This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries.

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.

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.