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Ecological Imperialism

A CORE PREMISE of ecological imperialism is that the success of European colonial settlement is due at least as much to nonhuman forces, including plants, animals and pathogens introduced both deliberately and inadvertently, as it is to military, political, economic, and demographic incursions. The term has been developed most fully by Alfred W. Crosby in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, an erudite environmental history of the relationships between ecology and European colonialism.

Crosby explores the concept to explain successful European population expansion into particular regions of the world he labels Neo-Europes. These areas include temperate zones of North America, South America, New Zealand, and Australia that—while oceans away from Europe—contain comparable climates in which European plants, animals, and diseases could successfully establish. In contrast, European colonial settlements generally failed in regions with tropical climates less suitable for European species and with more virulent diseases.

Import into Neo-Europes

Along with new technologies, colonists brought to the Neo-Europes what Crosby cals a “grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chirping, snarling, buzzing, self-replicating and world-altering avalanche” that collectively supported vast ecological and social transformations. The previously unidentified, yet most important ally, of the Neo-European invaders was their portmanteau biota, “… fellow life forms, their extended family of plants, animals, and microlife…first domesticated or…first adapted to living with humans in the hearthlands of Old World civilization.” Successful conquest occurred in those places with ecological similarities to western and northern Europe. “Where the portmanteau biota ‘worked,’ where enough of its members prospered and propagated to create versions of Europe, however incomplete and distorted, Europeans themselves prospered and propagated.”

Weeds, for instance, were of vital importance to the establishment of Neo-Europes. “The exotic plants saved newly bared topsoil from water and wind erosion and from baking in the sun. And the weeds often became essential feed for exotic livestock, as these in turn were for their masters.” Domesticated animals “adapted marvelously well to the Neo-Europe” with their ability to “alter environments, even continental environments, …[better than] any machine we have thus far devised.” Germs, too, were of immense significance. “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,” Crosby states. Through years of isolation, indigenous peoples had their own infections (e.g., hepatitis and polio amongst Native Americans; trachoma amongst Australia's aborigines) but they had had no experience of the wide range of Old World ailments such as chicken pox, smallpox, cholera, and influenza, which were to decimate them. Indeed, Crosby suggests that smallpox may have killed up to one-third of the Australian Aboriginal population in the late 1700s. Remarkably, the flow of disease between invaders and invaded was substantially one-way, with relatively few infections and ailments having effect on the Old World.

Asia and the Tropics

By contrast, Europeans failed to build lasting settlements in Asia and tropical Africa not only for obvious reasons of heat and humidity, but much more importantly on account of their “contact with tropical humans, their servant organisms, and attendant parasites, micro and macro.” In West Africa, parasites and disease prohibited European domesticates from thriving. And in Asia, along with the plants and animals that had “existed in and around thousands of villages and cities for thousands of years there had evolved many species of germs, worms, insects, rusts, molds,…attuned to preying on humanity and its servant organisms.” While Europe succeeded in exploiting these regions through colonialism, permanent settlements were rarely established. In short, successful conquest occurred in those places with ecological similarities to western and northern Europe. “Europeans and their commensal and parasitic comrades were not good at adapting to truly alien lands and climates, but they were very good at constructing new versions of Europe out of suitable real estate,” Crosby states.

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