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By Root 3009 0

with foreigners by developing new technologies and new business methods. In extractive states, locals never got the chance. Most of the English colonists who went to Virginia or Australia were servants or convicts, the lowest tiers in the social pyramid. But despite their bottom ranking their status as citizens gave them some ability to use the institutions of the homeland to push back when their leaders tried to oppress them. (Australia’s convicts, for example, began winning lawsuits against their would-be abusers almost as soon as they landed.) The slaves in extractive states had no such ability to tap into these institutions. Indeed, elites actively sought to cut off their access. A particular worry was education; echoing many in British Guiana, Booker president Josiah Booker denounced the notion of teaching his company’s employees to read because it would encourage them to aspire “far above their station in life.” Wrong ideas in the wrong people’s hands could put the elites’ political power at risk.

History suggests, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson wrote, that industrialization cannot occur without “both investments from a large number of people who were not previously part of the ruling elite and the emergence of new entrepreneurs.” Both are next to impossible in extractive states. Over the decades, reformers tried to counteract the system’s effects. Missionaries provided education for Guyana’s children; the British Anti-Slavery Society thundered unceasingly against mistreatment, launched investigations, and provided aid. “Jock” Campbell, the visionary head of Booker Brothers’ corporate successor, spent decades improving sugar workers’ conditions. The reformers did everything but change the basic extractive system. When Guyana gained formal independence in 1966, 80 percent of its export earnings were controlled by three foreign companies, one of them Campbell’s. The new nation had just one university, a night school established three years before.

WAR AND MOSQUITOES

In malaria zones, the primary victims are children. Adults as a rule have already had the disease and become immune upon survival. The adults who have most to fear are recent arrivals—a lesson that was learned in the Americas again and again, perhaps most dramatically during the U.S. Civil War. Much of the war was fought in the South by troops from the North. Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line, Yankees broke an epidemiological barrier. The effects were enormous.

In July 1861, three months after the conflict began, the Union’s Army of the Potomac marched from Washington to the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. It was repulsed at what became known to Yankees as the Battle of Bull Run and to Confederates as the Battle of Manassas. After fleeing to Washington, the generals dragged their feet about further action. President Lincoln railed against their pusillanimity, but they may have had a point. In the year after Bull Run, more than a third of the Army of the Potomac suffered from what army statistics describe as remittent fever, quotidian intermittent fever, tertian intermittent fever, quartan intermittent fever, or congestive intermittent fever—terms generally taken today to mean malaria. Union troops in North Carolina fared still worse. An expeditionary force of fifteen thousand landed at Roanoke Island in early 1862, and spent much of the war enforcing a naval blockade from a fort on the coastline. The air at dusk shimmered with Anopheles quadrimaculatus. Between the summer of 1863 and the summer of 1864, the official annual infection rate for intermittent fevers was 233 percent—the average soldier was felled two times or more.

From the beginning the Union army was bigger and better supplied than the Confederate army. As at Bull Run, though, the North lost battle after battle. Incompetent generalship, valiant opponents, and long supply lines were partly to blame. But so was malaria—the price of entering the Plasmodium zone. During the war the annual case rate never dropped below 40 percent. In one year Plasmodium infected 361,968 troops. The parasite