accompanies books about the environment. In 2010, he published Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914, where he argues that ecological changes brought by a transition to a sugar plantation economy increased the scope for mosquito-borne diseases like yellow fever and malaria, and that "differential resistance" between local and European populations shaped the arc of Caribbean history. Specifically, he says that it helps explain how Spain was able to protect its Caribbean colonies from its European rivals for so long and also why imperial Spain, France, and Britain ultimately lost their mainland empires in revolutionary wars in the Americas late 18th and early 19th centuries. The book won the Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association, a PROSE award from the Association of American Publishers, and was listed by the Wall Street Journal among the best books in early American history. In 2016 McNeill and co-author Peter Engelke published The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945. The "Great Acceleration" of the title refers to the initial decades of the Anthropocene, which is a proposed era of greater human interference in the Earth's ecology. McNeill has also written a world history textbook, The Webs of Humankind (2020). He is working on an environmental history of the Industrial Revolution. Awards and honors 2001: World History Association Book Prize, Something New Under The Sun 2001: Forest Society Book Prize, Something New Under The Sun 2010: Toynbee Prize, for "academic and public contributions to humanity" 2010: AHA Beveridge Award, Mosquito Empires 2010: Association of American Publishers PROSE award for European & World History, Mosquito Empires 2014 World History Association, Pioneer in World History Award 2017: elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2018: Dr A.H. Heineken Prize, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences 2019 American Society for Environmental History, Distinguished Scholar Award 2021 elected to the Academia Europaea Bibliography Books The Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700-1763. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1985, . The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, . Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th-Century World. New York: Norton, 2000, . With William H. McNeill. The Human Web: A Bird's-eye View of World History. New York: Norton, 2003, . Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010,