Columbian Exchange and the Environmental Turn in Early American History
Since Columbus’s discovery of the New World, the plants, diseases, animals were greatly exchanged between the Old World and the New World. In 1972, American environmental historian Alfred Crosby explained the term of “Columbian Exchange” in detail and examined its affect in the Atlantic world.[1] Then Columbian Exchange became a good lens for historians to explore cultural encounters between the Old World and the New World since the 1492. Like Crosby, Jared Diamond and William McNeil are also predecessors in applying ecological perspective into historical studies.[2]
In the field of early American history, enlightened by these scholars, early American historians have explored history in this way. In this paper, focusing on the Indian-White relationships, depopulation of Native Americans and a new synthesis on the historical writing of early American history, I am going to consider how the Columbian Exchange renews our understanding of early American history.
The Environmental Turn in Early American History
In the early 1980s, environmental history was totally new in American history. However, when the mainstream of American historians started to criticize the role of capitalism in interpreting early American history, environmental perspective gave historians an opportunity to explore history in an alternative way. In Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, Donald Worster criticized the main interpretations of American history in terms of capitalism. Worster believed that Max Weber, Adam Smith and Karl Marx could not help historians to understand American histories well, because they ignored the importance of ecological factors in it, especially the ecological catastrophe on the 1930s plains.[3] Noticing the insufficiency of materialism analytical approach, he asked historians to pay more attention to environmental factors, which greatly illuminated Richard White, William Cronon and Carolyn Merchant’s works on environmental history. In 1980, Richard White was one of the most important representatives who attempted to explain American history in terms of environmental change. Taking Island County, Washington, primarily composed of Whidbey and Camano islands in Puget Sound as a good case study, White examined its changes from 1850 to the present. White discussed the initial settlement by white farmers, the spurious and short-lived attempt to develop a market agriculture and a commercial center in Puget Sound, the two phases of the forest economy, the attempt to settle the logged-off lands, and the impact of developers and summer-home owners on the natural landscape. Focusing on these topics, White wanted to discuss the economy of the Salish Indians and its impact on the environmental and social change in Whidbey Island.[4] In evaluating the contribution of this book, William Cronon believes that “Richard White’s great achievement was to discover in the past of this seemingly obscure pair of islands a series of changes that have extraordinarily broad implications for the history of the Pacific Northwest, the trans-Mississippi West, and even North America generally.”[5]
Although White’s book was very original, it had fewer readers than it deserved. One reason was that White filled his text with nearly as many nonhuman actors as human ones; another reason was that it was a book on local history and the relationships between Native Americans and Americans in Washington. However, it became a classic in the field of American environmental history, which encouraged more historians to devote themselves to explore environmental history.
Like White, William Cronon also played very important role in adopting environmental perspective into early American history. In 1983, Cronon published his book — Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, in which he examined the relationships of Indians and colonists, as well as the ecological change in New England. When historians reflected the rise of environmental history, they highly evaluated it. Dan Flores argues that it “still strikes us as right today because it has become such a model for scholars writing environmental histories of place, or bioregional histories as they are commonly called now.”[6] Rhys Isaac claims that “future work will combine social cultural exploration with the landscape-ecological perspective introduced by William Cronon.”[7] In an American Historical Review conversation, the AHR editor thinks that it “is a perennial staple on undergraduate and graduate reading lists, and is, I would venture, one of the handful of monographs that virtually every practicing historians has read.”[8] Like White, through exploring environmental history, Cronon set up a good example for historians to pay more attention to ecological factors in early American history.
Moreover, Carolyn Merchant also promoted the environmental turn in early American history. In 1980, Merchant finished her first book on environmental history, in which she discussed the attitudes of the Western Europeans towards nature from medieval through modern times. In seeking to understand how people conceptualized nature in the Scientific Revolution, she asked not about unchanging essences, but about connections between social change and changing constructions of nature. According to her, “between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the image of an organic cosmos with a living female earth at its center gave way to a mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstructed as dead and passive, to be dominated and controlled by humans.”[9] In her book, she dealt with the economic, cultural and scientific changes through which this vast transformation came about.
Moreover, she considered the ecological revolution in New England. By saying ecological revolution, she meant major transformations in human relations with non-human nature. These revolutions, she argued that “arise from changes, tensions and contradictions that develop between a society’s mode of production and reproduction. These dynamics in turn support the acceptance of new forms of consciousness, ideas, images and worldviews.”[10] Central to this perspective was an understanding that nature was a socially constructed concept, which was defined in different ways by different groups. Merchant explored two ecological revolutions in New England: one was a colonial ecological revolution which happened in the 17th century. Another was a subsequent capitalist ecological revolution which occurred between 1776 and 1860. Merchant advocated a new paradigm based on ecological thinking was needed to replace the exploitative one based on patriarchy, capitalism, and the domination of nature. Through examining the changeable consciousness of nature and the ecological revolution in the 17th and 18th century, Merchant advocated historians to explore new territories and rethink the historical writing of early American history.
Before the 1980s, historians rarely paid their attention to environmental history. However, with the help of White, Cronon and Merchant, ecological perspective was applied into early American history.[11]
[1] Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
[2] Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Doubleday, 1976).
[3] Donald, Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
[4] Richard White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999) and The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650- 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Richard White, “Environmental History: Watching a Field Mature,” Pacific Historical Review 70 (2001), 103. The original essay is “Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field,” Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985), 297-335.
[5] William Cronon, “Forward,” in Richard White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), xii.
[6] Dan Flores, “Review: Twenty Years on: Thoughts on ‘Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the
Ecology of New England,’” Agricultural History, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Autumn, 2004), 496.
[7] Rhys Isaac, “Review: The New England Mentalité: Ecologies, Structures, and Longues Durées from Algonquian to Yankee,” Reviews in American History, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Jun., 1984), 175.
[8] Richard C. Hoffmann, Nancy Langston, James C. McCann, Peter C. Perdue and Lise Sedrez, “AHR Conversation: Environmental Historians and Environmental Crisis,” The American Historical Review, December 2008, 113: 1431–1432.
[9] Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (), xvi.
[10] Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 2.
[11] White and Cronon still published several other books and articles, which also helped early American historians to adopt an environmental perspective into early American history, see William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996) and Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991) and his articles: William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Mar., 1992), 1347-1376 and “Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Mar., 1990), 1122-1131; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and his articles “Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Mar., 1990), 1111-1116, “The Nationalization of Nature,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 86, No. 3, (Dec., 1999), 976-986, “Discovering Nature in North America,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 79, No. 3, Discovering America: A Special Issue (Dec., 1992), 874-891, and “American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Aug., 1985), 297-335.
No comments:
Post a Comment