Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 (review)

Addressing what has long been the province of anthropologists and political scientists, Matthew Mulcahy’s book is a welcome and timely entry into a growing genre in history that utilizes disaster and its aftermath as theoretical and/or analytical frameworks to establish change over time. Related to, but distinct from traditional environmental history, disaster studies focus on a cataclysmic event or series of events as turning points in a region’s history. Logically, Mulcahy has chosen hurricanes to investigate the greater British Caribbean in the colonial period. A wealth of primary sources from traveler’s accounts, journals, meteorological accounts, colonial office records, and visual evidence such as woodcuts and engravings provide a substantive base of evidence for his study

One of the most difficult challenges facing historians is to demonstrate that a particular disaster was the cause for change—what political scientists Richard S. Olson and Vincent T. Gawronski term a “critical juncture.” Mulcahy solves this problem in three ways. First, he removes hurricane from a purely localist perspective by expanding the geographic scope of his study. He examines a wide area under British control from the West Indies to South Carolina, a region that was always vulnerable to hurricane strikes. Second, he places storms and their aftermath into imperial perspective by demonstrating how the mother country responded to disaster in its far flung empire. Finally, the author takes a long chronological view, beginning when the British were first established in the Caribbean in 1624 through the cataclysmic hurricane season of 1780, recognized by scientists and historians alike as the most deadly in history.

The book begins by defining the problems that the Europeans encountered when they came to the Americas, and he details well the familiar tales of misery such as food shortages and disease. The discovery of the Americas gave impetus to a scientific revolution, and Europeans set about collecting information about the strange phenomena of the New World; they were particularly fascinated by the devastating power of hurricanes. One chapter analyzes building techniques from substantial stone structures built to withstand hurricane winds to the modest, traditional wattle-and-daub houses that were levelled even in a minor storm. The author introduces the economic consequences of disaster by demonstrating how much damage was done when the two great cash crops, sugar and rice, were destroyed. A long term consequence was that Caribbean planters were forced to take on an inordinate amount of debt to survive. If they were unlucky enough to become the victims of sequential storms, they faced financial ruin, and local officials took steps to protect hurricane victims from creditors. Mulcahy’s strongest chapters deal with public attitudes towards disaster. When the news of a “calamity” arrived, charity campaigns were organized in the mother country and in the colonies to aid the victims. Politics in the collection and distribution of the aid—which came in many forms from food, to cloth and clothing, to specie, and to loan guarantees—always played a significant role in disaster’s aftermath. The distribution of the amount and kind of relief was always an opportunity for confrontation pitting public officials in London against victims in the colonies. Mulcahy uses the disastrous season of 1780 when sequential storms struck the British Caribbean as a case study to show just how contentious the politics of disaster could become.

The current debates about climate change and its consequences upon human endeavors virtually guarantee that more studies in this vein will be produced in the future. Because of its innovative approach, its solid research, and its strong contribution to the debate about the consequences of hurricanes, Mulcahy’s book will become one of the seminal works in this growing trend in historic disaster studies.