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Climate and catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic world in the age of revolution Cover Image E-book

Climate and catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic world in the age of revolution

Johnson, Sherry 1949- (author.).

Summary: From 1750 to 1800, a critical 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 in which some of the signal events of the Age of Revolution are seen as consequences of ecological crisis and of the resulting measures for disaster relief. For example, Johnson finds that the general adoption in 1778 of free trade in the Americas was catalyzed by recognition of the harsh realities of food scarcity and the needs 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, largely unacknowledged role in the rise of revolutionary sentiments in the eighteenth-century Caribbean.

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Record details

  • ISBN: 9780807869345
  • Physical Description: remote
    1 online resource (xiii, 306 pages : illustrations, maps)
  • Publisher: [Chapel Hill, NC] : The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Formatted Contents Note:
Cursed by nature -- Be content with things at which nature almost revolted -- It appeared as if the world were ending -- The violence done to our interests -- In a common catastrophe all men should be brothers -- The tomb that is the Almendares River -- So contrary to sound policy and reason.

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Subject:
Climatic extremes Social aspects Cuba History 18th century
Climatic extremes Political aspects Cuba History 18th century
Disasters Cuba History 18th century
Social change Cuba History 18th century
History
HISTORY / Caribbean & West Indies / Cuba
Cuba Climate History 18th century
Cuba Politics and government 18th century
Cuba Social conditions 18th century
Cuba History To 1810
Caribbean Area History To 1810
Latin America History To 1830
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