Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina by Stuart B. Schwartz (review)

Sea of Storms explores how for the past five centuries, people have understood and responded to hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean—the diverse island and coastal societies centered in the Caribbean Sea and linked by Atlantic histories of colonialism, slavery, and nation-making. The book’s sweeping coverage, together with its focus on shared environmental conditions and hazards, is an effort to overcome the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries that typically frame histories of the region. Schwartz’s primary concern is the social dimensions of hurricanes—the changing concepts of nature and the divine that have shaped perceptions of storms and efforts to deal with them, and the social and political conditions that have influenced the impact of hurricanes in distinct locales and across time. Toward that end, Schwartz offers transnational comparisons and interconnections rather than discrete local or national histories, and he draws from the latest meteorological and oceanographical research to enrich his narrative and inform his methodology.

Using modern averages, Schwartz estimates that the Caribbean has experienced between 4,000 and 5,000 hurricane-level storms since 1492, a stunning number that alone justifies rethinking the histories of colonization, state formation, empire, slavery, and emancipation in the region. As the sheer number of Caribbean storms makes any comprehensive study of their influence impossible, Schwartz turns to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale—the modern meteorological scale used to rank storms according to their speed, intensity, and potential to inflict environmental and property damage—to identify periods of especially intense storms associated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation (enso) phenomenon, and to narrow his analysis to key disasters. This process of selection was no doubt made easier by Schwartz’s extensive knowledge of the social and political history of the Greater Caribbean.

With this innovative approach, Schwartz joins environmental historians in treating nature as a dynamic entity that has always been interconnected with human society, and he profits from documentation of disasters that reveals spaces and mentalities that might otherwise remain hidden from view. Interestingly, if nature and society have always been entwined, Schwartz’s longue durée analysis shows that the relationship has not always been conceptualized as such. The problem of anthropogenic climate change, for example, echoes the early modern view that human sin and moral failure caused hurricane disasters. Later scientific views, by contrast, construed storms as normal risks in an environment for which humans bore little responsibility. An emphasis on human error has since returned to the analysis of natural disasters, but the focus is on human decisions and policies rather than on sin or moral failure.

By tracing the historical continuity of hurricanes in the Caribbean, Schwartz finds persistent arguments for and against government aid to victims of disaster. Responses to hurricanes have always been conditioned by the fear of social unrest; ideological concerns have been paramount. In the aftermath of the hurricane San Ciriaco that struck Puerto Rico in 1899, shortly after the United States occupied the island, authorities were eager to demonstrate enlightened governance, but feared that public assistance would foster dependency and sloth among the destitute masses. Hence, they channeled recovery aid to Puerto Rican business leaders who shared the view that the island’s non-white majorities needed discipline and control, not social welfare.

Schwartz also details community solidarities that formed in response to disasters, when a greater awareness of shared vulnerability engendered cooperation. Such responses resonated deeply with the hurricane Katrina, which Schwartz examines in the final chapter to highlight the racial prejudice and conflict of ideologies that have always shaped encounters between hurricanes and societies in the Greater Caribbean. Sea of Storms is a book of Braudelian ambition by a master of the trade. The story is as engrossing as it is momentous.