In 1880, American pharmacist Henry S. Wellcome, founder of the pharmaceutical company Wellcome and Co, published his memoirs of a trip he made to the Loja Forest (Ecuador) to secure a supply network of cinchona for export and commercialization. Referring to the conditions under which the medicine was produced, Wellcome recalls:

The Indians bear the main weight of the load on their heads, placing a strip of raw leather on their foreheads to which ropes of the same material tied to the bundle are attached. They lean forward to maintain their balance and use long alpine sticks to stabilize themselves and climb the dangerous cliffs. The skeletons of hundreds of unfortunate laborers now lie bleaching in the tropical sun, having ended their earthly lives by a misstep on the edge of a precipice or by falling victim to deadly fevers while carrying on their backs the very material intended to relieve the sick in distant lands. An old Indian, while recounting the dangers encountered in gathering cinchona bark, said that at the time of the Spanish conquest his people had been stripped of their possessions, that since then they had served as slaves, and that now human sacrifices were made to provide health to the white foreigners.

Malaria in some of the jungle valleys is simply appalling, and due to the high exposure and lack of nutritious food, the Indians succumb very quickly to its influence.

A bark trader told me that during a severe malaria season several years ago, up to twenty-five percent of the Indians employed in one district died of fever before the harvest was over.

Malaria fevers are viewed with great terror by the Indians, and it is only extreme poverty or obligation as laborers that induce them to enter the bark forests to face the dangers for the paltry sum of ten to twenty-five cents a day. (Wellcome, 1880, 826, own translation).

By the time Wellcome visited the cinchona forest, this plant had been extensively exploited for just over a century. Colonial interests surrounding cinchona produced a way of relating to plants, humans, lands, and territories that I will refer to as death zones (Taussig, 1987). In the Loja Forest, the barrier between life and death is blurred. In order for the Jesuit's powder to guarantee the survival of some there, it was necessary to sacrifice the lives of others here. The cinchona trees were amputated and skinned, while the Indians often succumbed to fatal falls or the same deadly diseases that the product of their labor promised to cure. True cinchona hunters, the bark traders ventured deeper and deeper into the jungle. In their wake, they left a graveyard populated by the corpses of Indians and trees alike.

“Did the Grim Reaper ever reap a greater harvest than that caused by the Spanish conquest of the New World?” asks anthropologist Michael Taussig (1987) in Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Savage Man (5, own translation). Passing through the New World, white men satisfied every desire. First they craved gold and silver, then sugar, which was also consumed by slaves. Next they wanted cinchona, tobacco, coffee, bananas, and oil palms. They took whatever they wanted, and when they found nothing more, they moved on to the next place, leaving ruin in their wake. Since 1492, the New World has become a laboratory for a predatory way of inhabiting the world that would later be exported everywhere. Claude Levi Strauss (2017) tells us about this way:

Between man and the soil, there was never that attentive reciprocity which in the Old World founded the millennial intimacy in the course of which both mutually shaped each other. Here, the soil has been violated and destroyed. A predatory agriculture seized the lying wealth and then moved on, after having extracted some profits. The area of activity of the pioneers is aptly described as a strip, for as they devastate the soil almost as quickly as they clear it, they seem doomed to occupy nothing more than a moving band that bites into virgin soil on one side and leaves exhausted fallow land on the other. (125)

To better understand what has happened in the five centuries since Europeans arrived in the Americas, it is essential to consider a complex ecology in which humans (Europeans, Native Americans, Africans, and mestizos), mosquitoes, plants (such as sugarcane and cinchona), and other elements interact in relationships of collaboration, coercion, and conflict. These interactions shaped the colonial framework, whose impact transformed not only human societies but also ecosystems.

A key concept for understanding this transformation is the Plantationocene proposed by Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway (2019). It points to how, under the plantation model, both human and non-human bodies were disciplined and organized into exploitative production systems during the colonial period. The plantation model, in particular, rapidly transformed the American landscape. Far from being an isolated plant in colonial history, cinchona was an integral part of a broader ecology, where humans, plants, animals, and territories were intertwined in dynamics of exploitation and control. From the European perspective, cinchona represented more than a natural resource: it was a key tool for consolidating power over the colonies, especially in tropical regions where malaria, transmitted by mosquitoes, posed a significant threat to their rule.

In this context, cinchona not only offered a cure, but also guaranteed a form of colonial sovereignty by allowing Europeans to mitigate the debilitating effects of the disease and maintain their territorial and economic control in the New World. This sovereignty achieved through cinchona must be understood within a biopolitical framework, where Europeans used natural resources to manage the health and lives of colonial bodies. By disproportionately attacking white settlers, malaria eroded Europe's ability to sustain its power structures. Without cinchona, the ability to exploit colonial resources and maintain the flow of goods and wealth to Europe would have been severely compromised. Thus, cinchona not only protected European bodies, but also sustained colonial economies and, therefore, imperial power networks.

On the other hand, the sugar production regime also played a key role in the spread of disease in the Americas (McNeil, 2010). Large sugar cane plantations, the result of deforestation and river diversion, created perfect environments for the proliferation of the Anopheles mosquito, which carries malaria. These conditions, together with the transatlantic slave trade, facilitated the introduction and spread of the mosquito on the continent. Here, a cyberpositive relationship (Land & Plant, 2014) emerges between sugar exploitation and the mosquito: deforestation and the creation of swampland provided the ideal habitat for the mosquito, while the slave trade and the plantation system spread its presence.

Malaria, by severely affecting Europeans, limited their ability to maintain colonial control, leading to an increase in demand for cinchona. This tree became a crucial commodity for European empires, which saw in its bark the possibility of resisting tropical diseases (Nieto, 2000). Thus, the trade in cinchona deepened, as it represented not only a medicine to combat malaria, but also a tool to sustain colonial rule in regions where mosquitoes threatened that control. Colonial sovereignty was achieved not only through military force or political control, but also through the manipulation of nature and the bodies that inhabited it.

The power and sovereignty that European colonists managed to consolidate through the exploitation of resources such as cinchona found its limits in the very dynamics that this colonial framework produced. A key example of these limits is the differential immunity of the African American population to malaria, a phenomenon that had profound implications for the independence processes of the American colonies during the 19th century. According to John McNeill in Mosquito Empires (2010), differential immunity refers to how malaria disproportionately affected Europeans and Native Americans, while African populations, coming from regions where the Anopheles mosquito and malaria were endemic, showed greater resistance to the disease. This phenomenon became a crucial factor in the consolidation of the plantation system and, simultaneously, in the fragility of European colonial structures.

From a colonial perspective, this differential immunity was naturalized to justify the exploitation of enslaved people of African origin on plantations. European elites and colonists saw the Black population as a strong race, capable of withstanding the harsh conditions of plantation labor in the Americas. The growing demand for labor resistant to the unhealthy environment of sugar, tobacco, and other crop plantations contributed to the rise of the transatlantic slave trade. Thus, the slave market was sustained not only by economic reasons, but also by this supposed immunological “advantage” that the African population offered against malaria, a disease facilitated by the ecological transformation driven by the plantation system itself.

However, differential immunity was not only a tool of colonial exploitation, but also became a vector of emancipation. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as struggles for independence intensified in the Americas, the biological resistance to malaria exhibited by African American populations played a key role (McNeill, 2010; Fonseca, 2020). European colonial forces, weakened by malaria and other tropical diseases, found themselves increasingly unable to maintain control over vast swathes of territory. In this context, enslaved and Afro-descendant populations, many of whom had developed resistance to malaria, were able to forge alliances with insurgent forces and play a central role in the wars of independence.

This double meaning of immunity—as a mechanism of exploitation and as a condition of possibility for emancipation—is key to understanding the contradictions inherent in colonial ecology. On the one hand, malaria and the exploitation of enslaved bodies contributed to the expansion and sustainability of European empires in the Americas; on the other hand, the same ecological dynamics that enabled colonial domination also weakened imperial forces and fostered resistance and anti-colonial movements. Thus, colonial power, which was initially sustained by the exploitation of natural resources (such as cinchona) and slave labor, ended up being limited by the very forces that this system created. In this sense, the history of cinchona and malaria reveals how colonial ecologies were not only structured around exploitation, but also produced the conditions for resistance and social transformation.

The depletion of cinchona's healing properties represents another limit to colonial and capitalist domination, which depended on its exploitation to sustain European sovereignty in tropical regions. The overexploitation of natural resources under the plantation model, in this case cinchona, not only transformed the landscape and ecological balance, but eventually led to the plant's near extinction. In Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia, regions where cinchona was native and abundant, it is now rare to find wild specimens, reflecting the severity of the depletion caused by centuries of intensive extraction (Riepl, 2017).

The overexploitation of cinchona under colonial rule followed the extractive logic of plantation agriculture, a system geared toward maximizing production without regard for ecological limits. This led to several problems that affected the tree's ability to continue providing its valuable healing properties, primarily the alkaloid quinine, which is essential for combating malaria (Middleton, 2021). Over-exploitation not only led to the near extinction of the plant, but also to the depletion of the soil where it grew, decreasing the concentration of alkaloids in its resin. This phenomenon reveals a fundamental contradiction in the capitalist exploitation of natural resources: the very system that benefited from the plant was destroying its regenerative capacity and thus undermining its own source of power.

The relationship between mosquitoes and the colonial system has not remained static, but has been one of genetic dynamism that continues to affect the contemporary world. In recent decades, new forms of malaria have emerged that have developed resistance to synthetic drugs, such as chloroquine, used to treat the disease (Ashmi & Chandra, 2016). This phenomenon reflects how mosquitoes and the pathogens they carry respond evolutionarily to environmental and pharmacological pressures. The cycle that began with the spread of malaria through the colonization of the New World has created conditions conducive to the emergence of these new resistant strains, partly due to the continued movement of people, goods, and pathogens driven by globalization.

Global warming has exacerbated this problem by creating conditions that allow mosquitoes to inhabit areas where they previously could not survive. Tropical and subtropical areas, already ravaged by mosquito-borne diseases, are now seeing risk zones expand to higher latitudes. Projections indicate that global warming could lead to massive mosquito expansion, facilitating the emergence of malaria outbreaks in previously safe regions (Roychoudhury, 2024). This expansion of mosquitoes could be considered a kind of specter of colonization, in that the same vectors that once spread disease under the colonial project are now expanding under the logic of climate crisis and globalization, replicating, in a way, the colonizing movement toward new territories.

In this context, the ruins of colonialism, far from being mere inert waste, continue to be inhabited by potential assets. These ruins—whether they be the ecological transformations that facilitated the expansion of mosquitoes, the depletion of natural resources such as cinchona, or the African diaspora—are not empty of future or agency. The interactions between humans and ecosystems, forged in a context of oppression and exploitation, continue to shape our current realities, especially in the context of the climate crisis and the emergence of new forms of existence. Thus, when we look at the ruins of colonialism, we find not only vestiges of a violent past, but also active potentialities that can inspire new ways of relating to the environment and to others.

‍

REFERENCES:

1. Ashmi, H., & Chandra, S. (2016). Antimalarial drug resistance: An overview. Tropical Parasitology, 6(1), 30-41. https://doi.org/10.4103/2229-5070.179462
2. Fonseca, C. (2020). Epidemics: Virality, immunity and the outbreak of modern sovereignty. En C. Fonseca, The Literature of Catastrophe (pp. 113-148). Bloomsbury Academic.
3. Land, N., & Plant, S. (2014). Cyberpositive. En R. Mackay & A. Avanessian (Eds.), Accelerate (pp. 303-314). Urbanomic.
4. Lévi-Strauss, C. (2017). De paso por el trópico. En Tristes Trópicos (pp. 120-128). Paidós.
5. McNeil, J. (2010). Mosquito empires. Cambridge University Press.
6. Middleton, T. (2011). Becoming-After: The lives and politics of quinine’s remains. Cultural Anthropology, 36 (2), 280-307. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01112.x
7. Nieto, M. (2000). Remedios para el imperio. Fondo de Cultura Económica.
8. Riepl, M. (2017). Quina, el casi extinto árbol medicinal del escudo de Perú que pocos patriotas conocen e inspiró el gin tonic. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-40744976
9. Roychoudhury, M. (2024). Shifting landscape: Climate change’s impact on malaria. Barcelona Institute of Global Health. https://www.isglobal.org/en/healthisglobal/-/custom-blog-portlet/el-variable-panorama-como-el-cambio-climatico-afecta-la-malaria
10. Taussig, M. (1987). Shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man. University of Chicago Press.
11. Tsing, A., & Haraway, D. (2017). Reflections on the Plantacionocene. Edge Effects Magazine.
12. Wellcome, H. (1880). A visit to the native cinchona forests of South America. Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association at the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting, 28, 814-830.

‍