ResoluteReader: March 2026

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Alfred W. Crosby - Ecological Imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900

In his infamous book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond tried to answer the question of why it was that European settlers arrived in the Americas, and not the other way around. His geographical determinism left many wanting in their quest for answers to these important historical questions. Before Diamond however Alfred W. Crosby asked similar questions, and while his book Ecological Imperialism is much better than Guns, Germs and Steel, it still is flawed in providing answers.

Crosby is, however, good at exploring what happened when Europeans arrived in the Americas. He begins with the brief arrival of the Norse and that will not detain us here. He then looks at various aspects of the arrival of Europeans after 1492. The impacts he discusses are primarily biological - disease, weeds, crops and animals. What was driven extinct? What survived well? What caused the decimation of the indigenous people?

The first thing that Crosby notes is the "striking paradox" that

The parts of the world that today in terms of population and culture are most like Europe are far away from Europe - indeed, they are across major oceans - and although they are similar in climate to Europe, they have indigenous floras and faunas different from those of Europe. The regions that today export more foodstuffs of European provenance - grains and meats - than any other lands on earth had no wheat, barly, rye, cattle, pigs, sheep, or goats whatsover five hundred years ago.

While Crosby is very detailed in what happened and always sympathetic to the human cost of colonialism, his answers to the questions such as "why did so few of the natives of the Neo-Europes survive?" are often rooted in quite crude biological determinism. Take this point:

A very specific advantage of the Norse over the Skraelings, Eskimo or Amerindian, was the ability of their adults to gain nourishment from fresh milk.

On the question of disease, and it's impact, he writes:

The Amerindians, Aborigines, and Australiasians were true isolates. They had been different from Europeans, Asians and Africans for thousands of years, and so, perhaps, were the capabilities of their immune systems.

Essentially what Crosby argues is that for a number of reasons European biology was able to supplement and destroy indigenous people, flora and fauna. But while this is true in a general sense, it fails to explain why it happened. Here, for instance is Crosby's key argument around the queston of pathogens:

We must examine the colonial histories of Old World pathogens, because they success provides the most spectacular example of the power of the biogepgraphical realities that underlay the sucess of European imperialists overseas. It wa stheir germs, not these imperialists themselves, for all their brutality and callousness, that were chiefly responsible for sweeping aside the indigenes and opening the Neo-Europes to demographic takeover.

But here Crosby plays a neat trick. He starts by saying we must examine colonial histories of pathogens. But then he doesn't and simply says that it is the biological realities that did the horrifc deads that saw enormous numbers of indigneous people in the Americas and Australisia die. What Crosby misses is that the diseases cannot be separated from colonialism. There are, for instance, multiple examples of settlers using disease to infect and kill (the infamous smallpox blankets for instance). But Crosby also misses something else - if the Europeans had not had smallpox and other diseases, they would have used the musket and gatling gun to murder their way to supremacy. In fact they did exactly this in many places were disease hadn't killed vast numbers. The Europeans did nothing to try and stop the spread of disease, and they did nothing to help its victims. They simply took the vacant land.

But there's a deeper problem. Crosby doesn't articulate any real understanding of what it was about (say) European culture that was different to that in the colonies. Part of this is that he doesn't really get how the economic dynamics of societies in Europe meant that they were much more productive - particular;ly after the 17th century. They could produce more to overwhelm indigenous people. Secondly the reshaping of the environment of the colonies was part of developing capitalism. The slave trade, the introduction of industrial agriculture and so on all strengthened Europe's ability to subsume the colonies.

Crosby does make some interesting points about the biological processes themselves. He argues, for instance, that European biology thrived in conditions of disturbance, and it was disturbance that was introduced by the Europeans. By this he means, "condition[s] of continual disruption: of plowed fields, rzed forests, overgrazed pastures, and burned prairies, of deserted villages and expanding cities, of humans, animals, plants and microlife that hav eevolved separately suddenly coming into intimate contact."

But really these conditions are not about "Europe". They are more about the particular mode of production of capitalism, and how capitalism treats the natural world and the humans it encounters. Those people were subsumed into the process of accumulation and either died, or were distorted by it. Crosby is not entirely ignorant of this. He notes, when discussing the horrific impact of sexual diseases on Native Americans, hat their economic world was turned upsidedown:

A physician serving the Sioux at Fort Peck toward the end of the last century assessed the tragedy of veneral infections among their women not simply as a result of immorality but as the result of a more general change: "They were chaste till the disappearance of the buffalo".

What Crosby doesn't say here is that this is partly because Native American women, to survive, had to turn to sex work. Another example of biology following economic change, not the other way around.

In conclusion there is a tendency here for Crosby to end up blaming the victim's circumstance/biology for their misfortune, rather than the nature of the settler states that arrived in the Americas, Australia or New Zealand. Crosby has a tendency to associate more advanced societies with those in Europe which means there is an inevitability to his analysis of what happens. Crosby doesn't in any way celebrate the destruction of indigenous societies or people. But his conclusions are inadequate to explain what happened and why, and while there is much of interest here, the book is flawed.

Maja Lunde - The History of Bees

Climate fiction is in the vogue these days. It usually depicts a horrific, post-apocalytic world where extinction and global warming have decimated humanity and destroyed society. The few survivors grub about in the ruins and try to live their lives. When Maja Lunde's The History of Bees was first published in 2015 the genre was less advanced, and to be fair, Lunde's take on it errs on the side of hope, rather than inevitable disaster.

Bees are a key, though not the only, part of the ecological system due to their role in pollination. Without bees, we are told, the world come close to starvation very quickly. In the last few decades the decline of bees, and the collapse of bee colonies, through the little understood "Colony Collapse" has become an issue of mainstream concern. Lunde puts it at the heart of her story which uses three different, and obliquely connected stories to tell a wider tale about how bees have been transformed by humans.

The earliest story is set in the 1850s with a scientist whose efforts to advance understanding of bees and improve their domestication are constantly undermined by his failure to remain at the forefront of scientific knowledge. Wracked by depression and self-doubt, William designs a new beehive, but is distraught to learn it isn't unique or the first. His design however becomes a family heirloom and his descendents become bee keepers in the United States. Interestingly William's depression overcomes his ability to innovate, but Lunde's development of his daughter, Charlotte, as the person who takes things forward and breaks free of England's stiffling atmosphere is one of the high points of the book. William, characteristically dismisses Charlotte's insights. Rather like one of his descendents George.

George is a bee farmer (I use the words deliberately) in the 2000s. He's farming colonies that can make honey, but more importantly because they are part of a wider and utterly irrational part of capitalist agriculture. I've written on this elsewhere, but the monoculture of industrial farming makes it impossible for bees to survive. So capitalism has made it profitable for bee farmers to move thousands of hives across country to artifically pollinate crops. You couldn't make up a better metaphor for the limitations of farming for profit. Unfortunately George is too pigheaded to see this. He also is too pigheaded to understand that his son is the only person who can truly innovate things, but doesn't want anything to do with the bees (or his father).

Finally we have Tao and her family. In China in a future where bees have disappeared she works in near slave conditions to artifically pollinate trees by hand. Its the most dystopian part of the story, and Tao dreams that her son will escape through education. His sudden illness and disappearance sets her on a journey that leads to the "hope" of the novel.

While bees, farming, and colony collapse are the central themes of The History of Bees, the substance of the book comes from the family relationships. Lunde is adept at portrayal of parents who don't understand their children, and whose obsessions blind them to wider issues of family and society. That said, Lunde is also shownig how our attempts to domesticate the undomesticable (is that a word?) drive ecosystems into crisis. The desire to manipulate for profit is what is dooming us - and along the way fathers will fail to understand their children just as they have always done. But the politics and the conclusions aren't developed enough, and the ending is too much of a liberal cop out (with a leader who "also has kids"). Relying on family won't save us. What will save us is the rejection - exemplified by George's son Tom - of capitalist farming and its profit motive.

Nonetheless I enjoyed this novel a lot, despite the appalling insensitivity and blinkered nature of George and William.

Sunday, March 08, 2026

Ivan Doig - Mountain Time

In my head I associate Ivan Doig closely with the old West, settlers and immigration. His autobiography This House of Sky is mostly set in his time as a boy and young man on a ranch near the Rockies in Montana. The period traverses the 20th century in many ways, finishing with Doig heading to a new life as a writer in Seattle, but is rooted in the characters and family of the late 19th and early 20th century and their experiences living, farming and loving in Montana's rural areas.

So it is strange to read a Doig novel that has laptops and email, and seems to focus more on the Seattle side of this life. While Mountain Time is part of the lose Two Medicine Country series, it shares only a few names with the early books in that series and a few characters with the later books. Indeed one of the realistic things about these books is how the past, while present for all the characters, matters less and less to them the further generations it is away. There is clearly a lot of Doig's life here. His main characters are centred on Seattle having made the break from Montana and rural life. Mitch, the main character is a talented environmental journalist, whose regular columns document the depletion of the natural world on the West and NW coast of the United States. Mitch's connection to Montana is his father, a grumpy old grifter back home, whose get rich projects never, well, get him rich.

Mitch's wife Lexa is the sister of Mariah McCaskill the central figure in Ride With Me, Mariah Montana. This allows Doig to tie up a few story lose ends from previous books in passing. But the main story centres on Mitch's return home to see a dying Dad and the weeks that follow his death.

Life most of Doig's novels there is little plot. Montana itself, the countryside, the mountains and the people are the real story. Here however the real story is an individuals relationship with their parents, and how that is challenged and transformed by death. It is inevitably, poignant and sad. But also a celebration of life and labour.