Paul Webb

Book Review: Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914McNeillJ.R., Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914.London and New York: Cambridge University Press [www.cambridge.org], 2010. xviii + 371 pp., maps, footnotes, bibliography, index. £55, US

In all, this volume will make a very fine, if expensive, souvenir for visitors to the preserved ships in Portsmouth. Its illustrations will delight many but it cannot be otherwise recommended. The author expects too much of his readers to suit a neophyte but delivers too little that is new, and burdens it with too much that is well known, for a specialist. His text is too disordered for a work of reference, even were another needed, yet the ponderous presentation hardly qualifies as readable.