Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770-1850

David Igler investigates the biological and commercial exchanges that shaped the eastern Pacific Basin during the decades around 1800. He focuses on the regions that later became the American Far West, including California, the Northwest Coast, Alaska, and Hawaii. As European, Asian, American, and native Pacific populations converged for trade, they linked isolated Pacific communities to global trade systems. But international commerce brought a hidden layer of global agents that transformed the Pacific: the spread of epidemic diseases from trading vessels to native communities. This influx of deadly microbes gradually culminated in demographic catastrophe for native peoples, and Igler's analysis highlights three crucial reasons: sexual contact between shipping crews and indigenous women, the pre-contact trade and social networks of native communities, and the increasing frequency of trade encounters with outsiders. His analysis of how commercial and epidemiological exchanges constituted a deadly set of relations for native communities during this period helps us understand the critical connections between the histories of disease and the marketplace. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]