“Ecological Imperialism” Revisited

In his 1986 classic Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, the historian Alfred Crosby argued that the success of European impe­rialism in temperate areas of the world was largely a consequence of the successful expansion of a biological assemblage of species that accompanied the European colonizers, displacing indigenous peoples, plants, and animals.

A similar argument was elaborated 11 years later by the geographer Jared Diamond in his 1997 bestseller, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.^[1082] Like Crosby, Diamond traces the ultimate roots of European dominance in the modern world to biogeographical circumstances that were several millennia old. In attempting to explain the unequal global distribution of wealth and power, Diamond is careful to reject explanations that appeal to biological differences be­tween human populations, but his account nevertheless refers to natural factors that, in the final instance, render social-scientific approaches superfluous.

Neither Crosby nor Diamond offers any significant insights on the role of macro- sociological processes in the economic history of European expansion. In fact, it seems to be precisely by avoiding social scientific theorizing, in favor of simple and easily grasped biogeographical models, that they have gained such wide readerships. But social science does offer more credible accounts of societal expansions than pure biogeography. It is as futile for biogeographers to try to account for European expansion without considering, for instance, the cultural patterns of consump­tion that encourage specific constellations of long-distance trade as it would be for scholars of economic history to disregard physical factors such as transportation routes, energy sources, demography, or farmland. Such consumption patterns are idiosyncratic, historical accidents generated by more or less arbitrary semiotic sys­tems that assign specific social significance to particular trade goods such as certain kinds of food, textiles, porcelain, or metals.^[1084]

The economic and political expansion of Europe was indissolubly linked to its demand, for instance, for silk, spices, beaver pelts, and sugar, and to the Chinese demand for silver. Andre Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz persuasively argue that, rather than being predetermined by geographical circumstances sev­eral millennia ago, the rise of the West was an accident of late eighteenth-century history.^[1085] The European peninsula is a corner of the Old World that is closest to the New World, and its history of expansion began when the two hemispheres were economically connected in the sixteenth century. Europe would in time draw great advantages from its proximity to the vast silver resources and conven­iently depopulated lands of the Americas, but until the late eighteenth century remained inconspicuous in comparison to similar, densely populated areas of the Old World such as China and India.

The approach adopted in this chapter is that, although biological factors such as epidemics certainly were significant in facilitating Europe's economic expan­sion, sociocultural incentives were the primary driving force. This is not to say that European society or culture was uniquely predisposed for expansion,^[1086] but that global conjunctures in the centuries following 1492 shaped the specific trajectory of “Western” imperialism. Because this trajectory rests on modern conceptions of “ec­onomic development” and “technological progress,” the world to this day remains largely persuaded by the “West's” own narrative of its expansion. This means that to grasp the nature of imperialism in the modern world, it will be necessary to ap­proach contemporary accounts of global inequalities as a specific kind of ideology that is comparable to the cultural constructions of earlier empires. Moreover, to rec­ognize the ideological affinity of modern and pre-modern narratives of expansion, it will be necessary to unravel the various ways in which they justify the appropria­tion of material resources.

In order to understand imperialism as a recurrent socio-ecological phenom­enon in world history, we need to ask how the expansion of European and modern empires after 1492 differ from, as well as resemble, earlier imperial expansions. Furthermore, we need to explore these differences and similarities in terms of both ideologies and material flows. Through what narratives have empires justified their power, and in what ways have they appropriated the ecological resources of expanding territories? How, in other words, are cultural constructions and socio- ecological processes intertwined in world history?

As employed by Crosby, the concept of “ecological imperialism” has come to de­note the ecological consequences of imperialism, rather than its ecological rationale.