raharris1973
Well-known member
When did Europeans and North Americans figure out that the tropics were a death trap for settlers from temperate lands, due to the high prevalence of tropical disease and extra vulnerability of people who didn't have multi-generational exposure and childhood exposure to such diseases?
Apparently the French were still clueless as late as the 1760s because they tried some major white settler colonialism (that failed) in Guiana in that era.
When Liberia was set up, I don't think people realized the toll tropical disease would take on blacks born in, or even who just grew up in North America. So that's cluelessness as late as the 1820s.
By the 1880s, steamships and quinine were enough to support navigation, and blunt tropical disease enough to allow European conquest of the African interior, and eventually, larger settlement, but even when white settlement happened, they were never the laboring classes.
So did people in Europe and North America basically have naive thoughts they could massively settle the jungle for almost as long as it was a deathtrap, only figuring out it was incredibly stupid, a decade or two before quinine, anti-malarial, and anti-mosquito measures slowly began to make settling jungles and savannas actually less deadly for temperate zone peoples?
Apparently the French were still clueless as late as the 1760s because they tried some major white settler colonialism (that failed) in Guiana in that era.
When Liberia was set up, I don't think people realized the toll tropical disease would take on blacks born in, or even who just grew up in North America. So that's cluelessness as late as the 1820s.
By the 1880s, steamships and quinine were enough to support navigation, and blunt tropical disease enough to allow European conquest of the African interior, and eventually, larger settlement, but even when white settlement happened, they were never the laboring classes.
So did people in Europe and North America basically have naive thoughts they could massively settle the jungle for almost as long as it was a deathtrap, only figuring out it was incredibly stupid, a decade or two before quinine, anti-malarial, and anti-mosquito measures slowly began to make settling jungles and savannas actually less deadly for temperate zone peoples?
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