John Robert McNeill (born October 6, 1954) is an American environmental historian, author, and professor at Georgetown University.
His father was the noted University of Chicago historian William H. McNeill, with whom he published a book, The Human Web: A Bird's-eye View of World History, in 2003.
[3] In 1985 he became a faculty member at Georgetown University, where he serves in both the History Department and the Walsh School of Foreign Service.
[5][6][7] 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.
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.