WI : Quinine not available to Colonial Powers

[Jfoul]

Following up on the Meiji Inca thread, I wonder how the XIXth century colonial endeavours would unfold if the colonial powers do not have access to the Cinchona Tree and more specifically the Quinine extracted from it. It would mean that medication against Malaria would be far more limited than in OTL, would it bring the colonisation of tropical territories to a stop and thus impact greatly the economic development of colonial powers, or would it be a mere dent in the inevitable conquest of new lands?

 

[Philip]

Following up on the Meiji Inca thread, I wonder how the XIXth century colonial endeavours would unfold if the colonial powers do not have access to the Cinchona Tree and more specifically the Quinine extracted from it.

What is to prevent smuggling followed by cultivation? Unless the Inca create a hermit kingdom, the plant and its lore will leak out.

 

[Bad@logic]

Its actually a bit of both, in that it would hurt economic development, but European conquest would go ahead roughly on schedule. I'd advise reading the article "Malaria and French Imperialism" which covers disease and French colonial conquest. To put it bluntly, the French were medically incompetent with the usage of quinine (promptly forgetting the success they had in Algeria in the 1830s in dealing with the disease), and they took huge casualties to disease when they sent white troops into Africa. But they were nevertheless able to conquer huge swathes of the continent, because the only people who suffered really horrifying casualties were the advance vanguards, who were very small and mostly consisted of native troops under French officers. If you take vast casualties among a few dozen men, well that sucks for them, but it is insignificant for your empire as a whole. The only time they suffered really big casualties were for operations like Madagascar where they sent in big drafts of unacclimated Metropolitan troops who promptly dropped like flies, and since there were a lot of them, their casualties were significant.

But once the French had actually conquered the territory, the casualty rates dropped quite a lot, because there was proper rest, food, sanitation, shade, native support, and they could recuperate from malaria even without having proper quinine treatment of it. The death rate was still high, but manageable.

I think the British did a better job of using quinine, but the point is the French showed that it is possible to colonize a tropical territory without quinine. However, I still assume it had some utility for keeping death rates lower among the settlers, so it will impede economic exploitation through a death rate which will be marginally higher in French territories and perhaps much higher in British ones. But the territories will be colonized anyway, so as far as colors on a map, there won't be much difference.

 

[Jfoul]

What is to prevent smuggling followed by cultivation? Unless the Inca create a hermit kingdom, the plant and its lore will leak out.

From what I understand in OTL, the effects of the bark were first acknowledged by Spaniards in late XVIth century and it's mostly Jesuit priests who used it and shipped it to Europe for a couple centuries, and the Dutch successfully smuggled seeds out of the Andeans forests only in the late XIXth century to break the Peruvian monopoly.

If Europeans have far less access to the Andes and to the medical practice of the Tahuantinsuyus, the knowledge of the cinchona bark's effect would come (much?) later and so would the widespread acknowledgement of its importance. Moreover, the Inca rulers may be keen on keeping a tight control over the culture and trade of the product. If the Quinine was still solely produced in Peru until late XIXth Century, it's plausible that it remains so ITTL as well.