Sea and Land

With 13 nations and 24 distinct polities spread amid a million square miles, the Caribbean is vast, complicated, multifaceted, and very difficult to condense into a single narrative about its environmental history. Perhaps this explains why relatively few environmental histories of the whole Caribbean region exist, especially histories spanning thousands of years. This book strives to accomplish that task. It mainly focuses on the period from 1492 to 1850 but also examines the earlier history from roughly 7,500 years ago to the arrival of European colonists, as well as concluding with brief analysis of the post-1850 period.Historians usually write their books alone, as single authors. But this book has four authors who all bring different and complementary expertise. This innovative approach offers an excellent model and inspiration for historians to do more coauthorship—to depart from restrictive single-author formats that still dominate our discipline despite trends across the academy to diversify authorship and scholarly formats. What's more, the breadth of author specializations allows greater coverage when trying to synthesize such a complex region as the Caribbean, where scholars often work only on the Spanish or British Caribbean, for example. Rather than all four authors coauthoring the whole book, however, they divide it up like an edited collection, except the conclusion that they cowrote. Given this allocation of authorship, the book can feel like a midway product between an edited volume and a monograph. The type of narrative flow, chronological progression, and singular argument that would normally span entire books are here confined to each substantive chapter. Many readers will thus likely turn to this book for great expertise within specific chapters or for its comprehensive overview of the whole region that includes extensive endnotes and a vast bibliography.In the first chapter, Philip Morgan provides an overview of human-environment interactions. He explains at the outset of this 110-page chapter that “nowhere in the New World was the disjuncture between natural bounty and vulnerability so marked as in the Caribbean” (p. 30). This seemingly contradictory binary appears throughout his chapter and the book. Morgan notes, for instance, that the region has a devastating history of earthquakes and hurricanes while simultaneously boasting “staggering” biodiversity (p. 52). Human interaction with this environment took a sharp turn after 1492, Morgan maintains, suggesting that “while Native Americans modified the Caribbean environment, Europeans and Africans transformed it” (p. 91). The most profound effect of European colonization was sugar and the plantation system, while fishing, harvesting pearl beds, constructing port cities, and extracting marine animals altered the marine environment.In the second chapter, “Disease Environments in the Caribbean to 1850,” J. R. McNeill analyzes three periods of disease history: 7,500 years ago to 1492, 1492–1650, and 1650–1850. Throughout the nearly 60-page chapter, he focuses on the concept of “syndemics,” a term that recognizes intertwined and simultaneous disasters, such as two or more diseases existing in specific social, political, and environmental contexts that can exacerbate disease impacts. He also notes the relative lack of diseases during the 7,000 years prior to European arrival, which made the Caribbean one of the healthiest places in the world. But that changed profoundly after 1492, when two main types of diseases riddled the region: vector-borne diseases (e.g., malaria, yellow fever, dengue) and crowd diseases (e.g., measles, smallpox, mumps, influenza, pertussis). McNeill explains that “the Caribbean's Columbian syndemic was on the whole worse than that elsewhere in the Americas, and it was probably geography more than violence, genetics, or anything else that explains it” (p. 161). Additionally, the plantation, urban, and military disease ecologies not only caused widespread death but also helped produce “the modern Caribbean population,” which is “mainly one of African ancestry” (p. 184).In the last main chapter, “Natural Disasters in the Caribbean to 1850,” Stuart Schwartz and Matthew Mulcahy turn to impacts of hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, floods, drought, and pests. These events were always “shaped by the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions in which they [struck]” (p. 189). Recognizing that natural hazards only become disasters when they affect people, Schwartz and Mulcahy call their approach “the new disaster history” (p. 189). It aligns well with approaches, for example, in the 1993 book Los desastres no son naturales, edited by Andrew Maskrey. The 60-page chapter relies on European sources to provide examples and details about colonists' experiences with these disasters. Policies, insufficient food provided for slaves, land-use practices, plantation economies, and other societal decisions shaped disaster impacts and responses. Although conditions have improved for diseases, disaster mitigation, and plantation slavery, the authors nonetheless conclude that “the environmental history of the Caribbean since 1850 has remained a function of the region's place within the global economy and of its geographical and deep historical legacies” (p. 274)

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