Mosquito Empires
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| Author | : J. R. McNeill |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 391 |
| Release | : 2010-01-11 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1139484508 |
This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean - the landscapes lying between Surinam and the Chesapeake - in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Ecological changes made these landscapes especially suitable for the vector mosquitoes of yellow fever and malaria, and these diseases wrought systematic havoc among armies and would-be settlers. Because yellow fever confers immunity on survivors of the disease, and because malaria confers resistance, these diseases played partisan roles in the struggles for empire and revolution, attacking some populations more severely than others. In particular, yellow fever and malaria attacked newcomers to the region, which helped keep the Spanish Empire Spanish in the face of predatory rivals in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century, these diseases helped revolutions to succeed by decimating forces sent out from Europe to prevent them.
| Author | : Timothy C. Winegard |
| Publisher | : Penguin |
| Total Pages | : 639 |
| Release | : 2019-08-06 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1524743437 |
**The instant New York Times bestseller.** *An international bestseller.* Finalist for the Lane Anderson Award Finalist for the RBC Taylor Award “Hugely impressive, a major work.”—NPR A pioneering and groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction that offers a dramatic new perspective on the history of humankind, showing how through millennia, the mosquito has been the single most powerful force in determining humanity’s fate Why was gin and tonic the cocktail of choice for British colonists in India and Africa? What does Starbucks have to thank for its global domination? What has protected the lives of popes for millennia? Why did Scotland surrender its sovereignty to England? What was George Washington's secret weapon during the American Revolution? The answer to all these questions, and many more, is the mosquito. Across our planet since the dawn of humankind, this nefarious pest, roughly the size and weight of a grape seed, has been at the frontlines of history as the grim reaper, the harvester of human populations, and the ultimate agent of historical change. As the mosquito transformed the landscapes of civilization, humans were unwittingly required to respond to its piercing impact and universal projection of power. The mosquito has determined the fates of empires and nations, razed and crippled economies, and decided the outcome of pivotal wars, killing nearly half of humanity along the way. She (only females bite) has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief existence. As the greatest purveyor of extermination we have ever known, she has played a greater role in shaping our human story than any other living thing with which we share our global village. Imagine for a moment a world without deadly mosquitoes, or any mosquitoes, for that matter? Our history and the world we know, or think we know, would be completely unrecognizable. Driven by surprising insights and fast-paced storytelling, The Mosquito is the extraordinary untold story of the mosquito’s reign through human history and her indelible impact on our modern world order.
| Author | : J. R. McNeill |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 391 |
| Release | : 2010-01-11 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0521452864 |
| Author | : Marcus Hall |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 229 |
| Release | : 2021-09-02 |
| Genre | : Medical |
| ISBN | : 1000435105 |
This edited volume brings together natural scientists, social scientists and humanists to assess if (or how) we may begin to coexist harmoniously with the mosquito. The mosquito is humanity’s deadliest animal, killing over a million people each year by transmitting malaria, yellow fever, Zika and several other diseases. Yet of the 3,500 species of mosquito on Earth, only a few dozen of them are really dangerous—so that the question arises as to whether humans and their mosquito foe can learn to live peacefully with one another. Chapters assess polarizing arguments for conserving and preserving mosquitoes, as well as for controlling and killing them, elaborating on possible consequences of both strategies. This book provides informed answers to the dual question: could we eliminate mosquitoes, and should we? Offering insights spanning the technical to the philosophical, this is the “go to” book for exploring humanity’s many relationships with the mosquito—which becomes a journey to finding better ways to inhabit the natural world. Mosquitopia will be of interest to anyone wanting to explore dependencies between human health and natural systems, while offering novel perspectives to health planners, medical experts, environmentalists and animal rights advocates.
| Author | : J. H. Elliott |
| Publisher | : Yale University Press |
| Total Pages | : 611 |
| Release | : 2006-01-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0300133553 |
This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus's arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on a grand scale, contrasting the worlds built by Britain and by Spain on the ruins of the civilizations they encountered and destroyed in North and South America. Elliott identifies and explains both the similarities and differences in the two empires' processes of colonization, the character of their colonial societies, their distinctive styles of imperial government, and the independence movements mounted against them. Based on wide reading in the history of the two great Atlantic civilizations, the book sets the Spanish and British colonial empires in the context of their own times and offers us insights into aspects of this dual history that still influence the Americas.
| Author | : John Soluri |
| Publisher | : University of Texas Press |
| Total Pages | : 338 |
| Release | : 2009-03-06 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0292777876 |
Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States. Beginning in the 1870s when bananas first appeared in the U.S. marketplace, Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers' lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalization and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity.
| Author | : Marc J. O'Reilly |
| Publisher | : Lexington Books |
| Total Pages | : 376 |
| Release | : 2008 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9780739105900 |
Unexceptional examines U.S. policy vis-à-vis the Persian Gulf since the Second World War. It asserts that the American experience in this strategic yet volatile region known for its plentiful oil and gas can be best understood as an unexceptional imperial endeavor similar in kind to that of the British and Ottoman empires of previous eras.
| Author | : Carrie Gibson |
| Publisher | : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic |
| Total Pages | : 650 |
| Release | : 2014-11-11 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0802192351 |
A “wide-ranging, vivid” narrative history of one of the most coveted and complex regions of the world: the Caribbean (The Observer). Ever since Christopher Columbus stepped off the Santa Maria and announced that he had arrived in the Orient, the Caribbean has been a stage for projected fantasies and competition between world powers. In Empire’s Crossroads, British American historian Carrie Gibson offers a panoramic view of the region from the northern rim of South America up to Cuba and its rich, important history. After that fateful landing in 1492, the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, and even the Swedes, Scots, and Germans sought their fortunes in the islands for the next two centuries. These fraught years gave way to a booming age of sugar, horrendous slavery, and extravagant wealth, as well as the Haitian Revolution and the long struggles for independence that ushered in the modern era. Gibson tells not only of imperial expansion—European and American—but also of life as it is lived in the islands, from before Columbus through the tumultuous twentieth century. Told “in fluid, colorful prose peppered with telling anecdotes,” Empire’s Crossroads provides an essential account of five centuries of history (Foreign Affairs). “Judicious, readable and extremely well-informed . . . Too many people know the Caribbean only as a tourist destination; [Gibson] takes us, instead, into its fascinating, complex and often tragic past. No vacation there will ever feel quite the same again.” —Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold’s Ghost
| Author | : Thomas Denk |
| Publisher | : Springer Science & Business Media |
| Total Pages | : 863 |
| Release | : 2011-03-28 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 9400703724 |
Being the only place in the northern North Atlantic yielding late Cainozoic terrestrial sediments rich in plant fossils, Iceland provides a unique archive for vegetation and climate development in this region. This book includes the complete plant fossil record from Iceland spanning the past 15 million years. Eleven sedimentary rock formations containing over 320 plant taxa are described. For each flora, palaeoecology and floristic affinities within the Northern Hemisphere are established. The exceptional fossil record allows a deeper understanding of the role of the “North Atlantic Land Bridge” for intercontinental plant migration and of the Gulf Stream-North Atlantic Current system for regional climatic evolution. ’Iceland sits as a “fossil trap” on one of the most interesting biogeographic exchange routes on the planet - the North Atlantic. The fossil floras of Iceland document both local vegetational response to global climate change, and more importantly, help to document the nature of biotic migration across the North Atlantic in the last 15 million years. In this state-of-the-art volume, the authors place sequential floras in their paleogeographic, paleoclimatic and geologic context, and extract a detailed history of biotic response to the dynamics of physical change.’ Bruce H. Tiffney, University of California, Santa Barbara ’This beautifully-illustrated monograph of the macro- and microfloras from the late Cenozoic of Iceland is a worthy successor to Oswald Heer’s “Flora fossilis arctica”. Its broad scope makes it a must for all scientists interested in climatic change and palaeobiogeography in the North Atlantic region. It will remain a classic for years to come.’ David K. Ferguson, University of Vienna
| Author | : John Darwin |
| Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing USA |
| Total Pages | : 594 |
| Release | : 2008-02-05 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1596913932 |
The author of The End of the British Empire traces the rise and fall of large-scale empires in the centuries after the death of the emperor Tamerlane in 1405, in an account that challenges conventional beliefs about the rise of the western world and contends that European ascendancy may be a transitory event.
