A commentary on the book review of Timothy C. Winegard’s The Mosquito. I emphasize that the constant demand for slave labor on the sugar plantations, not mosquitoes, shaped Caribbean demographics. Industrialized sugar production with British and French reliance on the Atlantic slave trade created the island populations that were of clear majority African descent.

The post 2019 Sept: Letter in New Yorker magazine first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.