Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean

Sea and Land provides an in-depth environmental history of the Caribbean to ca 1850, with a coda that takes the story into the modern era. It explores the mixing, movement, and displacement of peoples and the parallel ecological mixing of animals, plants, microbes from Africa, Europe, elsewhere in the Americas, and as far away as Asia. It examines first the arrival of Native American to the region and the environmental transformations that followed. It then turns to the even more dramatic changes that accompanied the arrival of Europeans and Africans in the fifteenth century. Throughout it argues that the constant arrival, dispersal, and mingling of new plants and animals gave rise to a creole ecology. Particular attention is given to the emergence of Black slavery, sugarcane, and the plantation system, an unholy trinity that thoroughly transformed the region's demographic and physical landscapes and made the Caribbean a vital site in the creation of the modern western world.\nIncreased attention to issues concerning natural resources, conservation, epidemiology, and climate have now made the environment and ecology of the Caribbean a central historical concern. Sea and Land is an effort to integrate that research in a new general environmental history of the region. Intended for scholars and students alike, it aims to foster both a fuller appreciation of the extent to which environmental factors shaped historical developments in the Caribbean, and the extent to which human actions have transformed the biophysical environment of the region over time.\nThe combined work of eminent authors of environment and Latin American and Caribbean history, Sea and Land offers a unique approach to a region characterized by Edenic nature and paradisiacal qualities, as well as dangers, diseases, and disasters.

History

Schwartz, Stuart B.

Morgan, Philip D.

McNeill, John R.

Mulcahy, Matthew

Americas

Oxford University Press

Sea and Land provides an in-depth environmental history of the Caribbean to ca 1850, with a coda that takes the story into the modern era. It explores the mixing, movement, and displacement of peoples and the parallel ecological mixing of animals, plants, microbes from Africa, Europe, elsewhere in the Americas, and as far away as Asia. It examines first the arrival of Native American to the region and the environmental transformations that followed. It then turns to the even more dramatic changes that accompanied the arrival of Europeans and Africans in the fifteenth century. Throughout it argues that the constant arrival, dispersal, and mingling of new plants and animals gave rise to a creole ecology. Particular attention is given to the emergence of Black slavery, sugarcane, and the plantation system, an unholy trinity that thoroughly transformed the region's demographic and physical landscapes and made the Caribbean a vital site in the creation of the modern western world. Increased attention to issues concerning natural resources, conservation, epidemiology, and climate have now made the environment and ecology of the Caribbean a central historical concern. Sea and Land is an effort to integrate that research in a new general environmental history of the region. Intended for scholars and students alike, it aims to foster both a fuller appreciation of the extent to which environmental factors shaped historical developments in the Caribbean, and the extent to which human actions have transformed the biophysical environment of the region over time. The combined work of eminent authors of environment and Latin American and Caribbean history, Sea and Land offers a unique approach to a region characterized by Edenic nature and paradisiacal qualities, as well as dangers, diseases, and disasters.

The Slaves' Economy

Slaves achieved a degree of economic independence, producing food, tending cash crops, raising livestock, manufacturing furnished goods, marketing their own products, consuming and saving the proceeds and bequeathing property to their descendants. The editors of this volume contend that the legacy of slavery cannot be understood without a full appreciation of the slaves' economy.

The Slaves' Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas

Business & Money

Berlin, Ira

Economics

Routledge

On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South. Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.

Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History ... and the University of North Carolina Press)

Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press

A detailed comparison of 18th-century slave life in the two areas where their population was centered: the Chesapeake region of Virginia and the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Omohundro Institute and UNC Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Morgan, Philip D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Morgan, Philip D.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Morgan, Philip D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean

Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean

The Slaves' Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas

Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History ... and the University of North Carolina Press)

Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History ... and the University of North Carolina Press)