Ecological Imperialism Summary

Crosby spans time and space in his work, Ecological Imperialism, making sense of meta-historical time frames from epoch to epoch, from Pangaea to near present, concerning everything from microbes to marinheiros. Crosby’s work stands out in the sea of global histories of European expansion, taking on a far more expansive perspective on the population collapse and role of disease in the conquest of the New World to delve deep into the ecological history of the earth as we know it now, as well as it was in previous geological eras. Crosby places this chapter of human history in a larger biological sphere and navigates across “the seams of Pangaea,” to use his own phrase, to stitch together how European imperialism succeeded due to ecological domination to bring the European ecosystem to head at the expense of native ecosystems and peoples. Crosby argues that Europeans flourished and succeeded in establishing massive oversea empires

However, Ecological Imperialism expands eras far earlier than 1492 in effort to express the core of the ecological process that enabled Europeans to invade and settle into large portions of the non-European world even before Columbus. Crosby argues that European success over the past millennia can be owed to the near simultaneous invasions by Europeans’ biological allies – weeds, diseases, animals – which were exported as little micro-Europes, what Crosby calls “neo-Europes,” and made way for their larger, more complex biological compatriots in the native ecosystems. Thus, Crosby asserts, Europeans never truly discovered or settled any new worlds, but simply sent off their own mini ecosystems to colonize non-European areas. Thus, wherever the European plants and animals could thrive, the Europeans could,