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Controlling Nature and Transforming Landscapes in the Early Modern Caribbean
Abstract
In the seventeenth century, the Caribbean islands were increasingly incorporated into the international trade network, the core of which was constituted by the European colonial powers. The growth of markets and buying power in Europe stimulated investments in sugar plantations. Consequently, sugar cane agriculture in the Caribbean developed into a considerable apparatus, consisting of land, people, animals and buildings. Agricultural methods and techniques, as well as well-organised routines in sugar production, were developed with a view to managing the sugar plantations as efficiently as possible. The results were in many cases deforestation, impoverished soils and erosion. The changes in the landscapes were noticed and commented upon by visitors who wrote travel accounts of the English and French islands. By the end of the seventeenth century, new agricultural methods and techniques had been developed, based on the growing body of experiences of the sugar planters. The aim of the strict regime on the plantations was to control nature in order to produce sugar as efficiently as possible. In some cases experience taught planters to use resources in a more sustainable manner. The ambition to control nature created the solutions to the problems caused by overexploitation. Conservationist measures were taken to keep the sugar production apparatus in as good a shape as possible.
... Los británicos establecieron sus colonias caribeñas centrándose, principalmente, en economías basadas en plantaciones productoras y exportadoras de productos básicos tropicales (commodities). Varios autores (Watts, 1986;Grove, 1995;Bennett, 2015;Beinart & Hughes, 2007;Hollsten, 2008;McNeill, 2010;Morgan, 2022;Ferdinand, 2022) han señalado sus consecuencias ecológicas. Sustentado en la iniciativa y propiedad privadas 1. En este texto utilizamos el concepto de extractivismo, definido, entre otros, por Cardoso y Fa letto (1969), como la explotación de recursos naturales y materias primas que llevan a cabo los países centrales en la periferia, y que traen consigo consecuencias nefastas para la vida de los trabajadores, sus comunidades y el medio ambiente. ...
Este artículo trata sobre las políticas forestales coloniales de Gran Bretaña en el Caribe en los siglos xvii y xviii. Da cuenta de la utilización de madera caribeña en Gran Bretaña y en sus colonias, mostrando que en este lapso la tala fue constante, pero hubo una evolución en las políticas del imperio para contener la deforestación. Presenta, como antecedente, la preocupación europea por la escasez de madera, la estrategia de importación desde el Báltico y Norteamérica y algunas normativas forestales emitidas en Inglaterra, subrayando el papel que jugaron los científicos y la Sociedad de Artes. Destaca las diferencias entre las disposiciones acuñadas para las primeras islas colonizadas, para las «islas cedidas» y para los asentamientos en las costas continentales, con el objetivo de mostrar que las políticas forestales emitidas para el Caribe británico fueron expedidas a «conveniencia», acatadas priorizando la productividad y la ganancia y de acuerdo con la racionalidad del capitalismo basada en la extracción de materias primas de las colonias para el aprovisionamiento de las metrópolis. Este tipo de capitalismo fue inaugurado entonces, pero aún está vigente.
... then the rigidly controlled industrial plantation landscapes of the sugar monocultural systems (Hollsten, 2008). Then, in the post-plantation and post-colonial Caribbean world, island economies re-orientated themselves towards a new industry: tourism. ...
This chapter will examine the pressures on Caribbean islands in the post-COVID-19 world, considering how the demands of tourism and threats of climate change are forcing governments and non-governmental organisations to devise creative and sustainable solutions to the management of fast-disappearing natural landscapes. This is imperative as these small island economies, traditionally geared towards tourism as a key economic activity, seek to rebuild in the wake of almost two years of global COVID-19 lockdown. Furthermore, it is becoming clear that increased hurricane and tropical storm activity, driven by climate change, is resulting in more frequent and destructive weather episodes. The fragile ecosystems of Caribbean landscapes and seascapes are at risk from extreme weather, and also linked to extensive tourism footfall and associated infrastructural development, from human driven factors. Using a series of case studies drawn from Barbados, we examine how an approach to sustainable natural heritage tourism can be framed in the post-COVID-19 and climate changing world.
... Nadia evokes the possibility to be classless and genderless when a person is diving in the waters. On the contrary, the land hosts a "contact-zone" of transformations that involves the economic value of the land that becomes an estate, the land as a right and a deprivation, as a sense of ownership and a sense of transgression, all derived from the plantation value of land ownerships (Gerber Hess 2017;Hollsten 2008). In the Caribbean region, the lands were "fields" of contention for power relations that included racial, ethnic, gender and religious separatism. ...
This article aims to investigate the subjective, cultural value of landscapes behind the representations of the landscapes themselves, in a conversation with the Caribbean artists Nadia Huggins and Richard Fung.
The opening chapter sets out the aim of the work, which is to examine the common law concept of property in relation to land using a landscape lens. The chapter distinguishes this research from other genealogies of property by emphasising the use of the legal geography methodology to critique property in terms of its relation to space. The chapter summarises the main features of modern land law. The book’s structure is outlined, beginning with an exploration of property’s roots in landscape, an investigation of the development of the classic hallmarks of property through a legal geographical analysis of classic property theory, a discussion of property’s linkages to spatial injustice and a critique of progressive property’s potential to challenge the ownership paradigm in property law.
To explain property’s origins in place or landscape, this chapter draws on legal, historical, geographical, etymological and archaeological research to reconstruct how people understood land before property. The chapter relies on two main sources: Kenneth Olwig’s cultural geographical research on early landscapes in pre-feudal Scandinavia and Sub-Roman/pre-enclosure Britain illustrates the relationship between land, law and people; and Nicole Graham’s etymological analysis linking property not to ownership but to proximity affirms that a specific location to which someone belonged generated relations relevant to identity, community and a sustainable way of life. Land was communal, dynamic and characterised by attachment, the polar opposite of property’s defining characteristics today (individual, exclusive and alienable).
This chapter examines the progressive property school’s attempts to address property’s shortcomings, as it is one of the more recent critiques of the ownership model to have gained traction. The main characteristics of progressive property are described, and the contributions of prominent scholars are summarised in relation to virtue ethics, public trust and the common heritage of mankind. While noting that this school emerged in the specific cultural context of the US, and that its parameters are continuing to evolve, the chapter nevertheless outlines some conceptual limitations in progressive property thinking that have implications for developing a spatially just approach to property. The chapter concludes by reinforcing the importance of a legal geographical perspective when examining the law’s relationship with land.
This chapter examines John Locke’s contributions to the property discourse in the context of the first hallmark of property, individuality. A legal geographical analysis of his Two Treatises is employed to show how Locke’s focus on the individual and the labour theory of value required a reductionist understanding of the commons and communal land use. Locke’s influences from improvement philosophy and his role in the colonial administration of North America are also discussed in relation to his understanding of land. The chapter addresses the consequences of perceiving locally developed concepts of common land as empty space or wasteland. Property’s association with individual liberty in Anglo-American law is reinterpreted in light of its reliance on and extraction from complex Indigenous landscapes.
The closing chapter recaps the book’s objectives, which were to determine property’s origins, now identified in pre-feudal landscape, recover the spatial parameters of the theories of Locke, Blackstone and Marx, which are foundational to classical property theory, and highlight the process of converting landscapes to property as an exercise in spatial injustice that is facilitated by the law. This process was not linear or progressive, in response to land’s environmental limits, but executed through enclosure, displacement and colonisation. As a result, the chapter contends that a legal geographical perspective reveals that property is based on detachment from place, and this placelessness has implications for sustainable land use today.
This chapter relies on Marx’s later critiques of capitalism (which focused on the relationship between property rights and nature) to explain the final hallmark of property: alienability. Using Marx's metabolic rift theory, the chapter considers how the abstraction of land was achieved through the separation of culture and nature, which created distance between people and their embedded relations with land. This is illustrated with examples from rundale communities in Ireland and the slave colonies of the Caribbean. Converting landscapes to plantation monoculture to maximise exploitation destabilised the landscape dynamic, facilitating displacement, oppression, and enslavement, and socio-ecological crises such as the Famine. The chapter thus draws attention to the spatial consequences of land's dephysicalisation in property law.
The idea of absolutist ownership in land, introduced in William Blackstone’s influential work, Commentaries on the Laws of England , is the subject of this chapter. Blackstone’s reframing of intrinsic aspects of the landscape as external encumbrances burdening the individual landowner is discussed as the watershed moment that terminated property’s social function. Blackstone applied the generic feudal pyramid of tenures to England, without considering the lived-in experiences of local communities and their ancient way of life that varied and complicated feudal practices. The chapter examines the role of the new landowning class in Parliament, which passed the Enclosure Acts to enclose common land as private property, thereby using the law to dismantle common rights and functioning local communities, and legitimise exclusion as a feature of property.
Cultural heritage law; landscape; environmental law; spatial justice; procedural environmental rights; Lesser Antilles; Caribbean
This article analyses the historical trajectory of a southern Brazilian population
emerging from the interbreeding of Amerindian, African and European peoples: the
so-called caboclos. In particular, it focuses on their relationship with Brazilian institutions in the nation-building and modernisation processes between 1889 and 1945.
Although caboclos constituted a considerable portion of the population of southern
Brazil, because of their lifestyle, they were generally regarded as incapable of participating in the national developmental effort. As a result, they were forcefully assimilated through ethnic interbreeding and sanitation reforms. Reconstructing this historical
process, this article adopts the term ‘bio-anthropophagy’, a concept describing the
combination of anthropological and biological practices of persecution and appropriation in the region. First, it looks at the impact of racial theories promoted by
national institutions during the nineteenth century that led to ethnic persecutions and
forced interbreeding of caboclos. Second, it addresses the role played by the combination of eugenic theories and sanitation policies since the 1920s, leading to significant
techno-environmental reforms in the region. While the combination of these bio-anthropophagic reforms progressively dismantled the caboclo way of life and their ecosystems, some of their environmental practices and values resurfaced in recent times
with the emergence of environmentalism and agroecology in the region.
As the European colonization of the Americas progressed through territorial occupation and economic exploitation, the motley Atlantic society that emerged from the Columbian Exchange also led to unprecedented social experiments. This article analyzes the consolidation of buccaneers' culture in the island of Hispaniola during the first half of the seventeenth century. Adopting the methodological tools of environmental history – with a particular emphasis on coevolutionary history and neo-materialism – it assesses how feral European-born animal species contributed to creating this cosmopolitan society
living at the margins of western civilization. This encounter generated an ecological niche carved on the creole Caribbean environment of Hispaniola, one of the first Spanish settlements in the Americas. This article also assesses the historical causes of buccaneers' demise and the emergence of the plantation complex. The research draws from a vast array of primary sources produced by explorers from several European nations and former buccaneers and scholarly publications in environmental history, Caribbean history, and European colonial history.
This article addresses broad and plural concepts of landscape, considering its diversity of meanings and uses, which go far beyond its environmental and geographical connotations. It discusses the relationship between humanity and the rest of the natural world as a global process that combines physical and cultural aspects, and it seeks to highlight the contribution of environmental humanities to the understanding of these. Given the multiple conceptual interpretations and meanings of landscapes, we argue that current research trends are good examples of what we can consider as postdisciplinary approaches, challenging both disciplinary and interdisciplinary models of analysis. In this context, we use the recent pandemic scenarios as an example.
This contribution considers how a small Caribbean island (Balliceaux, St Vincent and the Grenadines) holds up a mirror to the wider experiences of the Garifuna (‘Black Carib’) peoples who live on the neighbouring island of St Vincent, and in diasporic communities through the Americas. In the late-18th Century Balliceaux was the scene of a genocide orchestrated by the British colonial authorities on the Garifuna, and as a consequence it has become an important place of memory for them, yet it also provokes other emotional responses. We start by taking a broadly phenomenological approach to the analysis of islandscape, emphasising its qualities as an embodied as well as physical entity, and then build upon the notion of embodiment using perspectives drawn from psychological studies of grief and grieving through the lens of grief and death studies. We argue that it is only through deploying such a phenomenological perspective to the study of this Caribbean island that we can discern the metaphors employed by the Garifuna in making sense of this island of death, grief and memory. By drawing on their own understandings of Balliceaux as a base for our theorisations, we offer an original theoretical and decolonised approach to thinking about the character, or sense of place, of a small, yet emotionally significant, Caribbean island.
For good reasons, the green movement turned from wilderness to environmental justice as its central category in the 1980s and '90s. Today, several leading wilderness advocates seem to compete for the most reactionary positions, particularly on the issue of migration. A case can, however, be made for a progressive, cosmopolitan, Marxist view of wilderness as a space less fully subjugated to capital than others. There is a long history of exploited and persecuted people seeking freedom in and through the wild. This essay focuses on two such groups-maroons and Jewish partisans- A nd asks what we lose in a rapidly warming world where the remotest and supposedly wildest corners of the world are among the first to be destroyed.
Cambridge Core - European History after 1450 - The Invention of Sustainability - by Paul Warde
Latin American environmental history has traditionally focused on three categories of research: colonialism, capitalism, and
conservation. It has also emphasized tragic tales of resource extraction and environmental destruction, primarily at the hands
of imperial powers. Though important issues, these stories of degradation and exploitation also constrain the historiography.
To broaden the field and push its theoretical grounding in new directions, this essay analyzes environmental history research
conducted by nonhistorians. It highlights scholarship in several areas, including the history of natural sciences, cultural
landscapes, environmental narratives, nature consumption, disasters, and social history. More dialogue across scholarly disciplines
can help historians of Latin America reconceptualize the meaning of “nature,” blur nature-culture boundaries, and integrate
environmental history with the region's broader historiography.
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