’Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.’ So wrote Charles Darwin in 1836. Though there has been considerable discussion concerning their precise demographic impact, reflected in the articles here, there is no doubt that the arrival of new diseases with the Europeans (such as typhus and smallpox) had a catastrophic effect on the indigenous population of the Americas, and later of the Pacific. In the Americas, malaria and yellow fever also came with the slaves from Africa, themselves imported to work the depopulated land. These diseases placed Europeans at risk too, and with some resistance to both disease pools, Africans could have a better chance of survival. Also covered here is the controversy over the origins of syphilis, while the final essays look at agricultural consequences of the European expansion, in terms of nutrition both in North America and in Europe.

Theories of Empire, 1450-1800 draws upon published and unpublished work by leading scholars in the history of European expansion and the history of political thought. It covers the whole span of imperial theories from ancient Rome to the American founding, and includes a series of essays which address the theoretical underpinnings of the Spanish, Portuguese, French, British and Dutch empires in both the Americas and in Asia. The volume is unprecedented in its attention to the wider intellectual contexts within which those empires were situated - particularly the discourses of universal monarchy, millenarianism, mercantalism, and federalism - and in its mapping of the shift from Roman conceptions of imperium to the modern idea of imperialism.

In The Sun King’s Atlantic, Jutta Wimmler reveals the many surprising ways in which the Atlantic world channeled cultural developments during the age of the Sun King. Although hardly visible for contemporaries at the time, Africa and America were omnipresent throughout early modern France: in the textile industry, pharmaceutics, medicine, scientific methods, religious discourse, and court theatre. The book moves beyond typical plantation crops and the slave trade to illustrate how a focus on Europe challenges us to rethink the place of Africa in the early modern world.

First published in 1997, this volume looks at the process of European expansion which brought into contact societies and cultures across the world which had been initially alien to one another. Conflict was one aspect of this interaction, but accommodation, mutual adaptation, and institutional and behavioural synthesis were also present though often biased in favour of European norms. The intent of this book is to avoid treating ’colonization’, ’dominance’ and exploitation’ as the only focuses of attention. The second volume focuses on the Americas, and uses the topics of religion, class, gender, and race as its points of entry.

For the first time, an accomplished scholar offers a painstakingly researched examination of the United States' involvement in deliberate disease spreading among native peoples in the military conquest of the West. The speculation that the United States did infect Indian populations has long been a source of both outrage and skepticism. Now there is an exhaustively researched exploration of an issue that continues to haunt U.S.-Native American relations. Barbara Alice Mann's The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion offers riveting accounts of four specific incidents: The 1763 smallpox epidemic among native peoples in Ohio during the French and Indian War; the cholera epidemic during the 1832 Choctaw removal; the 1837 outbreak of smallpox among the high plains peoples; and the alleged 1847 poisonings of the Cayuses in Oregon. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Mann's work is the first to give one of the most controversial questions in U.S. history the rigorous scrutiny it requires.

The surprising true story of how the course of human history was redirected, time and again, by the pesky mosquito.