse heaped on the settlers of Jamestown – “Strachy was one of many who denounced what he saw as their propensity for ‘sloth, riot, and vanity’” – may have been the result of malaria rather than bad character.

Mann continues his analysis of the impact of malaria,

… we know that malaria spread throughout the East Coast, eventually playing a major part in the pageant of U.S. history. Without malaria, slaves would have been less desirable to southern planters: Most people from tropical Africa are resistant to the plasmodium parasite, the product of millennia of evolution in its presence. The disease became especially endemic in the Carolinas, where it crippled the army of British Gen. Charles Cornwallis during the Revolutionary War. England had by that time drained its marshes and largely been freed of malaria. Meanwhile, the colonists had become seasoned. ‘There was a big imbalance. Cornwallis’s army was simply melting away,’ says J.R. McNeill, an environmental historian at Georgetown University. McNeill takes pains to credit the bravery of the Revolution’s leaders. But a critical role was played by what he wryly refers to as ‘revolutionary mosquitoes.’ Cornwallis surrendered, effectively ending the war, on October 19, 1781.

Consider the results of the introduction of malaria in Virginia: Indian culture was destroyed and the people died or were displaced. An independent and hardy Colonial nation rose out of the early settlements sending the riches of the new world back to the old. Slavery moved populations and cultures from Africa to the Americas. The British Empire lost the Colonies. The world shifted and changed in part because of a single-celled parasite. The commerce between the old and the new worlds sealed the globalization of planet Earth.

There is, of course a spiritual moral to this story: One small change can have huge effects. When a person enters into a living relationship with Jesus Christ, the world shifts – nothing can or will ever be the same again. If countries can rise and fall over a single-celled parasite, how much more can a life lived for Christ change the destiny of those around him or her? May this be our vision for all we touch with Messiah Love. It is a wonderful “infection,” this Messiah Love, and it is our privilege to be carriers of the “Christ Life” to our world. So let’s get out there and “pass it on!”