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

Author Alfred Crosby sets out to provide an ecological explanation for why “European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place” (1). He paints a picture of the racial and cultural makeup of the world overall: Most cultural and racial groups are concentrated in one or two zones of the world while the descendants of Europeans have settled in almost every part of the world that is inhabitable by humans. Some of these areas have become so dominantly white they are referred to in the text as Neo-Europes. In the modern era, the Neo-Europes have come to dominate human culture and economics worldwide. These countries produce a huge surplus of food: Around 30% of the total food exported abroad originated in one of the major Neo-Europes in 1982. Ecological Imperialism describes this as dominating the food supply, stating, “[The Neo-Europes] compose the majority of those very few nations on this earth that consistently, decade after decade, export very large quantities of food” (1). The text relies on monetary food value to measure this dominance, though the differences in food costs when exported from the primarily economically advantaged Neo-Europes to that from other, less affluent countries (or areas with vastly different political systems, like the highly productive farmland of the USSR) is not considered.