Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution

ONE: Cursed by Nature

c h a p t e r o n e Cursed by Nature C limate Change! Global Warming! El Niño and La Niña! These phrases, now part of our daily vocabulary, stir emotions and prompt reactions ranging from fear, to anger, to a feeling of helplessness in the face of impending disaster. For the past several years, the Caribbean, the southeastern United States, and the Gulf Coast have endured repeated hurricane strikes, while the Pacific region has suffered through alternating periods of drought-induced wildfires and torrential downpours. Governments are warned to be prepared for an imminent period of weather-induced environmental crisis caused by a warming cycle in the earth’s climate. Decades of research have made “climate change” household words, but until now the social sciences have rarely utilized scientific discoveries to understand the connections among climate, catastrophe, environmental crisis, and historical change. Drawing inspiration from hard science and contemporary issues, this book will establish that the current phase of climate-induced stress is not unique and that a similar cycle, a fifty-year warm anomaly, occurred during the last five decades of the eighteenth century. In addition, historical climatology demonstrates that in the period under study (1748–1804) barely a year went by when the world did not experience the effects of an El Niño or La Niña cycle, episodes of severe, prolonged drought counterbalanced by hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin. Such scientific facts have little value, however, unless the consequences of environmental stress can be shown to coincide with a known historical narrative. This book will establish that nexus of science and social science by demonstrating correlations among the late-eighteenth-century climate anomaly, the onset of the El Niño or La Niña cycle, and historical processes . It will argue that—not coincidentally—these phenomena coincided with one of the most critical periods in history, termed the Age of 2 • cursed by nature Revolution.1 From the mid-eighteenth century through the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Atlanticworld from Boston to Barbados and beyond underwent political upheavals culminating in the United States’ War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution .2 This book builds upon the foundations laid by hard science and rests on the scientific data provided by research in historical climatology, then incorporates the techniques and theories from the field of disaster studies. It accepts the scientific evidence of prolonged and severe weather sequences in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, what one of the leading scholars terms “spasmodic climatic interludes.”3 Borrowing from multidisciplinary work in economics, sociology, political science, and international relations, it will show how disaster in the Caribbean generated both positive and negative consequences throughout the Atlantic basin. The timeline of disaster placed alongside a chronology of political, economic , and social events demonstrates causal relationships between scientific facts and historical processes.4 This juxtaposition makes clear that processes and events that traditionally have been attributed to political, economic, and/or social forces were impacted by, and often caused by, weather-induced environmental crises. The Science The science that underpins this study is based on historical climatology, particularly studies of fluctuating temperature cycles and climate change. Beginning with a handful of studies in the 1990s, teams of researchers all over the globe contributed the results of their individual projects to an ever-growing body of knowledge about temperature fluctuations occurring over several millennia.5 These collective efforts have established beyond a reasonable doubt that the temperature of the planet varies, sometimes reaching extremes. One such extreme occurred from the mid1400s to approximately 1850, during which the earth’s climate experienced cooler-than-normal temperatures, a cycle that is known as the Little Ice Age.6 Around 1850, the Little Ice Age began to wane, and the earth entered into a period of warmer temperatures, which the planet continues to experience to this day. Before that happened, however, the cool cycle was punctuated by a fifty-year warm anomaly that began around 1750 and lasted until about 1800.7 The importance of this warm period in the area cursed by nature • 3 under study was that its effects can be correlated with severe weather events that exhibit the characteristics of El Niño/La Niña sequences.8 Until the winter of 1983, when devastating floods hit northern Peru and made the international news, the extreme weather event...