43 pages • 1 hour read
Alfred W. CrosbyEcological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary and Analysis: “Winds”
Detailed knowledge of worldwide wind patterns was the final piece of the puzzle that allowed Europeans to travel the world and conquer it at will. By the end of the 15th century, many European cultures had developed boats large and fast enough to allow intercontinental journeys and had weapons that would allow them to dominate Indigenous populations nearly anywhere. However, as Crosby states, “the explorer who puts to sea in the faith that there will always be a wind to carry him where he listeth will find that the wind will carry him where it listeth” (105). The conquest of the Azores, Madeiras, and Canaries helped in expanding European knowledge of wind patterns immensely, as it lead to the discovery of the trade winds and the westerlies, the two most important wind routes for crossing the Atlantic. Sailors found that the sail from Iberia to the Canaries was quick and easy; both winds and ocean currents helped push ships in exactly the right direction. To sail back the same route, in contrast, required endless tacking while constantly losing ground and exhausting the sailors, or hugging the coastline of Africa and risking crashing to shore in the event of a storm. Eventually they found that by heading northwest off the Canaries, they would be blown eastward back toward Europe. This was the beginning of the understanding of the greater Atlantic wind patterns; winds in that ocean blow in two huge circles, traveling clockwise in the north and counterclockwise in the south. The trade winds make up the bottom of the northern circle and the top of the southern, and both blow westward toward the Americas. Once the northeast trade winds reach the American coast, they circle back to the east, creating the westerlies. Between these gyres lies the doldrums, a strip reaching from the middle of Africa to the top of South America that lies between the major winds, creating a dangerous zone of unpredictable wind that could hopelessly trap wayward ships. Although Europeans did not understand the scientific reasons for winds existing as they do for many years, the discovery of the east to west trade winds and the west to east westerlies meant that along with their already reliable tools of navigation, they could steer toward areas of ocean where they could be confident that the wind would blow them in the desired direction.
Throughout the 15th century, Europeans like Christopher Columbus, Vasco Da Gama, and others expanded this basic understanding of major winds to create standard routes to and from the Americans as well as around the tip of Africa into the Indian Ocean, where the Europeans easily learned navigation due to the extensive nautical knowledge of the local people. By the 1600s, the notion of sailing across oceans, especially the Atlantic, became less the domain of well-funded nobles mounting complex exploratory journeys and more something that could be used to transport huge numbers of people, crops, technology, and diseases to new colonies around the world.
Although mastery of the winds was invariably a critical step in European colonialism, Crosby does not directly address why Europeans’ seafaring missions led to European settlements in all parts of the world while those of other cultures did not. The Polynesians are referenced in the discussion of New Zealand later in the text, but no reason is given why they did not achieve the same cultural success as the Europeans despite having seafaring ships earlier in their history. The Polynesians successfully settled a huge swath of the Pacific, albeit mostly on islands separated by miles of ocean. They certainly had the technology and resources to mount trans-oceanic journeys. Like the Europeans, Polynesians brought domestic and wild species to places they had never lived before, and their descendants still populate most of the Pacific. Several cultures in East Asia and the Middle East also had advanced seafaring technology at the beginning of European colonialism, and in fact many of the tools used by European sailors originated in those areas.
Chapter 6 Summary and Analysis: “Within Reach, Beyond Grasp”
In this chapter, Crosby lays out the difference between areas that experienced European colonization in general, and those that can be specifically defined as Neo-Europe. He believes that a narrow set of criteria are shared by every land that would become a Neo-Europe—they must be climactically favorable to people with European cultural backgrounds, and they must be geographically remote from the Old World. In these lands, colonization thrived for reasons explained throughout ecological imperialism.
Areas that did not become Neo-Europes avoided the fate for a number of reasons. In East Asia and the Middle East, the primary reason was technological and intellectual equality to the Europeans. Although many port cities in Asia had a strong European presence, these were “only spigots tapped into the flank of Asia to draw off some of its wealth” (133). The Ottoman Empire controlled the Middle East for centuries and practiced colonization of their own, conquering North Africa and the Balkans. The failure of the Crusades suggested that complete Europeanization of the Middle East was not worth the losses each attempt incurred.
Europeans also largely avoided settling in the tropics. They visited tropical regions in Africa and the Americas to plunder minerals and enslave locals but never established large colonies. Although certain areas like Costa Rica are exceptions to this rule, “[t]he rule (not the law) is that although Europeans may conquer the tropics, they do not Europeanize the tropics, not even countrysides with European temperatures” (134). The reasons for this vary depending on the specific tropical region, but according to Crosby almost all revolve around the Europeans’ lack of exposure to tropical pests and diseases. European humans, animals, and plants found life extremely difficult in the hot humid conditions; many died or failed to flourish, and colonizers had difficulty luring new settlers to these unappealing conditions. In areas where European life would have been easier, there were either existing large populations (such as in Asia), or the area was too rife with unknown diseases and dangerous wildlife (such as Africa, where colonization failed until powerful guns and anti-malarial medications were developed). The Europeans had somewhat more success in the tropical Americas, largely through the use of enslaved West Africans, who had more resistance to tropical diseases than Europeans, as troops. This seems to have worked for a while, but ultimately the influx of people from other tropical areas simply meant that even more diseases existed in the American tropics that could easily take down a European. To add to this, enough desirable land existed across the Americas that European settlements in the harsher areas never really took hold.
Queensland in Northern Australia is one of the few major exceptions to the rule that tropical land could not become a Neo-Europe. Crosby suggests that the primary reason for this was the very sparse indigenous population who lived in dispersed groups and had only domesticated one animal, the dingo. This meant that few diseases were able to multiply to the extent that they were in more populated areas. Malaria, the disease that caused particular devastation in many tropical areas, did not exist in Australia prior to being brought by Europeans, and never took hold there. As they did in many areas, the Europeans brought enslaved people to Queensland as laborers, but most of them were from the Pacific Islands (a relatively healthy location) rather than tropical Africa. To add to this, Queensland adopted an early rule of only accepting white immigrants, a law that, while overtly racist, also reduced the number of tropical diseases that could find their way to the continent.
Crosby outlines several convincing reasons Europeans selected certain areas over others, though some of the data used to uphold the book’s claims are inconsistent. For example, the text states that half of English settlers in the first Plymouth colony died in the first winter, and 50/100 British residents of the West Indies died around the same period. The New England settlers died primarily of malnutrition and exposure while the Caribbean occupants died largely due to disease. The book explains that disease avoidance was a primary factor in choosing a northern latitude for the Plymouth settlement but does not explain why other factors with equally high death rates were not equally important. Crosby also states that the racially mixed societies of the tropical Americas was due to the importation of enslaved Africans to work in place of the Indigenous people who died in huge numbers after being enslaved themselves. Part of the reasoning for this was that Africans from the tropics would be less vulnerable to tropical disease than Europeans, who otherwise may have been sent to American penal colonies like those in Australia. However, Africans from the tropics died at only a slightly lower rate than Europeans. Although this paints a picture of colonizers’ lack of scientific knowledge, it does not fully explain how the pockets of “Neo-Africa” that exist in the Americas have sustained with a primarily Black and mixed-race population to this day despite long years of rule by Europeans.
