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.
From 2003 he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair in Environmental History and International Affairs, until he was appointed a University Professor in 2006.
[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.