Capitalism and Other Pathogens

UBC professor Scott Watson has devoted much of the past year researching 19th and early 20th century smallpox outbreaks on Canada's Pacific Northwest Coast. We have spoken about this research over email, and more recently Scott mentioned that Margaret Ormsby gave smallpox scant no attention in her long-standing "definitive" history of British Columbia -- British Columbia: a History (1958).

Curious, I looked in the Index of the book that B.C. bookboss Alan Twigg touts as British Columbia: a History's successor -- Jean Barman's The West Beyond the West: a History of British Columbia (1991; revised 1997), and there is no mention of smallpox. There is mention of malaria, though not in the Index.

In Chapter Three ("The Trade in Furs") Barman discusses HBC governor George Simpson's 1841 decision to move the HBC regional headquarters from Fort Vancouver (Vancouver, Washington) to Vancouver Island (Victoria, BC). There are a number of reasons for the move, one of them based on a labour shortage in Fort Vancouver. Barman writes:

"... during the early 1830s, the local native population had been decimated by a mysterious epidemic, only later identified as a variety of malaria transmitted by a mosquito that, fortunately, did not thrive farther north. The result was a shortage of labour to acquire pelts, which were declining as the area became trapped out." (43)

Unfortunately Barman provides no "later" source to verify that it was a mosquito and not, say, an infected HBC blanket. The Oregon History Project mentions malaria outbreaks in its "Old World Pathogens" chapter.

Further down the page, Barman writes:

"Construction of Fort Victoria began in 1843, using Indian labour paid at the rate of one Hudson's Bay blanket for every forty cedar pickets cut." (43)

I dunno -- I find it hard to believe that malaria could survive, let alone recur, in what is now southern Washington State (Victoria B.C. actually has a higher seasonal temperature than Vancouver, Washington). The Oregon History Project points out that malaria came by way of West Africa through Central America, whereas smallpox is historically associated with Eurasia. Given Donald Trump's insistence on associating Covid-19 with China, not to mention previous political efforts to link the 1918 influenza pandemic with Spain (and not Kansas), I wonder if "malaria" was a convenient way of saying it's not "us" (European settlers) who brought this on, but "them" (African slaves).