دانلود کتاب Agents of Apocalypse

In order to appreciate this thorough and sophisticated book by Ken De Bevoise on epidemic disease in turn of the century Philippines, it might be wise to consider someone completely different, political scientist, Albert O. Hirschman. About a decade ago Hirschman wrote a book called "The Rhetoric of Reaction," which dealt with three tropes of conservative argument. The first one is "perversity," the idea that radical change will in fact only lead to and encourage its opposite. The problem with this argument is that first, deciding to do nothing is a choice, and second, that change is a part of life. De Bevoise's book deals with the perversity of changes brought by two eminently conservative forces, first, the attempts of the Spanish colonial administration to increase market production and capitalism, second, the pacification campaign of the Americans under McKinley, Taft, and Roosevelt. In total "it appears that the American war contributed directly and indirectly to the loss of more than a million persons from a base population of about 7 million."De Bevoise shows an admirable grasp of the nature of disease, and even more important its transmission and virulence. He is very thorough in examing the complex evidence about contacts, parasitism and malnutriton. At the same time he ably describes the social and political context that made things worse. He does not blame colonialism for everything: "What we can say finally is that the colonial process was neither necessary nor sufficient by itself to cause the abnormal level of illness and death in the late nineteenth-century Philippines. It was instead a CONTRIBUTORY determinant, but surely the major one." American medical efforts were usually rude and tactless. This was sometimes helpful, when they innocuated Filipinos against smallpox. Often it was not, when their brusque quarantine measures against cholera led to a lot of panic and flight that only worsened matters. Medical knowledge of disease and effective cures were often limited. Very contagious smallpox victims were often visited by their family and friends to buck up their spirits. At other times beriberi victims were quarantined, by people unaware that the disease is a vitamin deficiency and therefore not contagious. One American army officer thought that malaria was caused by noxious vapors coming from the ground, so he banned food cultivation. But ignorance was not the only problem. Undoubtedly epidemic diseases were bound to increase as the population grew and transport improved among the archipelago's many islands. But the rise of cash-cropping made things worse. "Using the legal apparatus to dismantle communal ownership of land...a new landlord class...rose on the backs of the disenfranchised." "Labor-control systems, all of which were increasingly oppressive, evolved to meet regional needs." The result was increasing inequality, increasing poverty, increasing malnutrition and increased suspectibility to disease. The rise of the export economy reduced local food production. Cash crop exports rested on unstable world prices. The Philippines became dependent on foreign rice, which removed most of the thiamine and led to a disastrous increase in beriberi. When the American army arrived, it was easily able to buy most of the food on the market. They also restricted the movement of food from one region to another, and then fought guerillas by systematically destroying possible food supplies. Other diseases had their social contexts. As employment and poverty increased so did prostitution, leading to a disastarous increase in venereal diseases. Regulation under the Spanish was feeble and unjust, but the arrival of the Americans vastly expanded the market and the problem, where it remains one to the present day. The aforementioned beriberi led to infant mortality rates in Manila that were the highest in the world, apparently approaching 100%. The spread of malaria was also encouraged by dispossesed peasants moving into malarial forests, while a laissez faire attitude towards these areas led to their exploitation and the spread of malaria. For decades afterwards many Americans would view the conquest of the Philippines as an example of their uniquely progressive and benign imperialism. Clearly that was not the case, and De Bevoise shows that "perversity" can affect the complacent and the ignorant just as well as the planned and "ideological."