Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900

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Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 is a 1986 book written by Alfred Crosby.

In the book Crosby begins by pointing out that the populations of the Neo-Europes are primarily composed of European descendents. But why is this so? Why are there such large concentrations of Europeans in these lands which are so distant from Europe? Furthermore, why have these locations been able to routinely produce large food surpluses and why are many of the countries located in these regions able to consistently be among the world's largest exporters of food?[1]

Although Europeans as a whole were reluctant to leave the familiarity of their homelands to start a new life abroad until the early 19th century, the Neo-Europes experienced a great influx of European settlers between 1820 and 1930. According to Crosby, this mass emigration was caused by conditions within Europe at the time, such as “population explosion and a resulting shortage of cultivable land, national rivalries, persecution of minorities,” alongside “the application of steam power to ocean and land travel."[1]But what was so appealing about the Neo-Europes to warrant being selected as the primary locations for European expansion?

As Crosby puts it, he presents a convincing explanation [1] for the success of European imperialists, the answer is biogeographical, and this is where one of Jared Diamond’s major claims overlaps with Crosby’s. For, as both men have pointed out, Europe and the Neo-Europes all share similar latitudes. That is, the Neo-Europes “are all completely or at least two-thirds in the temperate zones, north and south, which is to say that they have roughly similar climates.”[1]As Diamond explains it, whenever two locations share the same latitude they “automatically share the same length of day, and they often share a similar climate and vegetation.”[2] This is significant because the plants and animals Europeans have traditionally relied upon for sustenance tend to require a warm-to-cool climate that receives 50 to 150 centimeters of annual precipitation to flourish. Therefore, just as farming was able to spread from the Fertile Crescent, east and west, without much difficulty, replacing the hunter/gatherer lifestyle along the way, so was it able to in the Neo-Europes.[1] But before this could take place, because the indigenous floras and faunas in the Neo-Europes were different from those located in Europe, the foreign biota brought to the New World by Europeans would have to compete with the local one to survive. This would ultimately result in the complete devastation of the native floras and faunas. As Crosby tells it, “the regions that today export more foodstuffs of European provenance – grains and meats –than any other lands on earth had no wheat, barley, rye, cattle, pigs, sheep, or goats whatsoever five hundred years ago."[1]

Why were Europeans and their plants and animals able to prevail over an environment that had long been established? Rather than give credence to claims of innate European superiority and the like, Crosby and Diamond explain this phenomenon as being a product of biological and ecological processes. According to them, one of the major contributors to European domination was disease, which is a natural byproduct of human interaction with animals. Consequently, when Europeans shifted from being hunter/gatherers to being farmers who settled in large, stationary communities and domesticated small animals, they exposed themselves to conditions that birthed diseases that would later assist them in conquering the Neo-Europes. Some such carriers of diseases were the mice, rats, roaches, houseflies, and worms that were able to accumulate in these urban settings.[1]

Because Europeans were living in an environment where they were in close contact with domestic animals and the germs that accompany them, the same germs that many of the devastating diseases of humans have sprung, they were constantly being subjected to disease.[1]And though millions of lives were lost when diseases ravaged Europe during the Middle Ages, a natural consequence of these frequent epidemics was a population that built up a resistance to these diseases. With each and every epidemic there would be some individuals who were biologically more capable of resisting the virus. According to Diamond, “These people were more likely to survive and have children. In the process, they’d pass on their genetic resistance [to their offspring].”[2] After undergoing this process for a number of centuries, the entire population eventually acquired at least some minor immunological defense against diseases such as smallpox.

However, because the majority of the native populations to the Neo-Europes were still participating in hunting/gathering and did not interact with animals in the same manner as Europeans, they were never exposed to such diseases. Therefore, “When the isolation of the New World was broken . . . the American Indian met for the first time his most hideous enemy: not the white man nor his black servant, but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath.”[3] Because the Europeans arrived in the Neo-Europes with diseases that were absolutely new to those locations, they had an enormous advantage over the indigenous peoples and the consequences were overwhelming. Furthermore, as Warwick Anderson has argued, “the ‘persisting impact of colonial development policies’ and the ‘lasting effects of agricultural change and human resettlement’ offered a particularly conducive environment for a biological approach to infectious disease.”[4] For these reasons disease was able to spread like wildfire and undoubtedly must have claimed a large number of lives. As Crosby surmises in Ecological Imperialism:

"By 3,000 years ago, give or take a millennium or so, “superman,” the human of Old World civilization, had appeared on earth. He was not a figure with bulging muscles, nor necessarily with bulging forehead. He knew how to raise surpluses of food and fiber; he knew how to tame and exploit several species of animals; he knew how to use the wheel to spin out a thread or make a pot or move cumbersome weights; his fields were plagued with thistles and his granaries with rodents; he had sinuses that throbbed in wet weather, a recurring problem with dysentery, and enervating burden of worms, an impressive assortment of genetic and acquired adaptations to diseases anciently endemic to Old World civilizations, and an immune system of such experience and sophistication as to make him the template for all the humans who would be tempted or obliged to follow the path he pioneered some 8,000 to 10,000 years ago."

[edit] Publication

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism. Second ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004.
  2. ^ a b Guns, Germs, and Steel. Dir. Tim Lambert. Perf. Jared Diamond. DVD. National Geographic, 2005.
  3. ^ Crosby, Alfred W. The Colombian Exchange. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2003.
  4. ^ Mitman, Gregg. "In Search of Health." Environmental History 10.2 (2005): 184-210. ProQuest. University of Washington, Lynnwood. 1 Nov. 2006.