The Ecological Imperialism Analysis

The Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe from 900-1900 details the reasoning for the easy transition of life in Europe to the conquered lands, which Alfred W. Crosby calls “Neo-Europes”. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 1986 and is 311 pages long, though it does not seem like it when reading. Crosby is a historian most famous for his other publication, Columbian Exchange. He is currently a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and has taught at Washington State University, Yale, Alexander Turnbull Library in New Zealand, and the University of Helsinki in Finland. The authors prose suggests this can be read with ease by a general audience; however he does have a well researched book with plenty
It also coincided with steam power engines, which made land and sea travel much easier. The appeal of the Neo-Europes also lied in the biographical aspects. Europe and some parts of the Neo-Europes shared similar latitude, most in the temperate zone, with mostly similar climates. This was significant because Europeans relied on animals and certain plants for sustenance and needed a similar climate for these animals to be able to thrive and provide for them. Therefore, farming was able to prosper under these habitable conditions as it had in Europe. However, the plants and animals of the New World had to compete with the plants and animals of the Old World. This resulted in a lot of the flora and fauna of the new world to die out. Even more helpful to the Europeans in the new world, the natural predators of Europe were nonexistent in the new world. This is largely because the Native hunters hunted larger mammals, eventually causing their extinction. Crosby claims this is one of the first large scale impacts humans have had on the ecosystem. Later on, this extinction of natural predators allowed plants and animals the Europeans brought to increase
It definitely has a regional focus in Europe, and all the Neo-Europes named specifically earlier. The biological superiority of the Europeans may have been an accident but this does not make their successes politically, any less important. Because of their ease of conquest, they were able to obtain lands and enslave native populations that eventually lead to the increased wealth of their homelands in Europe. Like the book talks about, the Spanish learned that in the canaries, their best weapons were not necessarily guns and arms. Rather they learned that disease and illness were the weapons that truly helped the Spanish conquer. The Economic success of the Europeans in the Neo-Europes, especially in food production, is discussed heavily in the book and is one of the main questions Crosby tries to answer. He attributes the success of Europeans and their large food production to biological factors including immunity to disease, domestication of animals, the spread of weeds, and the conducive climates that accommodated the ease of growing European plants and propagating animals. In light of these factors, the Europeans were able to exploit the land and its people in order to grow wealth for their own nations and