Colonial Cataclysms: Climate, Landscape, and Memory in Mexico's Little Ice Age: Latin American Landscapes
Autor Bradley Skopyken Limba Engleză Paperback – 15 oct 2024
This book chases water and soil across the colonial Mexican landscape, through the fields and towns of New Spain’s Native subjects, and in and out of some of the strongest climate anomalies of the last thousand or more years. The pursuit identifies and explains the making of two unique ecological crises, the product of the interplay between climatic and anthropogenic processes. It charts how Native farmers responded to the challenges posed by these ecological rifts with creative use of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds, environmental engineering, and conflict within and beyond the courts. With a new reading of the colonial climate and by paying close attention to land, water, and agrarian ecologies forged by farmers, Skopyk argues that colonial cataclysms—forged during a critical conjuncture of truly unprecedented proportions, a crucible of human and natural forces—unhinged the customary ways in which humans organized, thought about, and used the Mexican environment.
This book inserts climate, earth, water, and ecology as significant forces shaping colonial affairs and challenges us to rethink both the environmental consequences of Spanish imperialism and the role of Indigenous peoples in shaping them.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780816555260
ISBN-10: 0816555265
Pagini: 336
Ilustrații: 34 b&w illustrations, 26 maps, 9 tables
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 19 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: University of Arizona Press
Colecția University of Arizona Press
Seria Latin American Landscapes
ISBN-10: 0816555265
Pagini: 336
Ilustrații: 34 b&w illustrations, 26 maps, 9 tables
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 19 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: University of Arizona Press
Colecția University of Arizona Press
Seria Latin American Landscapes
Notă biografică
Bradley Skopyk is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Binghamton University. His dissertation won prizes from the American Society of Environmental History and the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Watermarks: The Colonial Mexican Pluvial and Its Hydrographic Archive
2. Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries: Managing the Ecological Revolution in Early Colonial Tlaxcala
3. A Drunken Landscape: Pulque, Mule Trains, and the New Wastelands
4. Embedded Lives: Silt, Water, and Politics
5. Memories of a Devious Landscape: The Commissioner’s Report of 1761
Conclusion
Appendix A: Reconstructing Colonial Mexico’s Climate
Appendix B: A Framework of Soil-Water Dynamics
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Watermarks: The Colonial Mexican Pluvial and Its Hydrographic Archive
2. Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries: Managing the Ecological Revolution in Early Colonial Tlaxcala
3. A Drunken Landscape: Pulque, Mule Trains, and the New Wastelands
4. Embedded Lives: Silt, Water, and Politics
5. Memories of a Devious Landscape: The Commissioner’s Report of 1761
Conclusion
Appendix A: Reconstructing Colonial Mexico’s Climate
Appendix B: A Framework of Soil-Water Dynamics
Notes
References
Index
Recenzii
"Colonial Cataclysms is a fascinating journey through the archives of water, soil, and climate. Through Bradley Skopyk’s exploration of what he calls the “hydrographic archives,” this study overturns earlier historiographical assumptions in the fields of colonial New Spain, Indigenous history, agricultural history, and climate history."—Natale Zappia, New Mexico Historical Review
“This excellently researched study contributes innovative arguments to important ecological and historical debates around climate change and landscapes related to the Little Ice Age and its human and economic consequences for two riversheds in the central region of colonial New Spain. It integrates scientific methods for data analysis with historical methods for the cultural interpretation of diverse primary sources to weave a good story.”—Cynthia Radding, author of Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850
“This excellently researched study contributes innovative arguments to important ecological and historical debates around climate change and landscapes related to the Little Ice Age and its human and economic consequences for two riversheds in the central region of colonial New Spain. It integrates scientific methods for data analysis with historical methods for the cultural interpretation of diverse primary sources to weave a good story.”—Cynthia Radding, author of Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850
Descriere
Colonial Cataclysms explores the human and environmental consequences of the global climate event called the Little Ice Age as it played out in central Mexico during the era of Spanish imperialism. It focuses on the great floods, massive soil erosion, and human adaptations to these cataclysms.