Igniting the Caribbean's Past: Fire in British West Indian History (review)

In this classic scholarly study, Richardson seeks to determine the correlation between island size and the number of native faunal species that made up the ecosystems of the islands, as well as the damage to the islands caused by fires or natural disasters. Richardson has determined that small islands are subject to greater impact from natural disasters and fires than larger islands because of their less complex ecosystems. He reports that this book arose from a conversation with geographers that persuaded him to examine the idea that a "sugar cane fire had the virtue of seeming to pull everything together, being at once an environmental social and biological event and therefore an eminently geographical phenomenon" (xii).

This important work depicts fires due to natural causes as well as to the work of human arsonists or incendiaries, accidental or otherwise. Fires were notoriously destructive; they had socioeconomic and racial responses. Slavers initiated the use of fire to brand captive Africans, who eventually turned the fires against their owners/masters, burning sugar-cane fields as a form of protest and, on some occasions, for economic gain. Since a burning sugar-cane field can be a beautiful sight, some fires may have been set for entertainment. Fires pitted enslaved workers against white plantation personnel and later blacks/urban dwellers against the police. Missing from the study are examples of overseers deliberately burning recalcitrant enslaved persons in their huts or burning them alive at the stake.

This book not only discusses fires chronologically; it also includes a social-historical perspective that highlights the nature of their social impact on the Caribbean more than a century ago. By adopting a methodology that he calls "an ecological approach to social history," Richardson tries to offset the "structuredness of colonial history and the partial truths often contained in conventional archival records." Hence, he utilizes and evaluates all possible reports and comments on the fires and their socio-economic impact, because the fires affected everyone in the short or long term. He is particularly sensitive to the fires set in 1888 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of slavery's abolition, depicting as accurately as possible how blacks must have felt about their progress in several areas of social life. His methodology was also appropriate to demonstrate that the fires and riots of the 1890s were not senseless acts of the laboring class but reactions to economic depression (1884–1900) and demonstrations against the misery of malnutrition.

Igniting the Caribbean's Past is not just an attempt to recall the history of fires; after all, they caused little catastrophic environmental damage on these small islands since neither pristine wilderness nor extensive forestry existed there after the plantations appeared. However, fires had social implications/connotations related to the oppression initiated by the plantation system and countered by enslaved and working people through the uses of fire. Richardson also links the large migration and inter-island trade that developed during the 1890s with the conditions, the ingenuity, and the aspirations of local black seafarers. He sees in this movement "incipient" notions of "nationality," as well as the origin of the stereotypical view that islanders hold of each other.

Richardson claims that the "American Century" began with the collaboration between the British and United States' navies in putting out fires and relieving the destitute affected by other natural disasters in the region. He recalls the 1895 Port of Spain fire as an important example. A series of crises followed in relatively quick succession, beginning with a fire in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1896 and then the Spanish-American War. After the war, the United States became a Caribbean colonial power and quickly forced the region to increase its dependency on it. In 1902, the United States sent aid to victims of volcanic eruptions from Mt. Pele and Mt. Soufrere. It participated in rebuilding United Fruit Company's (American-owned) complex...