Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900

Ecological Imperialism opens 200 million years ago, long before humans or their hominid relatives began to populate the planet. At this time, nearly all the land on Earth was one giant supercontinent called Pangaea. Pangaea had various zones in which different climatic conditions existed, and therefore areas where different life forms were more or less common, but the lack of oceanic divisions between continents meant that all plant and animal life forms were effectively competing for resources against all other species. Until the continents began to separate, all land-dwelling life on Earth evolved alongside each other. Around 180 million years ago, Pangaea began to split along tectonic fault lines (described in the text as “continental drift,” a somewhat archaic term in light of advances in tectonic research since the time of writing). Ocean water flowed into the newly created lowlands and created distinct continents separated by bodies of water, uncrossable by many land-dwelling species. As the Earth’s land divided into more and more separate continents, evolution began to produce different species on each land mass. After the breakup of Pangaea, it became possible for multiple species to occupy the same biological niche in similar ecosystems on different continents.

One of these newly formed supercontinents contained what would become Eurasia, Africa, and North America. North America was the first to separate from this mass; it split off along the Mid-Atlantic rift. This means that while North America is more biologically similar to Eurasia than, for example, Australia, there were several key developments that happened only in the Eurasian and African land mass. The most important of these to the focus of ecological imperialism is the evolution of Old World primates. Highly intelligent great apes most likely first evolved in the Great Rift Valley of Africa, but their unique ability to innovate allowed them to occupy a vast number of ecosystems. The climate in the Fertile Crescent (what is now the Middle East) was particularly suitable for ancient humans. The temperate conditions meant that food was plentiful, and human populations expanded rapidly. This was where agriculture first began to exist, and humanity first entered the Neolithic Age. The humans’ newfound ability to take control of their food production aided them in moving out of the crowed Fertile Crescent and establishing settlements in other areas. By 40,000 years ago, humans occupied almost every part of Africa and Eurasia, including strikingly hostile environments like Northern Siberia.

After their original exit from Africa, humans’ first cross-continental journey came around the same time modern man first evolved. At that end of the Pleistocene, exposed land stretched from New Guinea to Australia, where humans first set foot about 40,000 years ago. Not long after (in geological terms), human groups in Siberia joined a host of other Old World organisms in crossing the Bering Strait on the exposed land bridge. There was a short window of time, a little more than 10,000 years ago, when the climate in Northern Siberia was warm enough to make the trip possible and the land was still exposed enough for humans to cross it mostly by foot. The exact timeline of human arrival in the Americas is still under heavy debate, and ecological imperialism does not focus strongly on when exactly it happened. What is known for certain is that around 10,000 years ago the majority of Earth’s ice caps melted, and seas rose where there were once vast lowlands all across the world. At this time, human populations in the Old World and New World were cut off from each other and evolved very different ways of life in increasingly unique ecosystems.

After the inundation of the land bridges, Crosby defines the next important step in human development as the Neolithic Revolution, which:

began when humans started to grind and polish rather than chip their stone tools into final form, and it ended as they learned to smelt metal in quantity and work it into tools that stayed sharp longer and were more durable than their stone equivalents.” (17) 

While this is a useful definition to track technological development throughout history and is used in this way in Ecological Imperialism, it does not mean that all Neolithic societies were culturally uniform or that any one way of life suited Neolithic people in varied environments.  Often, the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic to Bronze Age and beyond is characterized as a uniform measure of the level of technological sophistication of any given society. This definition ignores several key factors, such as the availability of various raw materials, the intentionality of humans in developing tools that are useful for their needs, and the influence of cultural exchange on the development of any particular technology.

In Ecological Imperialism, this characterization is particularly evident in the discussion about the advent of agriculture. Agriculture was unquestionably important in making the world what it is today. As the text argues in later chapters, the number and variety of domesticated animals and plants developed by Europeans was a huge asset when they set out to conquer other places. However, this book, like many texts, treats agriculture as an unquestionable advancement in human society, and Eurasia as the clear forerunner of agricultural development. This view is problematic for a number of reasons. Modern archaeological methods have revealed that in many areas populations were healthier and likely more egalitarian in the pre-agricultural period. Although small scale agriculture can ensure a stockpile of food to get humans through sparse seasons, it also requires a large labor force working constantly to ensure the cultivation will work, and it has a high risk of complete failure. In the view of many contemporary archaeologists, agriculture was not a revolutionary step forward in human history but a necessary way to prevent increasingly large, complex societies from starvation. Crosby touches on this possibility, citing the decline of large wild game animals due to overhunting and the corresponding increase in the value of gathering (and then cultivating) over that of hunting. Despite this, the text ultimately argues that the lagging development of agriculture in the New World created a level of disadvantage that ultimately caused a lag in cultural development as a whole. By the time of the European Middle Ages, the book concludes, many remote societies, even Eurasian societies like those in Siberia, were still “frozen at the first stage of the Neolithic” (37).

The first known evidence of large-scale human travel across significant bodies of water can be found in the Viking Age cultures of Late Iron Age/Early Medieval Scandinavia. The coast of Scandinavia was a hub for innovation in sea travel for generations prior to the Viking Age; the geography of the Norwegian and Danish coast meant that finding ways to traverse over water was often more efficient than traveling across the harsh terrain by foot. Norse travelers began exploring nearby coastlines, such as Great Britain, in the 8th century AD and were able to cross the Atlantic Ocean before the turn of the first millennium. They established a successful colony in Iceland, a task aided by their familiarity with fishing and farming in harsh conditions. Iceland had no Indigenous human population; the only humans there prior to Norse settlers were a few Irish monks. Historically and to this day, the island has very few apex predators. but Greenland and North America, where Vikings made several attempts to settle, were a different story. Both areas had large Indigenous populations (and corresponding diseases unfamiliar to European bodies) as well as dangerous native wildlife. Although the climates of Greenland and North America were not necessarily harsher than that of Iceland, the Viking settlers were never able to establish longstanding colonies in either area. Crosby names several reasons for this, most related to the Norse population’s lack of advanced technology. They were able to cross the Atlantic, but the journey was difficult and not able to be done regularly. Unlike the Indigenous Americans and Greenlanders they had metal weapons, but those weapons and the Vikings’ means of using them were no less crude than the stone tools of the Indigenous populations. Until Europe began to develop faster ship technology and more deadly weapons, they were unable to establish themselves in unfamiliar lands.

Crosby lays the Viking Age and the Crusades side by side, citing them as the two primary examples of early failed intercontinental European expansion. Although the book explains in depth why these attempts and colony building were not particularly successful, it does not extensively explore why these exploits, particularly those of the Norse, may not fit the same definition of colonialism as the ocean-crossing Europeans of the 15th-19th centuries. Norse Vikings came from a homeland with few resources compared to much of Europe, and the Nordic countries have a short growing season and a cold climate that could not sustain a large pre-industrial population like areas further south. In the Early Middle Ages, the Nordic countries, especially the fjords of Western Norway, were still very much the frontier of Europe, resistant to Christianization and too distant from other population bases to establish large scale overland trade routes. While the Viking raids on England have historically been viewed as pillaging for treasure, it is likely that many of these journeys were made simply to try to find enough resources to survive. The effect of civil war among the Nordic societies also cannot be ignored. The Viking Age happened simultaneously with a period of social upheaval in Scandinavia, which may have pushed many members of society to risk setting off for lands where they were safe from the forces of squabbling nobles. As longboat technology was already advanced from generations of local travel, many Norwegians and Danes set off for the British Isles, where they established a colony. As Norse power began to gain traction across Europe, Nordic explorers set off to the West, but never made a concerted effort to conquer anywhere they found. According to Crosby, the failure of Icelandic, Greenlandic, and North American Nordic settlements was primarily due to a changing climate which, along with the appetites of European livestock and the expanding Indigenous population, made surviving in the Atlantic almost impossible. The reality was likely much more complex.

A similar fate can be observed in the Middle East during the Crusades but for different reasons and on a much larger scale. Although Europeans tried for centuries to conquer the Middle East, they were never particularly successful. While the Norse were well underway with colonizing Northern Europe, the Latin Christian societies to the south set to expand their influence elsewhere. While Christianity had been expanding across Europe, Islam was increasingly the dominant religion in the Middle East. The Crusades, a series of European invasions of the Middle East starting around the turn of the first millennium AD, were widely popular and well equipped because many powerful Christians saw winning the battle as a testament to Christianity’s superiority over Islam. Despite the fervor, the Crusades failed after nearly 500 years of European forces fighting to hold portions of the Middle East. Crosby suggests the roots of this failure can be traced all the way back to the dawn of agriculture; the verdant conditions in the Fertile Crescent fostered a rapid expansion in population in the area. Early Middle Easterners began to domesticate and intentionally cultivate a wide variety of plants and animals, which allowed fixed settlements to develop and expand there before anywhere else in the world. Middle Eastern populations were among the first to develop complex social structures, and by the time of the Crusades the area was full of large cities with longstanding traditions and deep-seated social hierarchies. Perhaps most importantly, by the time of the Crusades Islam had been the dominant religion in the Middle East for hundreds of years, supplanting older regional religious traditions to about the same degree as Christianity had in Europe. These factors allowed the Muslim world to form a unified front against Christian invaders, and despite many attempts to conquer the Middle East the Crusaders were never able to replace Indigenous Middle Eastern culture with that of Christian Europe to any significant degree. Although colonies like Palestine were held by Europeans for hundreds of years, and the Middle East to this day is greatly affected by European influence, the area was never Europeanized to any great degree.