Alfred W. Crosby – “Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900-1900”, Cambridge University Press, 1986 hardcover edition (fair use)

(7) COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE – ECOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM

The Columbian exchange – the massive and widespread transfer of plants, animals, human populations, and communicable diseases between the Old World and the New World from Columbus onwards – might well have happened simply from trade rather than imperialism. Well, perhaps except for the human populations.

However, it did happen from imperialism and is distinctive enough for its own type of imperialism as ecological imperialism. Indeed, the historian who coined the term Columbian exchange in a book of that title – American historian Alfred Crosby – also coined the term ecological imperialism in the title of a sequel book.

Of course, the focus of Crosby’s ecological imperialism is on the European side of the equation – that is, Europe’s exports of biological species or population rather than those it imported from elsewhere, where the latter largely consisted of cultivated plants (with superstars such as potatoes and tomatoes) and largely beneficial.

“Crosby introduced ecological imperialism as an explanatory concept that points out the contribution of European biological species such as animals, plants and pathogens in the success of European colonists” – foreshadowing arguments much to the same effect by Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel.

Ecological imperialism may not have had the same deliberate nature of other aspects of imperialism – and even where it was deliberate, often may not have had the same awareness or intention of consequences, the most destructive of which can be summarized in one word, extinction.

That is, extinction of human populations through disease, often overlapping with gen0cide, but also extinction of animal (or plant) species, through such things as competition with or predation by invasive species but also something that might be added as another aspect of ecological imperialism – human over-hunting or habitat destruction.

The same destructive consequences recurred with European ecological imperialism in Australasia and Oceania.