Waters of Liberation: An Environmental History of Nineteenth-Century Jamaica

Abstract

The structural conditions that gave rise to present-day climate refugees of the Caribbean harken back to the history of endemic water and food scarcity in the largest, most profitable, and deadliest slave society of the nineteenth-century British empire: Jamaica. This dissertation explores the inter-generational freedom struggles of enslaved and free Black Jamaicans to meet their food and water needs over time. It shows how ordinary people adapted African and Jamaican material culture and knowledge to deal with the environmental contingencies of daily life in ways which crucially shaped the eruption and outcomes of major events in nineteenth-century Jamaica. I argue that Emancipation must be understood as an environmental event that scrambled the customary rules and power relations governing the distribution of land and water among the Black population. Black Jamaicans learned and taught one another how to take advantage of environmental circumstances and their cultures and knowledges of water, weather, and rainfall in order to accumulate wealth and stay safe through the practice of mobile, semi-nomadic lifestyles. But the resource scarcity that conditioned Black communities to build networks of care and mutual dependency also revealed weaknesses for hostile outsiders—both human and non-human—to attack. By the 1880s, the slow violence of environmental enclosure and the fast violence of ecological crises culminated in the near-total enclosure of extant natural resource reserves and the mass expulsion of Black farmers from the rural hinterland. The environmental and hydraulic history of nineteenth-century Jamaica underscores how and why alternative regimes and meanings of enclosure and environmental racism developed in imperial post-slave societies of the Anglo-Caribbean and the broader Atlantic world. The successes and failures of the last generation of the enslaved and the first generation of free people offer vital clues as to how poor, marginalized, and vulnerable peoples of the Global South today have adapted, and may yet adapt to, global climate change.