As anyone who has studied imperialism, something that has been around at least since the rise of city-states in large scale agricultural societies in the Near East and China, knows there have been and are several types of imperialism. There is, for instance economic imperialism, such as the imperialism associated with the Western run and dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund, both of which were the latest update of what has happened on a number occasions since the Congress of Vienna in which elite Europeans remade Europe and even the globe in their own image. The World Bank and the International Monetary fund, of course, "loan" monies to semi-peripheral and peripheral nations all the while expecting a little something in return, usually privatisation of their markets and access to their raw materials. There is political imperialism, an imperialism in which one state dominates another politically without colonising that other state, the situation we have today in which the great power US dominates Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom politically. There is cultural imperialism, an imperialism such as we have today in which Western media, such as Hollywood and, to a lesser extent, the UK, dominate the global communications marketplace. There is demographic imperialism, where one demographic group dominates another even if they are a minority as was the case in many of the Pacific Islands after the age of European colonisation or in the US, Canada, and Australia, where Anglo-Saxon Whites became dominant and still are, to some extent. Finally, there is geographic imperialism or colonialism, an imperialism in which one territorial political entity "conquers" or takes over another and colonises it, such as what happened in what we today call North America thanks to British, French, US, and Canadian manifest destiny or a type of imperialism in which the flora and fauna of one part of the world become dominant in another, as was the case in most of the European settler societies in the temperate areas around the globe.
Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press second edition 2004), while touching on other ideal types of imperialism, focuses on geographical imperialism, on the transfer not only of human animals but of other fauna and flora and germs, from, for example, old Europe to a host of Neo-Europes, including Argentina, Brasil, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, after the age of European imperialism, that age where Europe, or more accurately, Western and Northern European, states settled in and conquered, economically, politically, culturally, demographically and geographically, various parts of the globe.
Crosby notes that geography was central to the rise of greater Europe. Europeans, as he notes, were better at creating settler societies in areas that were climatically similar to their own, such as, for example, much of the United States, the areas that were settled on what became the border between the US and Canada, and the coastal areas of what became Australia. The Europeans were not, as Crosby points out, as successful in making areas that were geographically different from Western and Northern Europe, such as the Canadian shield and the Australian outback, areas that were cold, arid, or dry. Reservoirs built by the US government, of course, allowed for extensive settlement and development in the dry and mountainous parts of what we today call American West though whether these settlements will survive as they are now is an open question thanks to periods of drought--another one of which large parts of the American West are experiencing at the moment. Needless to say, the issue of drought and the settlement of the American West takes us back to the caveats raised by that now famous American government geologist and explorer of the US West John Wesley Powell in the nineteenth century.
While Crosby doesn't ignore colonisation in Ecological Imperialism it isn't territorial conquest that Crosby's book focuses on. Rather, he explores how the first settlers in what would become what he calls the neo-Europes, prepared the way, thanks to the transformations of their new environments, for the far greater ecological transformations (for example, "weeds", cows, pigs, goats, horses, bees, insects, rats, squirrels) of the Europeans after the fifteenth century. Crosby's book also focuses on germs, pathogens, and diseases, such as smallpox, something that both the Australian geographer and historian A. Greenfell Price had explored in his 1963 book The Western Invasion of the Pacific and other of his more geographically focused monographs on the Pacific, and something that Canadian born University of Chicago historian William McNeil had explored in his 1963 book The Rise of the West and in his 1976 book Plagues and People. Germs, pathogens, and diseases, Crosby reminds us, decimated indigenous populations in what became Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, Some scholars estimate, for instance, that some 90% of the Wampanoag of what is today Massachusetts and Rhode Island, were killed by European diseases and particularly smallpox in the seventeenth century. Probably 50% of New Zealand's Maori died thanks to the germs the Pakeha brought with them. As Crosby notes, it is no wonder, given this, that so many Europeans proclaimed the lands they "discovered" empty, something that was, of course, an ideological rationalisation, along with European notions that indigenes were not using the land as god or nature intended, for European conquest, genocide, and colonisation.
Crosby's book is a must read for anyone interested in imperialism in general, in European imperialism in particular, and even more specifically in ecological imperialism, in European settler societies, in human biology or biological anthropology, and in historical botany. It is an excellent synthesis and update of earlier works on ecological imperialism. While Crosby's book did not garner the kind of celebrity Jared Diamond's 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel did, it covers much of the same terrain in very readable prose. Highly recommended.
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