Ecological imperialism. The biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900

its methodology (no grappling here with Foucault or the social construction ofdisease) and none the worse for that. Its chronological span is complete (chapter I is entitled 'Les Buveurs Antiques'), and though the focus becomes increasingly medical as we approach the present, the attitudes of preachers, moralists, and governments are not neglected. For the Anglo-Saxon reader, it is particularly valuable to be reminded that there have been temperance movements elsewhere. In chapter 8, Sournia offers a highly illuminating account of how far it was working-men's organizations and socialist guilds which promoted temperance in nineteenth-century France and central Europe: not social control but a self-control which would fortify political strength. Professor Sournia's account of medical change is somewhat thin on eighteenth-century developments (a rather derivative and sometimes inaccurate account ofthe "gin craze" followed by a short section on Thomas Trotter). The work of nineteenth-century doctors is much more fully represented. A lucid account is offered of Magnus Huss, which does not stint the importance of Swedish Lutheranism, and Sournia also writes well about the "psychiatrization" of drink problems within the development ofmid-nineteenth-century degenerationist thought. Here, one misses, however, adequate reference to the parallels between alcoholism and other contemporary addiction phenomena (e.g., the medical use and abuse of opium and other narcotics). The last chapters survey medical attempts worldwide to counter the present epidemic of alcoholism. Medical historians are currently paying increasing attention to the "diseases of civilization". The history of the emergence of the idea of addiction and of its medical treatment still remains, however, under-researched. Professor Sournia has made a workmanlike and readily usable contribution to that understanding. One hopes that an English translation will appear in the not too distant future. In his latest contribution to ecologically-based historical narrative, A. W. Crosby uses a broad range ofprimary and secondary historical and ecological sources to document the impact ofwhat he calls the "portmanteau biota" ofOld World crops, livestock, weeds, people, and pathogens on previously isolated biological communities in the Pacific, the Americas, and the Atlantic islands. After a brief survey of the failure of the Norse and the Crusaders in the early Middle Ages to establish a permanent foothold in areas either too remote or densely populated, the author suggests that the ecological consequences of European contact and settlement on the eastern Atlantic islands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries AD display a pattern which would be repeated in later …