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

This is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on selected environmental histories. Bonham Richardson's historical geographical analysis of fire is unique because it serves as a window to the late nineteenth-century British West Indies. His multifaceted treatment of fire as a hazard, an act of protest and defiance, and a symbol of power, prove engaging. Fire was a social construction with precise meanings for actors as varied as slave and small farmer, politician and appointed governor, and planter. Richardson's readable account takes the reader beyond the normal review of fire as an event that brings closure to the sugar harvest (cannes brulées) or an easy if not unforgiving method of clearing land. Instead, the author leads us through the period leading up to the 1905 withdrawal of British forces in the bead of islands strung from Trinidad to the British Virgin Islands.

Divided into six substantive chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue, the book aims to provide:

...a historical geography of the small British island colonies of the eastern Caribbean in the depression decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; its subject is the people of the region and their interrelationships with fire – fire as it was used, categorized, contemplated, contested, and feared by West Indians in both rural and urban areas at the time.

(p. 3)

Fire is the focus not because it is "the overriding causal agent or single variable that best explains the human geography of the British Caribbean…[the book] is not intended to identify the One Big Cause or One Big Story in the environmental history of the eastern Caribbean" (p. 3). Rather, fire enhances our understanding of the "material circumstances of lives lived [in the Caribbean] in the past" (p. 4).

Chapter Two is must reading for understanding the history of fire in the Caribbean. Fire altered islands small and large, and often in irreparable ways. Witness the tragic backdrop of fire, deforestation, and the agricultural demise of places like Haiti. Firefighters came from We learn that crews from commercial seaman, as well as American, British, and European navies in the area who, in turn, worked alongside neighboring islanders and others who volunteered when large fires raged.

Chapter Three, "Fires in Towns and Cities," shifts the popular idea of sugar field fires to the lesser researched topic of precarious urban settings where densely packed wooden structures served as kindling for massive destruction. "Foresty and Bush Fires" in the next chapter returns the discussion to the use of fire in common slash-and-burn practices, post-harvest field clearing, and the removal of virgin forests for lumber and firewood. Chapter Five (Sugarcane Fires) is somewhat mistitled in that there is good information about how the waves of technology (wind, water, steam sources of energy) spread unevenly throughout sugar mills in the Lesser Antilles. Such technology mirrored changes in capital outlays, investment, and changing global production patterns of sugar. Here the reader is treated to the author's careful archival research that includes verbatim statements given to planters by owners or military governors about how to conduct the burnings. These instructions, however, differed many times from the ways in which the fires unfolded. It is as if the former were designed for a carefully prescribed recipe or a controlled laboratory experiment, not something subject to shifting winds, human error, arson, or social protest.

Igniting the Caribbean's Past teaches us about the state of 'scientific' knowledge in the realm of human-environment interaction.

In the West Indies, ideas concerning the relationships between deforestation, burning, and rainfall were aired with far more conviction than scientific certainty. An anonymous letter to the Antigua newspaper in January 1889 acknowledged that the idea of trees encouraging rainfall had long been 'accepted doctrine' but that 'exact investigations in the States, in Europe, and in India prove...