Atlantic Environments and the American South ed. by Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson (review)

It is time for environmental historians to work outside the lines. Since the field was established more than five decades ago, environmental history has provided a way to cut across political boundaries and shed light on relationships between far-flung areas. While some of the best environmental histories have done this—from William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis to Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait—scholars writing about the American South have been slow to think beyond the region.¹ Though the South has much in common with the Caribbean and Latin America, environmental historians have only recently considered questions that reach beyond familiar boundaries.

This timely volume—which originated at a symposium at Rice University in 2016—lays out a new agenda for southern and environmental history by considering these fields within a broader Atlantic world. Despite some resonances, the fields of Atlantic, environmental, and southern history have not had much “cross-field pollination” (2). According to the volume’s editors, Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson, this is because “scholars in each burgeoning field were interested in different problems” (3). Environmental historians, for instance, addressed questions that stemmed from the American environmental movement while Atlantic historians focused on imperial power and the institution of slavery. Previous generations of southern historians viewed the environment in simplistic terms and only defined the South by the shadow of the Confederacy.

This volume brings together historians working on a variety of topics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries across many geographies. Taken together, these essays provide a helpful framework for asking the kinds of questions that will push research in new directions.

The book is divided into four sections framed around the defining themes of Atlantic history: slavery and empire. Although historians have written extensively about slavery, the first section adds new contours by considering how ideas about climate intersected with slavery. A fascinating essay by Sean Morey Smith shows how European pamphleteers shifted from describing the climate of the Carolinas as healthy to hot and disease-prone to naturalize slavery and underwrite the expansion of the institution. Elaine LaFay focuses on the plantation’s built environment through the ventilation of slave quarters. Whereas planters often promoted ventilation as a paternalistic strategy of bringing efficiency and health to the plantation, enslaved people resisted by finding other ways to ventilate their living spaces. LaFay concludes that “ventilation of slave quarters was a site of resistance” where struggles over people and nature played out (56).

The next section explores the relationship between physical landscapes and slavery. Matthew Mulcahy shows that drought posed a serious risk for enslaved people in the British Caribbean, more even than hurricanes. Mulcahy argues that plantation agriculture—particularly staple crop monoculture—made the area vulnerable and presents convincing evidence to show how drought sparked resistance from enslaved people. Focusing on the American Southeast in the seventeenth century, Hayley Negrin shows how European settlers had their expectations about gender roles and agricultural labor stymied by the realities of the physical landscape, particularly when settlers adopted Native American crops and relied on the agricultural labor of enslaved Native American women.

The third section considers the intersection of infrastructures—broadly conceived—and empire. Focusing on colonial North Carolina, Bradford J. Wood trains his attention on the Atlantic Ocean itself. According to Wood, the ocean did not promote transatlantic ties. Rather, the physically imposing coastline produced a sense of isolation, and colonists adopted subsistence lifestyles that were far removed from the capitalist plantation economy that dominated much of the coastal South. Frances Kolb uncovers how colonial traders used waterways flowing into the Lower Mississippi River to extend British trade networks and outmaneuver the Spanish as French power waned, strengthening the plantation economy and tying the region to the African slave trade.

The final section explores how empire was extended through on-the-ground knowledge of...