Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (Envisioning Cuba)

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Description

From 1750 to 1800, a crucial period that saw the American Revolution, French Revolution, and Haitian Revolution, the Atlantic world experienced a series of environmental crises, including more frequent and severe hurricanes and extended drought. Drawing on historical climatology, environmental history, and Cuban and American colonial history, Sherry Johnson innovatively integrates the region’s experience with extreme weather events and patterns into the history of the Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic world.

By superimposing this history of natural disasters over the conventional timeline of sociopolitical and economic events in Caribbean colonial history, Johnson presents an alternative analysis through which probably the most signal events of the Age of Revolution are seen as consequences of ecological crisis and of the resulting measures for disaster relief. As an example, Johnson finds that the overall adoption in 1778 of free trade within the Americas was once catalyzed by recognition of the harsh realities of food scarcity and the desires of local colonists reeling from a series of natural disasters. Weather-induced environmental crises and slow responses from imperial authorities, Johnson argues, played an inextricable and, until now, in large part unacknowledged role in the upward push of revolutionary sentiments within the eighteenth-century Caribbean.

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