J.R. McNeill - Böcker

Within the chronological framework of Implantation, Maturation and Transition, this book provides the history of European expansion in the Americas from the age of Columbus through the abolition of slavery. Suggesting a shift in the traditional units of analysis away from nationally defined boundaries, this volume considers all of the Americas - and Africa - to encourage students to see the larger interimperial issues which governed behaviour in both the new world and the old. It also provides students with a mechanism for viewing interimperial rivalries from the largest possible perspective, by focusing, not only on commercial and demographic history and military and economic interaction between metropolitan regions and their colonies, but on the interdependence of European, African, and Amerindian peoples and culture.

Within the chronological framework of Implantation, Maturation and Transition, this book provides the history of European expansion in the Americas from the age of Columbus through the abolition of slavery. Suggesting a shift in the traditional units of analysis away from nationally defined boundaries, this volume considers all of the Americas - and Africa - to encourage students to see the larger interimperial issues which governed behaviour in both the new world and the old. It also provides students with a mechanism for viewing interimperial rivalries from the largest possible perspective, by focusing, not only on commercial and demographic history and military and economic interaction between metropolitan regions and their colonies, but on the interdependence of European, African, and Amerindian peoples and culture.

This volume brings together a set of key articles from the last 30 years pertaining to the environmental history of the Pacific basin. It aims to treat the islands and waters of the Pacific as well as the lands around the Rim, from New Zealand to Japan, to California, to Chile, and is the first work of environmental history to take this inclusive view of the Pacific basin. The focus is mainly on recent centuries but, as environmental history requires, at times the work also takes the very long view of millennia. Several of the articles seek to bring a broad Pacific perspective to bear on their subjects, while others use Pacific-basin examples to try to establish broader theoretical points of interest to all who are drawn to the study of the interactions between nature and culture. The book includes a bibliography of Pacific-basin environmental history and an introduction that aims to sketch the contours and possible future directions of the field.