Reviewed by Robert Olwell | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3

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Reviewed by Robert Olwell | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Robert Olwell, University of Texas at Austin

Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783. By Matthew Mulcahy. Early America: History, Context, Culture. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 270 pages. $45.00 (cloth).

Hurricanes—as the past few years of increased storm activity have amply reminded—are part of the environment in the American tropics, yet they have seldom been given much attention or assigned much importance by historians of the region. In this book Mulcahy aims to give these tempests their due. All early modern societies were menaced by fire, flood, pestilence, or earthquake. But, in all likelihood, any given colony or city could expect to endure such a trial only once or twice in a century. Hurricanes, however, were an entirely different category of calamity. From 1624 to 1783, the British-American tropical colonies were struck by seventy-one hurricanes, one almost every two years. Any particular colony could expect to lie in a hurricane's path about once a decade. The frequency and predictability of hurricanes in tropical America allows comparisons across time and between different colonies, thus enabling a study of these recurrent events to become a true history rather than merely a synchronic glimpse of one society's response to a singular catastrophe.

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