Colonial Exiles

The Tambora Volcanic Explosion, Environmental History, and Swiss Immigration to Nova Friburgo, Brazil, 1815-1821

Bibliographic Data

ID2789264
AuthorsDamian Clavel (0000-0003-3468-970X), Susanna B Hecht (0000-0002-4345-792X)
Year2024
Volume104
Issue4
Pages551-586
Publication date2024-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-11384938
OpenAlexW4400040176
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited61

The 1815 eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora triggered a subsistence crisis in Europe, especially in Switzerland. This article retraces the founding of Nova Friburgo, a colony in the mountains near Rio de Janeiro composed of several hundred Swiss families, mostly from the rural canton of Fribourg. This study shows how the unusual central European settler migration to the Brazilian tropics was facilitated by a new class of entrepreneurial go-betweens, acting as dynamic mediators between the effects that the climatic catastrophe caused by Tambora had on Swiss agriculture and politics and the development requirements for building new settlements in a metamorphosing South American continent. By positioning Brazil in the broader environmental history of Tambora, as well as the fallout from the Napoleonic Wars, this article sheds light on how the study of climatic teleconnections requires multiple scales of analysis to understand better how the different politics and scopes of action, and sets of unlikely processes, move into play. These teleconnections were, in fact, socially mediated with eventually wide-reaching social and racial transformations that became foundational prototypes for Brazilian land colonization throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Geochemistry · Geography · Immigration · Nova (rocket) · Political science · Volcano · American Environmental and Regional History · Geology · Historical Geography and Geographical Thought · History · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography

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