The African Exchange: Toward a Biological History of Black People - Tapa dura

David Eltis has observed that in terms of immigration, America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the 19th century. The unwilling African immigrants were not spread evenly across the Americas; the overwhelming majority arrived in tropical and subtropical plantation America with the result that the disease and nutritional environments of this region also became extensions of Africa. While the implications of disease ecology for world history have been examined, and the details of the Colombian exchange of plants and pathogens between Europe and the Americas studied, we have no comparable study of the African exchange.The essays in this volume form the cutting edge of biohistorical research that promises to rewrite the story of humankind's past in significant ways.

Kenneth F. Kiple is a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His edited collections include The Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease (2003); The Cambridge World History of Food (2000, with Kriemhild Conee Ornelas); Biological Consequences of European Expansion 1450 1800 (1997, with Stephen V. Beck); Plague, Pox, and Pestilence: Disease in History (1997); The Cambridge History of World Disease (1993); and The African Exchange: Toward a Biological History of Black People (1987). Kiple is author of The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (1984); Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism (1981); and Blacks in Colonial Cuba 1774 1899 (1976, with Virginia Himmelsteib King). His considerable body of written works also includes numerous articles and essays in scholarly journals and books. His work has been supported with grants and fellowships from institutions including the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society and the National Institutes of Health.