Of mosquitoes and men: A conversation with J.R. McNeill

Abstract

In April of 2011, John McNeill accepted my invitation to speak at the University of British Columbia as part of the history department's year-long thematic series entitled “Disasters and Diasporas: Entangled Histories of Empire and Environment.” No one better, I thought, to close out a year of reflections on this topic than Professor McNeill, whose recent book Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge, 2010) had just been anointed with the American Historical Association's prestigious Albert J. Beveridge Award (it has since then also garnered the 2011 PROSE Award in the European and World History category and heaps of praise in academic journals across an array of fields). A native of Chicago and graduate of Swarthmore College (BA) and Duke University (MA and PhD), McNeill currently holds the post of University Professor in the School of Foreign Service and member of the History Department at Georgetown University, where he has taught since 1985, and where he previously held the Cinco Hermanos Chair in Environmental and International Affairs. But it is not his numerous titles and academic accolades that will be most familiar to readers of Atlantic Studies. Rather, it is his wide-ranging and paradigm-breaking scholarship. From the Mediterranean to the Pacific worlds, and spanning the Atlantic and Caribbean waters in between, McNeill has written and edited a number of challenging and ambitious books, each of which has tenaciously sought to expand the conceptual and geographic boundaries by which scholars have analyzed imperial engagements in both the early modern and modern periods. His first book, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700–1763 (North Carolina, 1985), was a sustained comparison between two colonial seaports that played strikingly similar roles for the empires that sought to protect them, France and Spain, respectively. He went on to write about that most iconic of ecological landscapes, the Mediterranean, choosing to focus on the mountainous regions as “marginal environments” that revealed important human strategies in response to the particular challenges of living in such fragile ecosystems. But his latest scholarly endeavor, on the important role the mosquito has played in shaping imperial strategy and military engagements in the Caribbean from the early-seventeenth through the early-twentieth centuries, took a new tack by focusing not on cities or landscapes but rather on a single, humble, yet utterly potent insect: the Aedes aegypti. To get a sense of how Atlantic studies as a field and Atlantic history as a discipline may have shaped some of Professor McNeill's concerns in his most recent research project, we sat down to discuss the broad arc of what has already been an extraordinarily ambitious career, and which shows little sign of abating anytime soon.