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Contents
- Alfred W. Crosby
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6 - Within reach, beyond grasp
- Alfred W. Crosby
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… Where the vital substance fermenting as it were into life by the heat of the sun, breaks forth precipitately from its matrix, and spreads with a kind of fury over the whole land.
–John Bruckner, A Philosophical Survey of the Animal Creation (1768)When civilized nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race.
–Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)Mastery of the winds brought all oceanic coastlines and their hinterlands between Arctic and Antarctic ice within the European reach, but as history makes clear, not all were within the power of the Europeans to grasp, to occupy in numbers and displace the indigenous populations. Almost all the lands beyond the boundaries of Europe that are Neo-European today are those that most nearly meet the criteria cited at the end of the last chapter: similarity to Europe in such fundamentals as climate, and remoteness from the Old World. These are the Neo-Europes, the most visible residues of the age when Europe exclusively ruled the waves. Their history is the burden of the rest of this book, but first we must deal, if only briefly, with the lands that do not meet these criteria and that today are not Neo-European, though many were European colonies for long periods.
We can be brief about Pacific Asia north of the Tropic of Cancer. In China, Korea, and Japan, the Europeans had to deal with dense populations with traditions of strong central governments, resilient institutions, and cultural self-confidence, as well as with crops, domesticated animals, microlife, and parasites quite like those of Europe. In fact, the East Asians were very much like Europeans in most of the important ways, with a crucial but temporary deficiency in technology. The white imperialists never established colonies of settlement in this part of the world; the European quarters in such ports as Macao, Nagasaki, and Shanghai were only spigots tapped into the flank of Asia to draw off some of its wealth.
Middle Easterners were as well defended as the East Asians vis-à-vis the Europeans in the matters cited earlier, and they were actually expanding the area they controlled while the marinheiros were accomplishing their conquest of the oceans.
7 - Weeds
- Alfred W. Crosby
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We have the apparent double anomaly, that Australia is better suited to some English plants than England is, and that some English plants are better suited to Australia than those Australian plants were which have given way before English intruders.
–Josph Dalton Hooker, 1853It Is Really Not Surprising that Europeans failed to Europeanize Asia and tropical Africa. They did better in the New World tropics, but fell far short of founding congeries of Neo-European societies under the blazing American sun. In fact, in many areas they did not even try, but concentrated on creating plantation colonies staffed with non-European peons, slaves, or contract laborers. What is amazing is that Europeans were able to establish themselves in large numbers in the Neo-Europes, and indeed to thrive and multiply there “as the stars in the sky, and as the grains of sand on the seashore.” This the white imperialists achieved despite the remoteness of the Neo- Europes and their many bizarre aspects – bizarre by Old World standards. Quebec may be like Cherbourg today, but in 1700 it certainly was not. San Francisco and Montevideo and Sydney may be European today, but a few – really a very few – generations ago they were without masonry or streets, and they were inhabited by Amerindians and Aborigines jealous of their lands and rights. What enabled the white intruders to make Neo-European cities of these harbors and shorelines?
Any respectable theory that attempts to explain the Europeans' demographic advance has to provide explanations for at least two phenomena. The first is the demoralization and often the annihilation of the indigenous populations of the Neo-Europes. The obliterating defeat of these populations was not simply a matter of European technological superiority. The Europeans who settled in temperate South Africa seemingly had the same advantages as those who settled in Virginia and New South Wales, and yet how different their histories have been. pointed spear? The Bantu have prospered demographically not because of their numbers at the time of first contact with whites; they were probably fewer per square kilometer than, for instance, the Amerindians east of the Mississippi River.
8 - Animals
- Alfred W. Crosby
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We have a bellyful of victuals everyday, our cows run about, and come home full of milk, our hogs get fat of themselves in the woods: oh, this is a good country.
–J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782)The Marinheiros Taught their apprentices how to cross the oceans, and the latter did so, taking large numbers of people with them. Then the passengers, landsmen and women, had to make homelands of their new lands. The task was not beyond the range of their capabilities – they could have managed, given enough time – but it was beyond the range of their preferences. They were Europeans, not Americans or Australasians, and would never have adapted voluntarily to the new lands in their pristine condition. The migrant Europeans could reach and even conquer, but not make colonies of settlement of these pieces of alien earth until they became a good deal more like Europe than they were when the marinheiros first saw them. Fortunately for the Europeans, their domesticated and lithely adaptable animals were very effective at initiating that change.
The prospective European colonists were livestock people, as their ancestors had been for millennia. The founders of the Neo-Europes were descendants, culturally and often genetically, of the Indo-Europeans, a west central Eurasian people who spoke the ancestral language of most of the tongues of Europe (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, etc.), a people who were practicing mixed farming, with heavy emphasis on herding, 4,500 years before Columbus. The Europeans who founded the first transoceanic empires were also mixed farmers and pastoralists (they would have understood the Indo-Europeans' way of life more readily than our own), and the success of their animals was, generally speaking, their success.
The Europeans brought with them crop plants, which gave them a very important advantage over the Australian Aborigines, none of whom farmed, and who were slow to take it up. But the Amerindians possessed a number of productive, nourishing plants whose value the invaders quickly acknowledged by cultivating themselves. Cassava is one of the staples of Euroamericans in the tropics, especially in Brazil, and maize is a standard food of Euroamericans nearly everywhere, as it was of Australian colonists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Epigraph
- Alfred W. Crosby
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2 - Pangaea revisited, the Neolithic reconsidered
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God said,‘Let the waters under heaven be gathered into one place, so that dry land may appear’; and so it was. God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters he called seas; and God saw that it was good.
–Genesis 1:9–10Three slender things that best support the world: the slender stream of milk from the cow's dug into the pail; the slender blade of green corn upon the ground; the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman.
–The Triads of Ireland(ninth century)It Is Necessary To Begin at the beginning in considering the Neo-Europes, and that means not in 1492 or 1788 but about 200 million years ago, when a series of geological events began that brought these lands to their present locations. Two hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs were still lolling about, all the continents were jammed together in one great supercontinent that the geologists call Pangaea. It stretched over scores of degrees of latitude, and so we can assume that it had some variations in climate; but with only one land mass, there would not have been much variety among its life forms. One continent meant one arena for competition, and so only one set of winners in the Darwinian struggle for survival and reproduction. Reptiles, including all the dinosaurs, were the dominant kinds of land animals in Pangaea – and, therefore, the world – for three times as long as mammals have held that position since, and yet reptiles diversified into only two-thirds as many orders.
About 180 million years ago Pangaea began to break up like some immense tabular iceberg rotting in the heat of the Gulf Stream. First it split into two supercontinents, and then into smaller units that became, in time, the continents we know. The process was more complicated than we can describe here (indeed, more complicated than geologists completely understand as yet), but, in broad terms, Pangaea broke up along lines of intense seismic activity that later became undersea ridges. The most thoroughly examined of these is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that boils and bubbles from the Greenland Sea to Spiess Seamount, twenty degrees of latitude and twenty of longitude southwest of Cape Town, South Africa.
List of Illustration
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5 - Winds
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“Ah! why cannot men be content with the blessings Providence places within our immediate reach, that they must make distant voyages to accumulate others!”
“You like your tea, Mary Pratt – and the sugar in it, and your silks and ribbons that I've seen you wear; how are you to get such matters if there's to be no going on v'y'ges? Tea and sugar, and silks and satins don't grow along with the clams on 'Yster Pond” – for so the deacon uniformly pronounced the word ‘oyster.’ Mary acknowledged the truth of what was said, but changed the subject.
–James Fenimore Cooper, The Sea LionsIf The Old World expansionists were to be able to take full advantage of the global opportunities for ecological imperialism prefigured by the European successes in the islands of the eastern Atlantic, they would have to cross the seams of Pangaea – the oceans – in large numbers, along with their servant and parasite organisms. That great endeavor waited on five developments. One of the five was simply the emergence of a strong desire to undertake imperialistic adventures overseas – a prerequisite that may seem too obvious to bother mentioning, but not one we can omit, as the Chinese case, to which we shall refer presently, proves. The other four developments were technological in nature. Vessels were needed that were large enough, fast enough, and maneuverable enough to carry a worthwhile payload of freight and passengers across thousands of kilometers of ocean, past shoals, reefs, and menacing headlands, and back again in reasonable safety. Equipment and techniques were needed to find courses across oceans while out of sight of land for weeks, even months, on voyages far longer than any the Norse ever survived. Weaponry was needed that was portable enough to be carried on board ship and yet effective enough to intimidate the indigenes of the lands across the oceans. A source of energy was needed to drive the vessels across the oceans. Oars would not do: Neither freemen nor slaves could row without fresh water and plenty of calories, and a galley large enough to carry sufficient supplies for an oar-powered crossing of the Pacific would, paradoxically, be too large to row anywhere.
Frontmatter
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Index
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Preface to the new edition
- Alfred W. Crosby
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Each Generation of scholarly historians has not a universal but at least a common and characteristic way of looking at the past – a paradigm, if you will, but that is too ponderous a word for me. Let's call it a scenario.
The scenario a century ago of historians, nearly all of them Europeans or Euro-Americans, about modern imperialism and the industrial revolution was simple. The Europeans had conquered or at least cowed nearly everyone else in the world because the Europeans were the best people in the world. This phenomenon was especially clear in what I call the Neo-Europes – the United States, Argentina, Australia, and the like – where historians were sure there had never been many indigenous humans and the few survivors were obviously obsolescent.
The industrial revolution had happened first in Europe because everything important started there, as it always had since – oh – Aristotle. White people were better at machines., administration, and business than other people.
It is easy – even fun – to criticize the historians of the Victorian era., but they did nothing more contemptible than to draw their conclusions from the evidence they had at hand. Native American populations from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, along with those of Australian Aborigines and New Zealand Maori, seemed to be plunging to extinction, while European and Neo-European populations were exploding. Their factories were smoking away in Manchester, the Ruhr, and Pittsburgh. Their railroads spanned North America, there were plans for Trans-Siberian and Cape-to-Cairo equivalents, and the sun couldn't set on the British empire no matter how hard it tried.
Then came the world wars, Gandhi, Lenin and Mao and the Marxist evangelists, innumerable colonial uprisings – and the need for a new historical scenario. That scenario rocketed to notoriety in the trying times of the 1960s and soon achieved the status of “political correctness.” Its theme was that European imperialism had succeeded because of European brutality, superior military technology, and capitalist encroachments. And, oh yes, the industrial revolution was a capitalist scam and an ecological disaster.
We have, guided by this scenario, learned a great deal about our pasts that we had never known or at least consciously acknowledged. I learned that, as one of my T-shirts from Chicago's Field Museum proclaims, “Columbus didn't discover America; He invaded it.”
1 - Prologue
- Alfred W. Crosby
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Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an ink stand! Friends, hold my arms!
–Herman Melville, Moby DickEuropean Emigrants and their descendants are all over the place, which requires explanation.
It is more difficult to account for the distribution of this subdivision of the human species than that of any other. The locations of the others make an obvious kind of sense. All but a relatively few of the members of the many varieties of Asians live in Asia. Black Africans live on three continents, but most of them are concentrated in their original latitudes, the tropics, facing each other across one ocean. Amerindians, with few exceptions, live in the Americas, and nearly every last Australian Aborigine dwells in Australia. Eskimos live in the circumpolar lands, and Melanesians, Polynesians, and Micronesians are scattered through the islands of only one ocean, albeit a large one. All these peoples have expanded geographically – have committed acts of imperialism, if you will – but they have expanded into lands adjacent to or at least near to those in which they had already been living, or, in the case of the Pacific peoples, to the next island and then to the next after that, however many kilometers of water might lie between. Europeans, in contrast, seem to have leapfrogged around the globe.
Europeans, a division of Caucasians distinctive in their politics and technologies, rather than in their physiques, live in large numbers and nearly solid blocks in northern Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They occupy much more territory there than they did a thousand or even five hundred years ago, but that is the part of the world in which they have lived throughout recorded history, and there they have expanded in the traditional way, into contiguous areas. They also compose the great majority in the populations of what I shall call the Neo-Europes, lands thousands of kilometers from Europe and from each other. Australia's population is almost all European in origin, and that of New Zealand is about ninetenths European. In the Americas north of Mexico there are considerable minorities of Afro-Americans and mestizos (a convenient Spanish- American term I shall use to designate Amerindian and white mixtures), but over 80 percent of the inhabitants of this area are of European descent.
Appendix: What was the “smallpox” in New South Wales in 1789?
- Alfred W. Crosby
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The disease that struck the Australian Aborigines in 1789 was undoubtedly new to them, as evidenced by its impact upon them, and it seems unlikely that it had often raged in their continent before. But was it smallpox? Smallpox is a disease that combines virulence and extreme communicability and has no dormant state in humans or any other species – it can only rage, it cannot lurk. Even the virus living in the scabs from the pustules of its victims soon dies; there is nothing like a spore state. So the British must have brought it with them. But they could not have done so – not according to the record and what we know of the disease. There were no active cases of smallpox on board the First Fleet on the high seas, nor in the French ships that were cruising in the waters of New South Wales in 1789. In fact, the written record does not indicate any ship with the disease on board at or near New South Wales in 1788 or 1789. Ordinarily, such evidence, being purely negative, would not be worth much, but smallpox is such a frightful disease, and the Europeans in and around New South Wales at that time were so conscious of what devastation it could wreak, that it would be very odd, indeed, if one or more of them had it and no one thought to mention it in a letter, diary, or report.
None of the white settlers caught the disease, which is not surprising, because most likely they had all been immunized to this “childhood disease” back in Europe. But a number of white children had been born in Sydney, and none of these caught it either, despite the presence of Aborigines with active cases in the settlement. The only non-Aborigine who caught the disease in Sydney in 1789 was a seaman belonging to a visiting ship. He was – and this may be significant – an Amerindian from North America. He died of it.
Perhaps the disease was smallpox, but introduced by Malay seamen, visiting far northern Australia. Perhaps, but what a coincidence that they should bring smallpox just in time for it to meet the British on the beach, so to speak. Perhaps it was not smallpox, but chicken pox, a pustular disease with a dormant stage.
Dedication
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11 - Explanations
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“Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault.”
–Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter”If we confine the concept of weeds to species adapted to human disturbance, then man is by definition the first and primary weed under whose influence all other weeds have evolved.
–Jack R. Harlan, Crops and Man (1975)As constituted at present, New Zealand's biota and society, as well as those of the other Neo-Europes, are largely products of the runaway propagation and spread of what I call the portmanteau biota, my collective name for the Europeans and all the organisms they brought with them. Understanding its success is the key to understanding the puzzle of the rise of the Neo-Europes.
Adam Smith said of the success of one of the portmanteau biota's more prominent organisms, “In a country neither half-peopled or half-cultivated, cattle naturally multiply beyond the consumption of its inhabitants.” He was among the wisest of men, but neither a historian nor an ecologist, and we might want to ask him why said country is so lightly populated and farmed, and, further, to point out that in most places and most times, with or without humans present, the increase of cattle and indeed all organisms is naturally kept within decent bounds by the actions of predators, parasites, pathogens, and hunger. Events to the contrary were in such profusion in Smith's time as to dazzle his common sense.
The triumph of the portmanteau biota has been massive in the Neo-Europes, but most of the extreme predictions of such nineteenth-century naturalists as W. T. L. Travers have proved to be exaggerated. Very few of the indigenous life forms of the Neo-Europes have become extinct, and in North America and Australasia the native peoples are now increasing faster in number than the descendants of their conquerors. Yet the indigenes are only small fractions of the total populations, and there is no scoffing at the number of invading organisms that have thrived and swarmed across the Neo-Europes. The present-day biotas of these lands are very different from what they were a few human generations ago. The magnitude of the change has been more accurately assessed by its human victims than by its human beneficiaries.
12 - Conclusion
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Interlink'd food-yielding lands!
Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice!
Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wood and hemp! land of the apple and the grape!
Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! land of those sweet-air'd interminable plateaus!
Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie!
–Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok”In the last chapter I made use of a metaphor to describe the roles of the first arrivals in the Americas and Australasia, the indigenes, and of the second to arrive, the Europeans and Africans. I suggested that the Amerindians, Aborigines, and Maori were shock troops – marines – seizing beachheads and clearing the way for the second wave. They chiefly came on foot: the Amerindians entirely so, in all probability; the Aborigines on foot, with a few spells of paddling between Indonesian islands; the Maori only by seacraft. It might be helpful to elaborate on the metaphor (metaphor, please, not theorem), dividing the second wave into a pair of successive waves. We might think of the earlier of the pair to arrive in the Neo-Europes (consisting of those who came chiefly in the age of sail) as the army, landing with its heavy equipment, extensive support units, and greater numbers to take over from the marines. The members of this army came with weapons, fought many battles, and spent much or all of their lives under stern discipline. It is well known that the first Afro-Americans were slaves, but it is not so widely realized that half to two-thirds of the whites to migrate to North America before the American Revolution were indentured servants who had contracted away their freedom for up to seven years in return for passage to the New World. Until 1830, the majority of migrants to Australia were convicts, which leaves New Zealand alone to be founded by free laborers.
The next great batch of Old World peoples, almost all of them Europeans, to come to the Neo-Europes crossed the oceans chiefly by steamship. I think of them collectively as the civilian wave, because they harvested the benefits of the prior invasions, rather than launching invasions themselves. They came without weapons and without much in the way of institutional organization above the kinship level. They came, with very few exceptions, as free and independent individuals.
4 - The Fortunate Isles
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The fortunate isles or the isles of the blessed “abound in fruit and birds of every kind … These islands, however are greatly annoyed by the putrefying bodies of monsters, which are constantly thrown up by the sea.”
–The Natural History of Pliny (first century A.D.)In 1291, The crusaders lost acre, the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land, and, coincidentally, two Genoese brothers, Vadino and Ugolino Vivaldi, sailed out past Gibraltar into the Atlantic with the intention of circling Africa. Not surprisingly, they were never seen again. Their voyage, in and of itself, had little significance, but its implications were of transcendent importance. The Vivaldi venture was the beginning of the most important new development for the human and many other species since the Neolithic Revolution. European sailors and imperialists were now ready to try their luck in the latitudes where the Atlantic was warm, if deplorably wide.
The Vivaldis may not have died at sea or on the coast of Africa. Even in their unseaworthy craft they could have reached the Canaries, Madeiras, or Azores, all within a week or two of Gibraltar, given favorable weather. The Canaries, certainly, and the other two groups, possibly, had been known to the Romans and other sailors of the ancient Mediterranean world, and named by them the Fortunate Isles. However, Europe forgot or at least misplaced them during the centuries of Rome's decline and the Middle Ages. The sailors of Europe's Renaissance discovered or rediscovered them and made them laboratories for a new kind of European imperialism. The transoceanic empires of Charles V, Louis XIV, and Queen Victoria had their prototypes in the colonies on the islands of the eastern Atlantic.
In 13363 Lanzarote Malocello, following in the Vivaldis' wake, came upon the most northeasterly of the Canary Islands, which still bears his name, Lanzarote, where he settled and was killed by the native Canarians, the Guanches, some years later. During the fourteenth century, the Italians, Portuguese, Majorcans, Catalans, and, no doubt, other Europeans sent individual ships and expeditions to the Canaries and to the other archipelagos opposite Iberia and Morocco, the Madeiras and Azores, as they were discovered.
9 - Ills
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The colony of a civilized nation which takes possession, either of waste country, or of one so thinly inhabited, that the natives easily give place to the new settlers, advances more rapidly to wealth and greatness than any other human society.
–Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)Old world germs were entities having size, weight, and mass, just like Sweet Betsy, her Ike, and their animals; germs required transportation across the oceans, which the marinheiros unintentionally supplied. Once ashore and lodged in the bodies of new victims in new lands, their rate of reproduction (as often as every twenty minutes) enabled them to outperform all larger immigrants in rapidity of increase and speed of geographical expansion. Pathogens are among the “weediest” of organisms. We must examine the colonial histories of Old World pathogens, because their success provides the most spectacular example of the power of the biogeographical realities that underlay the success of European imperialists overseas. It was their germs, not these imperialists themselves, for all their brutality and callousness, that were chiefly responsible for sweeping aside the indigenes and opening the Neo-Europes to demographic takeover.
Until recently, the chroniclers of human history had no knowledge of germs, and most believed epidemic disease to be supernatural in origin, something to be piously endured but rarely chronicled in detail. Therefore, the epidemiological history of the European colonies beyond the seams of Pangaea is like a jigsaw puzzle of 10,000 pieces, of which we have only half – enough to give us an idea of how large the original was and of its major features, but not enough for a neat reassembly. We bemoan the spottiness of our information; yet so great is its quantity and so neatly does it parallel accounts of the modern experience of what happens to isolated peoples when they are dragooned into the world community that we cannot doubt its general validity. Before we approach the history of Old World pathogens in the Americas and Australasia, let us take a look at a few recent examples of what science calls virgin soil epidemics (rapid spread of pathogens among people whom they have never infected before), in order to accustom ourselves to the possibilities of epidemiological catastrophe.
Notes
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10 - New Zealand
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The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals – the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy in New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying, that they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children.
–Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)A virgin countryside cannot be restocked; the vicissitudes of its pioneers cannot be re-enacted; its invasion by alien plants, animals and birds cannot be repeated; its ancient vegetation cannot be resuscitated – the words terra incognita have been expunged from the map of little New Zealand.
–H. Guthrie-Smith, Tutira, the Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station (1921)We have discussed the American and Australian Neo- Europes topically – weeds, then animals and germs – in order to tease out evidence of the ecological factors underlying the success of European colonies there, but we have not tried to reweave the history of, say, the pampa into a narrative. The stories of all the continental Neo-Europes are too long and complicated to tell within the limitations of this book. Therefore, we turn to New Zealand, insular and comparatively small, whose history is the briefest and most fully documented among all the Neo-Europes. New Zealand is a palimpsest written on by only a few people, and only recently. It would be better for our purposes if New Zealand's indigenes had been Paleolithic or New World Neolithic when the marinheiros first came – purely non-Old World Neolithic, to be clear about it, like those of all the other Neo-Europes. They were not, but they were nearly so, because the long migrations of their Asian and Polynesian ancestors across the Pacific had stripped them of all but a few Neolithic elements, as we shall see later. They almost fit our needs perfectly, and whatever difficulties the said few elements may make for us are compensated for by the fact that the Europeans came to New Zealand so late that they made their first and most important additions to its biota while under the perceptive scrutiny of scientists and scientifically minded men of the generations of Cuvier and Darwin.
New Zealand calved off Australia 80 to 100 million years ago and has been in splendid isolation ever since.