Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 (New Approaches to the Americas) 0th Edition

Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650, New Approaches to the Americas series, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xv + 248 pp., 9 illustrations, 13 tables, 3 maps, bibliography, index. ISBN 0521622085 (hardcover), 0521627303 (paperback). Cook received his doctorate from the University of Texas in 1973 and currently is Professor of History at Florida International University, Miami, FL, specializing in Colonial Latin America, Early Modern Spain, and historical demography. This is one of 14 books that he has written and is, perhaps, the best known. The title, Born to Die, comes from the Maya region's Annals of the Cakchiques, 1559-1581. Among his other works are Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520-1620 (1981) and The Plague Files: Crisis Management in Sixteenth-Century Seville (2012), coauthored with Alexandra Parma Cook. His CV is online at [...].

After nearly a quarter century, his 1998 volume remains the most comprehensive book by one or multiple authors on the history of New World diseases in North, Central, and South America, and the demographic collapse of Amerindian America. Indeed, there are many other articles and monographs that consider parts of the New World but none are as far-reaching; for example, Celia Maldonado Lopez's Ciudad de Mexico, 1800-1860: epidemias y poblacion, Mexico, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropologiìa e Historia, 1995) and Clark Spencer Larsen's edited Native American Demography in the Spanish Borderlands (1991). Geographer William Denevan's edited The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 2nd ed. (1992) is dated as is Russell Thornton's American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (1987).

In 1972, Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., now Professor Emeritus of History, Geography, and American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, proposed that Christopher Columbus's voyages to the New World produced catastrophic consequences. Crosby's publications in environmental and epidemiological history, all widely acclaimed, include The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972), Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (1986), and Germs, Seeds, and Animals: Studies in Ecological History (1994). His most recent work is The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (1997).

The biological mingling of the Old World and the western Hemisphere began with the first voyage of Columbus. This exchange would be a mixed blessing since the high mountain ranges and geographical isolation had resulted in limited biological diversity in the New World, especially for large mammals and germs and would lead ultimately to the extinction or demographic decimation of entire peoples in the Americas. When the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French explored and later settled areas previously occupied by Native Americans and as millions of African slaves were transported to the New World, there was a significant exchange of germs, crops, animals, and humans. In the early years of the conquest, both Native Americans and Europeans suffered from endemic diseases, but technological and military superiority allowed the European's to rapidly expand their terrestrial holdings. Native populations had never before experienced Eurasian illnesses, notably smallpox, measles, typhus, plague, influenza, malaria, and yellow fever, and initially died by the thousands and soon thereafter by the millions as waves of introduced diseases were introduced and Native Americans had no biological resistances. Demographic isolation proved not to be a significant barrier to these lethal diseases, and traditional native healing methods were inadequate.

Cook's 1998 largely synthetic volume provides a splendid introduction and five well-written chapters, prior to his thoughtful conclusions. These chapters are: 1. "In the path of the hurricane: disease and the disappearance of the peoples of the Caribbean, 1492-1518" (a focus on Hispaniola, Columbus's second expedition, Mesoamerica, the background on Old World diseases, and quantifying Precolumbian populations); 2. "The deaths of Aztec Cuitlahuac and Inca Huayna Capac: the first New World pandemics" (Mesoamerica, the Andean region, Panama, and the 1518-1528 smallpox pandemic); 3. "Settling in: epidemics and conquest to the end of the first century" (serial and compound epidemics 1500-1545, 1557-1564, 1576-1591; the Amazon Basin); 4. "Regional outbreaks from the 1530s to century's end" (Mesoamerica, the Andean region, La Plata to Tierra del Fuego, coastal Brazil, southern North America, and St. Lawrence and Upper Mississippi river valleys); and 5. "New arrivals: peoples and illnesses from 1600-1650" (Mesoamerica, the Andes, coastal Brazil, New England, and New France). In sum, the coverage is from Hudson's Bay to Tierra del Fuego with notable gaps.

Born to Die while mostly comprehensive in geographic scope also demonstrates where research on disease pathogens and paleodemographic studies had not been carried out by the late 1990s (notably the American Southwest, western Canada, and Alaska). He has prepared the best possible synthesis given the available demographic data, and, frankly, not much new information has been published over the past two decades. Cook deals with the range of diseases, regional death rates, and native responses, but less so with the scholarly controversies among historians, anthropologists, and geographers over the death rates. He employs mostly secondary rather than primary sources in composing his book and when surveying demographic disasters throughout the Americas, the narrative becomes a catalog of what other scholars have written and he is uncritical of his sources. Cook rightly concluded that diseases, rather than warfare, were responsible for the successful rapid expansion of the Spanish Empire in Mesoamerica and the Andean region. The volume remains the best account by a single author about the depopulation of the whole of the Americas in the sixteenth century. John W. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker's edited volume Disease and Demography in the Americas (1992) is the nearest "competitor." A new work, Global History of Paleopathology: Pioneers and Prospects, edited by Jane E. Buikstra and Charlotte A. Roberts, (2012) provides the best current coverage.

Amazon.com is the place to go for these and other publications on these topics.

Good information. Needed book for paper for a graduate class.

Read this book as a textbook long ago and lost it. It is good to have it back. It is a clear account of the damage introduced to the New World by conquistadors.

This is a very thorough and well organized study of one of the most important and ghastly events in human history. In the century following the European discovery of the Americas, approximately 90% of the native population perished. The agents of this demographic and cultural catastrophe were an apparently unceasing series of epidemics transmitted by European and African immigrants to the Western Hemisphere. Isolated for millenia from the Western Hemisphere, the native peoples of the Americas were virgin soil for smallpox, plague, influenza, measles, and a wide range of other serious infections. Native American susceptibility to epidemic disease and not any technological or cultural advantage was the key factor allowing Europeans to conquer the Americas. The conquest of Western Hemisphere and European dominance of its resources resulted in a huge economic and ecological windfall for European states. This windfall was a key factor propelling the global dominance of European culture and states.
Cook does an excellent job of systematically surveying the various epidemics and their demographic impacts. This is difficult because of the need to cover an extended period of time, a broad variety of regions, and the fragmentary nature of the data. This book is an excellent summary of available knowledge on this important topic. Very organized and written competently, this book will be the standard reference on this topic.

What role did disease play in shaping the conquest of the New World. This book accounts for more than just the Aztec invasion but covers the Caribbean and South America as well. It is very well written and takes an interesting look at the epidemiology of the region. For those interested in either the imperial conquests of Spain or the development of epidemiology this is a great book. Cook writes very well and in most places his epidemiological accounts are well supported.

From discovery in 1492 to the mid 17th Century, the Americas were hit with one outbreak of infectious disease after another. Cook describes waves of smallpox, typhus, measles and influenza that killed off a continent of people. He is almost certainly right that these plagues destroyed more than the Spanish. Unfortunately he is unable to give any precise figures, or even anything close to it, as to how many actually perished. We can be confident, though, that this was the worst disease outbreak ever.

The collapse of the native population of the western hemisphere, where some 90 percent of the inhabitants perished within a century, was one of the greatest demographic disasters in history. In this well-detailed analysis, Cook lays the effect of Old World epidemics on a virgin soil population. Completely free of the impassioned polemical tones which so often characterized many of the books on the Columbian exchange,Cook presents a the framework needed for students of 16th century America. While not ignoring cruelty and war as a factor in the decline of certain groups, Cook points out that the number of Spaniards present during the 16th century was too small(less than 250,000)to have killed or worked to death the tens of millions already present in the Western Hemisphere. Smallpox,measles, and influenza ripped through the natives like a hurricane,preparing the way for European conquest and settlement.