Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (review)

This exhaustively researched study of Cuba's social and economic situation in the last decades of the eighteenth century is novel and original, not only in the wealth of new information it provides but also in the author's attempt to study the island's situation according to the three levels of history that Fernand Braudel's work on the Mediterranean has suggested. Johnson provides a wealth of information on the day-to-day political events, administrative decisions, and bureaucratic conflicts of Cuba in the period from 1748 to 1804, with special attention to the roughly 30 years from the retaking of Havana in 1763 to the period of political and agricultural crisis in the mid-1790s. This history of events, however, is only part of a deeper study of economic and political conjunctures involving the rivalry of the British, French, and Spanish empires and their changing economic fortunes during the height of the Bourbon reforms. This was a period during which an increasing struggle between metropolitan exclusivist mercantilist policies and local pressures for more open trade—often put into practice in the form of contraband—came sharply into focus. In addition, the book presents a deeper structural analysis, in this case by examining the climatic conditions that beset the Caribbean in these years and how they created a context that provoked and in many ways influenced the patterns of interaction and the political actions taken and the decisions made. For the author, what was most important in determining the history of this period was not the Bourbon reforms or the ideas of the Age of Revolution, but rather an extraordinary climatic anomaly that produced a half- century of warm temperatures that provided the stimulus and the context for striking events in politics, war, and economics. It was no accident that this tumultuous political period and a El Niño era coincided.

Johnson's deus ex machina for this structural history is the cycle of El Niño/La Niña events (the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, or ENSO) that occurs when the Pacific waters warm, producing heavy rainfall on the coast of South America. El Niño effects are usually felt in the Caribbean as periods of extended drought, followed by heavy rains or increased hurricane activity during the subsequent La Niña phase. Johnson argues that 18 such cycles took place during the half-century in question and that the result was the creation of emergency conditions in the Caribbean—Cuba in particular—that promoted increasing colonial disregard for exclusivist trade restrictions. As intense hurricane activity, earthquakes, and heavy rains destroyed Cuba's agricultural supply and made it difficult to obtain food from traditional Spanish imperial sources like Mexico, peoples and administrators were forced to seek remedy in the free ports or the colonies of other nations. Necessity knew no restriction. Food shortages were followed by disease that exacerbated the catastrophe. This was especially true during the 1770s when the search for food increasingly turned toward the English islands, themselves victims of the climatic conditions, and to the mainland colonies that were struggling for their own economic advantage and eventually for their political independence.

Essentially, the climatic conditions are seen here as the ultimate explanation for many events: the fall of Havana, the liberalization of trade policy, Spanish military failures, and growing colonial dissatisfactions. Free trade was not only a matter of finding markets for Cuban sugar and tobacco: it was also about feeding Cuba's people. As Johnson states, "the need to cope with extremely dire circumstances as much as progressive thinking broke down the Spanish adherence to mercantilism" (p. 200). Charles III and his administration faced the problem well, but Charles IV did not and his failure in the 1790s caused a growing resentment in Cuba.

The book is arranged in seven chapters that carry the narrative...