Mosquito Empires

J. R. McNeill is University Professor in the History Department and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His books include The Mountains of the Mediterranean World (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (2000), co-winner of the World History Association book prize and the Forest History Society book prize and runner-up for the BP Natural World book prize; and most recently The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History (2003), co-authored with his father, William H. McNeill. He has also published more than 40 scholarly articles in professional and scientific journals.

'For most of the last five centuries, the Atlantic empires - European and North American - wrested, fought wars, and killed thousands of citizens and slaves for possession of the wealth swaying in the fields of the Caribbean islands and coastlines. The dominant factors in the long conflict, no matter what the protagonists claimed, were not political or religious or even economic but septic, that is, the microbes of yellow fever and malaria. J. R. McNeill's book is by far the clearest, best informed, and scientifically accurate of the accounts available on this sugary conflict.' Alfred W. Crosby, University of Texas, Austin

• Part I. Setting the Scene: 1. The argument: mosquito determinism and its limits; 2. Atlantic empires and Caribbean ecology; 3. Deadly fevers, deadly doctors; Part II. Imperial Mosquitoes: 4. From Recife to Kourou: yellow fever takes hold, 1620–1764; 5. Cartagena and Havana: yellow fever rampant; Part III. Revolutionary Mosquitoes: 6. Lord Cornwallis vs anopheles quadrimaculatus, 1780–1; 7. Revolutionary fevers: Haiti, New Granada, and Cuba, 1790–1898; 8. Epilogue: vector and virus vanquished.