Mosquito Empires, spanning nearly three centuries and the histories of many peoples, nations, and empires in the American tropical world, places considerable responsibility upon mosquitoes for the course of events in this region.
Using New Zealand as a case study, Beattie demonstrates the strength of settler beliefs in the connections between existing environments, environmental transformation, and their own health.
The orchard is suggestive of the ways in which commercial apple growing was represented as an idealised lifestyle linking rural economy and nature…
The present investigation examines the resonance of such catastrophes in the correspondence network of the universal scholar Albrecht von Haller (1708–77).
By re-visiting the sources for the 1348 earthquake following the studies of Borst (1981) and Hammerl (1992) and looking at aspects of its perception, management and explanation, this article calls into question the supposed ‘medieval’ equation of natural disaster and divine punishment.
Studying the contents of each work shows which authors were merely copying the Greek theory of humours and miasma, and which made genuine contributions to the field.
After yellow fever was firmly ensconced via an ecological reconfiguration connected to sugar (c. 1640–90) it underpinned a military and political status quo, keeping Spanish America Spanish. After 1780, and particularly in the Haitian revolution, yellow fever undermined that status quo by assisting independence movements in the American tropics.
A frontier environmental history of Cossack settlers in the North Caucasus reveals some of the weaknesses of the Russian imperial mission.
