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cannot be ascertained. But one can get some idea by looking at another continent with endemic malaria that Europe tried to conquer: Africa. (The idea that one can compare malaria rates in places separated by the Atlantic Ocean is in itself a mark of the era we live in, the Homogenocene.) Philip Curtin, one of slavery’s most important historians, burrowed in British records to find out what happened to British soldiers in places like Nigeria and Namibia. The figures were amazing: nineteenth-century parliamentary reports on British soldiers in West Africa concluded that disease killed between 48 percent and 67 percent of them every year. The rate for African troops in the same place, by contrast, was about 3 percent, an order-of-magnitude difference. African diseases slew so many Europeans, Curtin discovered, that slave ships often lost proportionately more white crewmen than black slaves—this despite the horrendous conditions belowdecks, where slaves were chained in their own excrement. To forestall losses, European slavers hired African crews.

The disparity between European and African death rates in the colonial Americas was smaller, because many diseases killed Europeans in Africa, not just malaria and yellow fever. But a British survey at about the same time as the parliamentary report indicated that African survival rates in the Lesser Antilles (the southern arc of islands in the Caribbean) were more than three times those of Europeans. The comparison may understate the disparity; some of those islands had little malaria. It seems plausible to say that in the American falciparum and yellow fever zone the English were, compared to Africans, somewhere between three and ten times more likely to die in the first year.

For Europeans, the economic logic was hard to ignore. If they wanted to grow tobacco, rice, or sugar, they were better off using African slaves than European indentured servants or Indian slaves. “Assuming that the cost of maintaining each was about equal,” Curtin concluded, “the slave was preferable at anything up to three times the price of the European.”

Slavery and falciparum thrived together. Practically speaking, P. falciparum could not establish itself for long in Atlantic City, New Jersey; the average daily minimum temperature is above 66 degrees, the threshold for the parasite, for only a few weeks per year. But in Washington, D.C., just 120 miles south, slightly warmer temperatures let it become a menace every fall. (Not for nothing is Washington called the most northern of southern cities!) Between these two cities runs the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, famously surveyed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in 1768. The Mason-Dixon Line roughly split the East Coast into two zones, one in which falciparum malaria was an endemic threat, and one in which it was not. It also marked the border between areas in which African slavery was a dominant institution and areas in which it was not (and, roughly, the division between indigenous slave and non-slave societies). The line delineates a cultural boundary between Yankee and Dixie that is one of the most enduring divisions in American culture. An immediate question is whether all of these are associated with each other.

For decades an influential group of historians argued that southern culture was formed in the cradle of its great plantations—the sweeping estates epitomized, at least for outsiders, by Tara in the movie Gone with the Wind. The plantation, they said, was an archetype, a standard, a template; it was central to the South’s vision of itself. Later historians criticized this view. Big colonial plantations existed in numbers only in the southern Chesapeake Bay and the low country around Charleston. Strikingly, these were the two most malarial areas in the British colonies. Sweeping drainage projects eliminated Virginia’s malaria in the 1920s, but coastal South Carolina had one of the nation’s worst Plasmodium problems for another two decades. From this perspective, the movie’s Tara seems an ideal residence for malaria country: atop a hill,