Book Review

Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783. By Matthew Mulcahy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 257 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Cloth $45.00.
Climate change—no longer the exclusive domain of scientists investigating global warming and its documented effects on melting glaciers, rising sea levels, protracted droughts in formerly well-watered regions of the world, and extended seasonal rainfall in areas unaccustomed to deluge—has become a category of inquiry for environmental historians. Ted Steinberg's Acts of God (Oxford, 2000) and James Fleming's Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford, 1998) are among the most provocative works published on this topic in recent years. In addition, the impact of natural disasters and human responses to these events has resulted in widespread public discourse in the wake of hurricanes Andrew (1992), Ivan (2004), and Katrina (2005). Mulcahy's vivid descriptions of Caribbean hurricanes, their impact on colonial economic and social life, and their effects on the larger Atlantic world is a most valuable contribution to the recent number of books on disasters in history.	1
While the book moves chronologically, its focus is placed on a few central questions seldom addressed by historians studying major storms: How did colonists interpret these new and terrifying events? What effects did hurricanes have on the plantation economies and slave societies of the region? How did colonists recover from various calamities and what adjustments did they make in response to the storms? Mulcahy suggests that calamities tested plantation societies' commitment to permanent settlement, ideas about transforming a "wild-erness" into a productive econ-omy, and dependence on North American colonists and their supporters across the Atlantic.	2
Seventeenth-century colonists arrived in the New World convinced that they could tame the wilderness and improve on what nature provided. Repeated hurricanes challenged their sense of dominance over nature and upended their economic, social, and cultural worlds. Determined to bring European culture to wild nature and civilization to chaos, they found themselves reduced to living in huts in the wake of violent storms. Hurricanes forced Caribbean planters to alter their ideas about nature, their preconceptions about dominance over it, and their enterprising efforts to create a stable plantation economy.	3
Mulcahy points out that the informed debates among colonists and others included the ideas gained from Carib Indians about the seasonality of hurricanes as well as the scientific thinking of the times, including Benjamin Franklin's work on electricity. Importantly however, the planters of the Greater Caribbean, accustomed to their violent world, seemed unmoved by the "great spasms of sermonizing, pamphleteering and religious awakening" that swept over England, New England, and other regions of the British Atlantic world that followed natural calamities. With the exception of the most horrendous hurricanes, planters accepted these "acts of God" within the framework of natural forces and specific environmental factors, a framework missing from the texts of seventeenth and eighteenth century sermons.	4
Hurricane preparation also included new forms of construction and the creation of a distinctly Greater Caribbean architecture. Houses built on stone foundations with wooden sills replaced collapsed "hole-post" buildings whose rotting wood posts were no match for hurricane-velocity winds and their accompanying storm surges. Many members of the wealthier planter class mimicked housing styles in England that replaced "medieval modes of design" with brick and stone, more symmetrical rooms, sash windows and multi-levels, up to three or four levels. These rigid and elevated structures were particularly vulnerable to hurricanes. Adapting a style used by the Spanish in the Caribbean, planters lowered the profile of their houses by limiting them to one or two stories using hardened wooden posts stacked with bricks and mortar. Wrapping the rafters with cane stocks and mangrove bark and fusing these natural materials with mortar strengthened the houses. Circular designs also softened the impact of high velocity winds. In this particularly illuminating chapter, Mulcahy illustrates the many ways in which Caribbean colonists reimagined and reinvented their built landscape in response to natural weather events.	5
With the warming of the planet's oceans and the recent history of destructive hurricanes, Mulcahy's excellent monograph is a chilling reminder of hurricanes past and the resourcefulness of vulnerable populations to live in harmony with volatile nature rather than to resist its fury. The volume is a timely addition to the growing number of environmental histories that focus on natural disasters.	6
Anthony N. Penna is the author of Nature's Bounty: Historical and Modern Environmental Perspectives (M.E. Sharpe, 1999). He teaches environmental history at Northeastern University.

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