Alfred W. Crosby

Alfred W. Crosby was born in Boston in 1931 and served in the United States Army before taking degrees at Harvard and Boston University and beginning an academic career in history.

He is the historian who reframed 1492 as a biological event, and it is difficult now to remember how unusual that was. Before his work, contact between the Old World and the New was written as a story about people: explorers, conquistadors, kings, treaties, and battles. Crosby made the organisms the actors.

The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 was published in 1972 by a small press after considerable difficulty finding a publisher, because nobody could categorise a book that was neither conventional history nor biology. Its title became the standard name for the phenomenon it described, which is a rare thing for any work of scholarship.

The argument is that connecting two ecosystems separated for millennia produced consequences dwarfing anything the participants intended. Diseases moved west and killed on a scale that makes the military history close to a footnote. Crops and animals moved both ways, and European, African, and Asian populations rose substantially on American calories, particularly the potato and maize.

He extended the argument in Ecological Imperialism in 1986, which examines how European plants, animals, and pathogens made possible the settlement of temperate zones worldwide. Later books include America's Forgotten Pandemic, on the 1918 influenza, and Throwing Fire, on the human history of projectiles.

He taught at the University of Texas at Austin for many years and is regarded as a founder of environmental history as a discipline. He died in 2018 at eighty-seven. Jared Diamond credits him directly.