Crosby, Alfred. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Aside from habitat destruction, the single greatest agent of exinction facing the native species of America is competition from exotic organisms, animals and plants which have been steadily introduced to the Western Hemisphere by conquistadors, colonists and capitalists since 1492. Ecological Imperialism was one of the first studies in the field of “ecological history,” an interdisciplinary science which attempts to trace the environmental causes and consequences of the historical record. Dr Crosby’s pioneering hypothesis in this work is that Old World diseases, animals and plants did far more to shatter the resistance of non-European peoples to Western colonialism than did European military prowess, so that the demise of the American Indian nations was as much a biological victory as it was a military and cultural conquest.
While we cannot forget the psychological effects of gunpowder and iron weapons on Stone Age warriors, neither can we discount the horrifying spectacle of cavalry charges, with the glittering soldier atop his alien, raging beast like a berserk centaur. The domestication of large animals was as important a result of the Neolithic Revolution as the domestication of grain, and most certainly played a larger role in the subjugation of the New World. Another crucial event that must be factored into the imperialist victory is the debilitating effects of foreign pathogens on the bodies and religions of the people who attempted resistance to invasion. Millions of native Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans died of smallpox, diphtheria, and measles during the entire period of European colonization, and the resulting disruptions of supply sources and decaying moral played directly into the hands of the conquerors. The apocalyptic religious results to the natives are revealed as the author quotes an English colonist in saying that “the Amerindians ‘at first coming of our men died very fast, and said among themselves, it was the English god that made them die so fast.’” The demoralizing power of religious disruption was earlier prefaced in the despairing belief among the Aztec and other Mexican cultures that Cortez’s Spanish forces were the advance retinue of their returning diety, a Christ-like being known as Quetzalcoatl, whose coming as a bearded man atop a floating mountain had been foretold by the priests for centuries.
Crosby traces the history of Western expansion from the Crusades through the colonization of the Canary Islands, the Western Hemisphere, Oceania and Africa. In many instances, the native plants, animals, and people were extirpated to such a degree that the resulting ecosystems eventually resembled those of Europe more than of the aboriginal country. These usurped lands, referred to by the author as “neo-Europes,” reflect not only the racial composition of the invaders’ homeland but today teem with much of the flora and fauna of the Old World as well. Importations of vermin and pestilences from Eurasia and Africa played a decisive role in reducing the Americas and Oceania to largely emptied territories, and, after technological and strategic superiority crushed the last of native resistance, these regions were forced to accept colonization by the invaders.
This total dominance by Old World peoples, white and black, which resulted in the current racial makeup of the United States and Canada, the states of southern and central South America, Australia and New Zealand, was impossible in Asia and, to some extent, Africa (except temporarily, through force of arms) because these continents were part of the Europeans’ own Old World biosphere, whose inhabitants shared the same resistance to disease and similar agricultural and pastoral cultures. As for Asia, Crosby tells us that our similarities precluded the expansive colonization that was the fate of more alien lands.
“The desirable regions [of Asia] were already thoroughly occupied by humans in much greater numbers than Europe could ever send east, humans of physical endurance and sinewy culture. Like Europeans, these Indians, Indonesians, Malaysians, and so on, planted and consumed the same grains (especially rice, which had not arrived in Europe until the Renaissance), depended on approximately the same animals (though in much smaller numbers per human being), and struggled to maintain health against the same pathogens and parasites, plus several venous species unknown in Europe. Despite all the differences between Easterners and Westerners, both were obviously children of the Old World Neolithic Revolution, and therefore the European advantage over the Asians was ephemeral.”
This was not the case elsewhere. Old World pestilences, carried within Old World peoples and Old World animals, served to clear the way for the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English among the more isolated races of the globe, with very little adverse repercussion (save perhaps to the collective spirit) accumulated to Europe. “The exchange of infectious diseases—that is, of germs, of living things having geographical points of origin just like visible creatures—between the Old World and its American and Australasian colonies has been wondrously one-sided, as one-sided and one-way as the exchanges of peoples, weeds, and animals … Europe was magnanimous in the quality and quantity of the torments it sent across the seams of Pangaea.”
One invasion paved the way for another: as Old World plagues debilitated and destroyed the human defenders of the colonized lands, European settlers would arrive with an array of intentional (livestock, grains) and unintentional (rats, fleas, weeds) supplementations to their new homes in imitation of their natal ones. These creatures spread out in waves of invasion that served to strip the colonized country of more and more of its ecological coherence, overthrowing the native ecosystems—with the aid of such feats as the extermination of the bison and passenger pigeon, the damming of rivers, and the clearcutting of the eastern hardwood forest—in favor of a transplanted, domesticated, neo-European arrangement. (The introduced European honeybee, or “English fly” to the American Indians, was “a dismal portent of the approach of the white frontier. St. Jean de Crèvecoeur wrote that ‘as they discover the bees, the news of this event, passing from mouth to mouth, spreads sadness and consternation in all minds.’”)
To quote “a specific example: In primeval Australia, the weeds called dandelions might have languished in small numbers or even died out, as the weeds the Norse had brought to Vinland [North America] must have done. We shall never know, because that Australia has not existed for two hundred years. When dandelions spread, they did, in a matter of speaking, in another land, one containing and transformed by European humans and their plants, bacteria, sheep, goats, pigs, and horses. In that Australia, dandelions have a more secure future than kangaroos.”
The relocation of Old World organisms to areas of the earth colonized by Europeans has permanently altered the world’s natural balance, and the effects are still being felt. Major efforts are haltingly underway to contain and control the tremendous damage being inflicted upon native wildlife and flora by the careless introduction of exotic species; these limited achievements are as always subject to the fickle whims of political expedience, but in Ecological Imperialism Dr Crosby reminds us that we already have a lot of catching up to do if we are to limit further damage to native America: “The success of the portmanteau biota and its dominant member, the European human, was a team effort by organisms that had evolved in conflict and cooperation over a long time. The period of that co-evolution most significant for the success overseas of this biota with sails and wheels occurred during and after the Old World Neolithic, a multispecies revolution whose aftershocks still rock the biosphere.”
Aside from habitat destruction, the single greatest agent of exinction facing the native species of America is competition from exotic organisms, animals and plants which have been steadily introduced to the Western Hemisphere by conquistadors, colonists and capitalists since 1492. Ecological Imperialism was one of the first studies in the field of “ecological history,” an interdisciplinary science which attempts to trace the environmental causes and consequences of the historical record. Dr Crosby’s pioneering hypothesis in this work is that Old World diseases, animals and plants did far more to shatter the resistance of non-European peoples to Western colonialism than did European military prowess, so that the demise of the American Indian nations was as much a biological victory as it was a military and cultural conquest.
While we cannot forget the psychological effects of gunpowder and iron weapons on Stone Age warriors, neither can we discount the horrifying spectacle of cavalry charges, with the glittering soldier atop his alien, raging beast like a berserk centaur. The domestication of large animals was as important a result of the Neolithic Revolution as the domestication of grain, and most certainly played a larger role in the subjugation of the New World. Another crucial event that must be factored into the imperialist victory is the debilitating effects of foreign pathogens on the bodies and religions of the people who attempted resistance to invasion. Millions of native Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans died of smallpox, diphtheria, and measles during the entire period of European colonization, and the resulting disruptions of supply sources and decaying moral played directly into the hands of the conquerors. The apocalyptic religious results to the natives are revealed as the author quotes an English colonist in saying that “the Amerindians ‘at first coming of our men died very fast, and said among themselves, it was the English god that made them die so fast.’” The demoralizing power of religious disruption was earlier prefaced in the despairing belief among the Aztec and other Mexican cultures that Cortez’s Spanish forces were the advance retinue of their returning diety, a Christ-like being known as Quetzalcoatl, whose coming as a bearded man atop a floating mountain had been foretold by the priests for centuries.
Crosby traces the history of Western expansion from the Crusades through the colonization of the Canary Islands, the Western Hemisphere, Oceania and Africa. In many instances, the native plants, animals, and people were extirpated to such a degree that the resulting ecosystems eventually resembled those of Europe more than of the aboriginal country. These usurped lands, referred to by the author as “neo-Europes,” reflect not only the racial composition of the invaders’ homeland but today teem with much of the flora and fauna of the Old World as well. Importations of vermin and pestilences from Eurasia and Africa played a decisive role in reducing the Americas and Oceania to largely emptied territories, and, after technological and strategic superiority crushed the last of native resistance, these regions were forced to accept colonization by the invaders.
This total dominance by Old World peoples, white and black, which resulted in the current racial makeup of the United States and Canada, the states of southern and central South America, Australia and New Zealand, was impossible in Asia and, to some extent, Africa (except temporarily, through force of arms) because these continents were part of the Europeans’ own Old World biosphere, whose inhabitants shared the same resistance to disease and similar agricultural and pastoral cultures. As for Asia, Crosby tells us that our similarities precluded the expansive colonization that was the fate of more alien lands.
“The desirable regions [of Asia] were already thoroughly occupied by humans in much greater numbers than Europe could ever send east, humans of physical endurance and sinewy culture. Like Europeans, these Indians, Indonesians, Malaysians, and so on, planted and consumed the same grains (especially rice, which had not arrived in Europe until the Renaissance), depended on approximately the same animals (though in much smaller numbers per human being), and struggled to maintain health against the same pathogens and parasites, plus several venous species unknown in Europe. Despite all the differences between Easterners and Westerners, both were obviously children of the Old World Neolithic Revolution, and therefore the European advantage over the Asians was ephemeral.”
This was not the case elsewhere. Old World pestilences, carried within Old World peoples and Old World animals, served to clear the way for the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English among the more isolated races of the globe, with very little adverse repercussion (save perhaps to the collective spirit) accumulated to Europe. “The exchange of infectious diseases—that is, of germs, of living things having geographical points of origin just like visible creatures—between the Old World and its American and Australasian colonies has been wondrously one-sided, as one-sided and one-way as the exchanges of peoples, weeds, and animals … Europe was magnanimous in the quality and quantity of the torments it sent across the seams of Pangaea.”
One invasion paved the way for another: as Old World plagues debilitated and destroyed the human defenders of the colonized lands, European settlers would arrive with an array of intentional (livestock, grains) and unintentional (rats, fleas, weeds) supplementations to their new homes in imitation of their natal ones. These creatures spread out in waves of invasion that served to strip the colonized country of more and more of its ecological coherence, overthrowing the native ecosystems—with the aid of such feats as the extermination of the bison and passenger pigeon, the damming of rivers, and the clearcutting of the eastern hardwood forest—in favor of a transplanted, domesticated, neo-European arrangement. (The introduced European honeybee, or “English fly” to the American Indians, was “a dismal portent of the approach of the white frontier. St. Jean de Crèvecoeur wrote that ‘as they discover the bees, the news of this event, passing from mouth to mouth, spreads sadness and consternation in all minds.’”)
To quote “a specific example: In primeval Australia, the weeds called dandelions might have languished in small numbers or even died out, as the weeds the Norse had brought to Vinland [North America] must have done. We shall never know, because that Australia has not existed for two hundred years. When dandelions spread, they did, in a matter of speaking, in another land, one containing and transformed by European humans and their plants, bacteria, sheep, goats, pigs, and horses. In that Australia, dandelions have a more secure future than kangaroos.”
The relocation of Old World organisms to areas of the earth colonized by Europeans has permanently altered the world’s natural balance, and the effects are still being felt. Major efforts are haltingly underway to contain and control the tremendous damage being inflicted upon native wildlife and flora by the careless introduction of exotic species; these limited achievements are as always subject to the fickle whims of political expedience, but in Ecological Imperialism Dr Crosby reminds us that we already have a lot of catching up to do if we are to limit further damage to native America: “The success of the portmanteau biota and its dominant member, the European human, was a team effort by organisms that had evolved in conflict and cooperation over a long time. The period of that co-evolution most significant for the success overseas of this biota with sails and wheels occurred during and after the Old World Neolithic, a multispecies revolution whose aftershocks still rock the biosphere.”
