Slavery and the Environment in the Atlantic World

From the spread of disease on Carolina rice plantations to crop devastation from hurricanes in the Caribbean, the proliferation of plantation economies through the Atlantic World transformed environments. In turn, the natural world shaped the lives of both enslavers and the enslaved. Unpredictable environments forced enslavers and the enslaved to continually adapt their economic activities and settlement patterns, and struggles between enslavers and their enslaved men, women, and children took place within the broader context of these changing environments. Journeying from the Caribbean to North and South America to Scotland, Slavery and the Environment in the Atlantic World explores how enslavers exploited both the enslaved and the land, and how the environment often dictated both slaveholders' power and enslaved people's resistance. The result is a hemispheric view of the relationship between slavery and the environment that has hitherto been understudied. The contributors to Slavery and Environment in the Atlantic World reorient how we think about the environment: less as a passive object that enslavers and the enslaved acted upon, and more as an agent and a presence in the history of slavery in the Atlantic World.