To Lose Myself in a Wood': Proximate Ecologies in Richard Ligon's True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados

A recent study in the journal Nature made a compelling case for correlating the “Anthropocene” to the history of Anglo-European imperialism. Noting the significant decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide following the... [ view full abstract ]

A recent study in the journal Nature made a compelling case for correlating the “Anthropocene” to the history of Anglo-European imperialism. Noting the significant decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide following the destruction of indigenous populations and agricultural systems, as well as the geographic redistribution of plant and animal species known as the Columbian Exchange, this report, as Dana Luciano has noted, was the first to link planetary environmental disruption to the genocidal course of empire. Taking this view of the ecological dimensions of geopolitical history, our panel similarly maps the long nineteenth century onto an extended chronology. Emphasizing the continuities of commercial and biotic processes unleashed with early colonialism and ominously unfolding in the climate of the present, the panel will explore the impacts of empire, slavery, and global capitalism on both human societies and nonhuman ecosystems across a range of colonial settings and commercial networks. With special attention to the traffic in literally consumable commodities—Caribbean sugar, Pacific breadfruit, Hawaiian poi, American meat—the papers reveal not only the ways settler colonialism and extractive capitalism have disrupted local ecologies and local food cultures, but also how they contribute to planetary crises of climate change and mass extinction. 

Andrea Knutson opens the panel with a pre-history of the ecological issues that will emerge within plantation economies across the long nineteenth century by articulating an ecological register for what Susan Scott Parrish calls an “experimental social zone” between metropole and colony in Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. Knutson argues that the Historyproblematizes any vision of artisanal or agricultural progress through its focus on the material resistances of a tropical climate that literally consumes tools with rust and of an indigenous forest that resists naturalist representation. With both atmosphere and forest, tropical materiality compels Ligon, prior to the emergence of Barbados as the richest sugar economy in the British Empire, to represent the island as a “contact” zone marked by unsettling ecological proximities or adjacencies that trouble what Anna Brickhouse calls “the assumed inevitability of European settlement.”