John McNeill. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1640-1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
This book shows how ecological changes made the plantation zone of the Americas, from Surinam to Virginia, more suitable habitat for the vector mosquitoes that carry yellow fever and malaria, and how those diseases affected the outcome of imperial rivalries and revolutionary wars. The cases most squarely dealt with include the British assaults of Cartagena (1741) and Havana (1762), and the revolutionary wars in the Carolinas and Virginia (1780-81), Haiti (1791-1804), Venezuela (1808-23) and the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98). The books ends with the successful control of yellow fever by the US Army in Cuba and Panama.
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