Suzanne Alchon’s book is an epidemiological history of the north-central highlands of the Audiencia of Quito from pre-Hispanic times to the independence wars. In a brief, sometimes staccato presentation, Alchon presents a history of Indian survival that attempts to elucidate not only the disease catastrophes and demographic instability of the colonial period, but the social, political, and ideological changes that derived from them. Her analysis of Ecuador’s pre-1534 disease environment and its evolving complexities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is illuminating, as is her discussion of the transforming effects of disease episodes and depopulation on Andean cosmology. The latter, however, is one of several subjects for which she resorts to extraregional data when more appropriate documentation is available in Ecuadoran archives.
Alchon’s focus on regional disease history as a methodological vehicle for illustrating the relationship between biology and cultural adaptation, while not new, perhaps elucidates the dialectic more concretely than other studies to date. The author’s demographic analysis, however, is problematic. She arrives at preconquest estimates for Ecuador by employing the epidemic disease model, which posits blanket depopulation rates of 30 to 50 percent for the early epidemics. This model has been challenged by Linda A. Newson (in Secret Judgments of God, edited by Noble David Cook and W. George Lovell, 1992, pp. 107, 112), who claims that such generalizations cannot be extended over broad areas, such as audiencias or even provinces, owing to regionally specific disease environments. Alchon cites this work, but does not address the argument.
The book’s most serious problem, however, lies in the author’s analysis of Quito’s seventeenth-century population. Alchon proposes the same demographic curve as Robson Tyrer does in Historia demográfica y económica de la Audiencia de Quito (1976): serious sixteenth-century decline followed by miraculous growth in the seventeenth century, and serious decline again in the 1690s, followed by eighteenth-century stagnation. In comparison with other areas of Spanish America, this curve is irregular (as Alchon points out); it is also highly questionable when considered in light of Andean migration studies and overwhelming evidence for extensive sixteenth-century demographic fraud and seventeenth-century administrative crackdowns. Although Alchon attempts to integrate these factors into her work, her efforts result in competing hypotheses. She is firm in her projection that the population of highland Ecuador more than doubled in the seventeenth century, but she appears uncertain about the cause, sometimes arguing that natural increase was the main factor (p. 79) and sometimes positing the preeminence of migration (p. 83). The need to clarify the larger issues of causation is crucial for Alchon’s other arguments, such as those about the development of immunities.
The central question here is whether the seventeenth-century demographic recovery was real or statistical. Was it the result of natural growth or simply the incorporation of forasteros into the records? Increased administrative efficiency in the seventeenth century severely curtailed the sixteenth-century practice of hiding large numbers of Indians from the census taker. Considering this, the sixteenth-century decline may have been less precipitous and the seventeenth-century boom more of a “paper” increase. This scenario is well documented for some areas of the southern Andes in the works of the late Thierry Saignes and for Ecuador in my 1990 dissertation, although the latter may not have been available to the author in time for this publication.
Although Alchon’s projected demographic curve and the data she extrapolates from it raise considerable doubt, Native Society and Disease is an interesting and useful synthesis of the history of disease, natural disasters, agricultural conditions, native medical practices, and public health policies in an underresearched area.
