Sea and Land

Drawing together a remarkable array of information in one compact volume, Sea and Land provides an excellent synthetic survey of the environmental history of the Caribbean. Capacious, fascinating, and eminently readable, it also represents the best available overview of the current state of the field, highlighting the plethora of new scholarship on the topic; its voluminous bibliography, for example, primarily cites titles that have been published since 2000. At the same time, its authors have cast a wide interdisciplinary net to include relevant works from the realms of archaeology, biology, ecology, climatology, geology, biogeography, marine biology, botany, zoology, entomology, and epidemiology.Prior to this book’s publication, someone interested in understanding how environmental conditions in the Caribbean changed over time would have had to cobble together multiple studies that focused narrowly on individual islands, specific periods, events, or natural phenomena. The highly fragmented nature of that existing scholarship stemmed, in large measure, from the region’s heterogeneity, insularity, and complex geopolitical history. The development of more integrated, inclusive studies was also hindered by linguistic divides as many researchers focused exclusively on Francophone, Hispanophone, or Anglophone islands. All of these issues persisted as enduring historical legacies of colonialism and imperial rivalry.Another contributing factor was the rigidity of academic fields that dictated that relevant subjects fell into distinct categories that rarely intersected. Until relatively recently, scholars within the humanities and social sciences also tended to prioritize the Caribbean’s social, economic, and geopolitical dimensions. Consequently, environmental history—which is inherently interdisciplinary—had not gained much traction.Even earlier attempts at more comprehensive approaches were limited in scope. As a cultural anthropologist, for example, Mintz published an entire book in 1985 about the production and consumption of sugar but barely mentioned the intensely negative ecological impacts of its cultivation.1 Two years later, Watts, the biogeographer, published a book that was considered ground-breaking at the time and which still holds up as a very useful resource.2 Belying its title, however, the book primarily emphasized the British Caribbean and focused on sugar cultivation to the exclusion of many other economic activities that likewise caused major changes.By contrast, Sea and Land encompasses the entire Caribbean basin, including not just the islands but the surrounding continental land masses and, importantly, the sea itself. Its sweeping chronology traces environmental transformations across the region—from the pre-Columbian era to the 1850s. Throughout this vast time span, the region witnessed unprecedented levels of “mixing, movement, and displacement” of people, plants, animals, insects, and microbes from America, Africa, Europe, and Asia (10–11). The exploitation and commodification of land, natural resources, and people compounded the destructive effects of settler-colonialism, slavery, and plantation agriculture. Consequently, as the book’s introduction convincingly argues, the Caribbean became “a vital site in the creation of the modern western world” and overseas capitalism (10).To orient readers, the book’s introduction offers a compelling explanation of its objectives, namely to “make environmental perspectives more accessible and more indispensable, to scholars and students alike, to foster both a fuller appreciation of the extent to which environmental factors shaped historical developments in the Caribbean and the extent to which human actions have transformed the biophysical environment of the region over time” (17). The rest of the book, divided into three sections, addresses an impressive array of topics, including the history of Indigenous populations, plantation agriculture, deforestation, the impact of invasive species and introduced livestock, extinctions and extirpations of flora and fauna, the introduction of sugar and other staple crops, urbanization, disease, and natural disasters.The complexities of sugar cultivation, however, were discussed rather superficially, and the ecological impacts of extractive industries, such as gold mining, were largely overlooked. Yet throughout the book the authors incorporate an impressive array of new scientific knowledge to their historical analysis; for example, they apply genome data and dna research to understand historic populations better and they glean valuable insights from the emerging fields of Medical Anthropology and Animal Studies. Indeed, one of the most innovative aspects of the book is the diversity of species discussed—from fireflies and mosquitoes to sea turtles and manatees to geckos and skinks—countering the anthropocentrism typical of many historians.In the first section, Morgan explores why the complex dynamics of island ecosystems, as exemplified by the Caribbean, tend to be sites of great biodiversity but are also highly volatile and vulnerable to many kinds of disruptions. After outlining the basics about the region’s geography, geology, and climate, he vividly explains how the islands’ environmental conditions were impacted by their first human inhabitants in the pre-Columbian era and the subsequent changes precipitated by the influx of Europeans and enslaved Africans.In the second section, McNeill examines the changing disease environments within the Caribbean, contextualizing them within a global comparative framework. To understand the devastating impact of past epidemics, especially on Indigenous peoples, he also incorporates new theories about “syndemics” and the effects of “immune amnesia.”In the third section, Mulcahy and Schwartz combine their expertise to elucidate the immediate and long-term effects of hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, floods, and other natural disasters on the region’s development. The book’s conclusion explores environmental trends in the Caribbean from the 1850s to today, focusing on the hazards of tourism, pandemics, pollution, and climate change.Critical to mitigating the aforementioned problem of regional fragmentation, the authors emphasize the connectivity and mobility among islands and neighboring continental land masses and, importantly, situate the sea itself as “the heart of the region” (14). Given recent scholarship on oceans as historical spaces in their own right, this perspective is a welcome change from earlier works. Higman’s Concise History of the Caribbean, for example, opens with the baffling statement that “Without the islands, there would be no sea. The water would nothing more than another stretch in the fluid maritime history of the oceans.”3Sea and Land, by contrast, acknowledges the watery realm as the region’s defining characteristic, critical both to its environmental conditions and the lived experiences of its inhabitants. In sum, this book is an incredible resource and should be essential reading for anyone visiting, studying, or teaching about the region

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