Ecological Imperialism

What Hacker News says

1. benbreenMar 2018
   I'm an historian of the colonial Americas. I agree with the comment below about 1491 being a great guide to this question. The very short answer is that there was an active effort throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to establish a myth of an untouched wilderness that settlers "expanded into" rather than confronting the reality of conquest.

   The longer answer involves the above, plus a lot of population demography and source analysis regarding the effects of "virgin soil" epidemics. Crosby's Ecological Imperialism is an excellent guide to that stuff. Even the very earliest European accounts of populations in the interior, like the expedition of de Soto, [1] are describing the aftermath of massive depopulation, since many diseases were spread by an advance guard of European domesticated animals before any Europeans actually showed up on the scene (or at least, any literate ones did).

   [1] https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2004/septemberoctober/feature...

   Show morethread
2. benbreenDec 2015
   I actually got into history through visual sources and maps, like Colin McEvedy's "Penguin Atlas of Medieval History." But the history books that I remember really changing my life include Simon Schama's "The Embarrassment of Riches" (a fantastic history of the rise and fall of the Dutch empire), Alfred Crosby's "Ecological Imperialism" (similar to 1491, but more wide-ranging), and Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism series (the best history books of the 20th century, in my view).

   I also remember loving John Brewer's "The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the 18th Century" and Mario Biagioli's "Galileo Courtier." Also "Mad Blood Stirring" by Edward Muir, which tackles the question of why 16th century Italian street life was so incredibly violent.

   Edit: seems apropos to mention that a couple friends of mine are about to launch a site for historians to curate lists of their favorite books on key topics, called Backlist: http://backlist.cc

   Show morethread
3. chxJan 2019
   It might be a good read but at best its pop science at worst complete bunk (close to the latter). There was a book about this topic written by an actual historian much earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_Imperialism_(book) and where Diamond tried to answer very broad questions and his broad answers break down in detail, Crosby makes similar points but approaches as a historian, limits his arguments and actually practices proper scholarship.
   Show morethread
4. benbreenOct 2014
   Agreed, Diamond's most salient points are 1) the latitudinal axis of Eurasia compared to the longitudinal one of the Americas and 2) the role of domesticated animals as disease vectors. The stuff about pre-Columbians not paying attention to quarantine is quite frankly rubbish (both because Europeans had no modern notions of quarantine either, and because it's impossible to make a blanket statement about how two continents-worth of civilizations conceptualized disease), as is the stuff about lack of urbanization (at least in the context of present-day Mexico and Peru, which indeed did have urbanization on a scale to rival Europe).

   A personal pet peeve of mine is that Alfred Crosby wrote about this stuff in the 1970s (The Columbian Exchange) and the 1980s (Ecological Imperialism) but Diamond gets all the credit for it because he successfully repackaged it for more popular audiences, without adding much.

   Show morethread