 | |
| Author | Anya Zilberstein |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Climate change; colonial science |
| Genre | Environmental History; History of Science |
| Published | 2016 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 280 |
| ISBN | 9780190206598 |
A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America is a 2016 book by historian Anya Zilberstein.
A Temperate Empire explores perceptions of climate among colonists and colonial scientists in New England and Nova Scotia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [1] This time span corresponded with the Little Ice Age, a period of lower average global temperatures. Zilberstein examines how the harsh but varied climates of the "New World" challenged popular conceptions of the global climate being latitudinal, or the idea that arctic, temperate, and tropical climates surrounded the globe at particular latitudes. [2] Although such conceptions proved to be false, they were considered integral to attracting European settlers to New World colonies. [3] Moreover, Zilberstein documents how scientists and officials reacted to this challenge by advancing an understanding that emphasized the ability of humans to affect and improve the climate, primarily through agricultural cultivation. Colonists argued that settlers could create a warmer and more hospitable climate by "improving" the land, making the region suitable for further settlement. [4] As such, A Temperate Empire demonstrates that debates about climate change and humanity's role in changing the climate extend back well before the modern era.
The book also examines the ways in which colonial ideas about race and climate were considered to be intertwined. Colonists held to the notion that different races were suited to different climates, for example that white bodies were better suited to colder climates. [3] However, the difficulty of attracting settlers due in part to the harsh climate led some to revise such arguments. When Jamaican Maroons were relocated to Nova Scotia in the late eighteenth century, for instance, it became integral to argue that the climate was in fact temperate enough for black bodies. [4] Such episodes reveal further how colonial ideas and climatic realities seemed to shape each other in this period.
A Temperate Empire was awarded the 2016's Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize. [5] Dagomar Degroot, the founder of the Climate History Network, calls A Temperate Empire "one of the most intriguing climate history books ever published." [6]
Colonialism is the pursuing, establishing and maintaining of control and exploitation of land and people by a foreign group of people, the colonizers, through establishing coloniality and possibly colonies. Thereby keeping the colonized land and people socio-economically othered and subaltern to the colonizers and the metropole. While commonly advanced as an imperial regime, colonialism can take the more particular form of settler colonialism, when colonial settlers pursue a more complete and potentially autonomous colonization of the land and people, often towards a replacement and possibly even genocide of the native populations.
The Tuscarora are an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands in Canada and the United States. They are an Iroquoian Native American and First Nations people, based in New York and Ontario.
The Thirteen Colonies were a group of British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America during the 17th and 18th centuries. Grievances against the imperial government led the 13 colonies to begin uniting in 1774 and expelling British officials by 1775. Assembled at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, they appointed George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army to fight the American Revolutionary War. In 1776, Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence as the United States of America. Defeating invading British armies with French help, the Thirteen Colonies gained sovereignty with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
During the Age of Discovery, a large scale colonization of the Americas, involving a number of European countries, took place primarily between the late 15th century and the early 19th century. The Norse had explored and colonized areas of Europe and the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 AD. However, due to its long duration and importance, the later colonization by the European powers involving the continents of North America and South America is more well-known.
France began colonizing the Americas in the 16th century and continued into the following centuries as it established a colonial empire in the Western Hemisphere. France established colonies in much of eastern North America, on several Caribbean islands, and in South America. Most colonies were developed to export products such as fish, rice, sugar, and furs.
Lunenburg is a port town on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, Canada. Founded in 1753, the town was one of the first British attempts to settle Protestants in Nova Scotia.
King Philip's War was an armed conflict in 1675–1676 between a group of indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands and the English New England Colonies and their indigenous allies. The war is named for Metacomet, the Pokanoket chief and sachem of the Wampanoag who adopted the English name Philip because of the friendly relations between his father Massasoit and the Plymouth Colony. The war continued in the most northern reaches of New England until the signing of the Treaty of Casco Bay on April 12, 1678.
The Barbados Slave Code of 1661, officially titled as An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes, was a law passed by the Parliament of Barbados to provide a legal basis for slavery in the English colony of Barbados. It is the first comprehensive Slave Act, and the code's preamble, which stated that the law's purpose was to "protect them [slaves] as we do men's other goods and Chattels", established that black slaves would be treated as chattel property in the island's court.
Shelburne is a town located in southwestern Nova Scotia, Canada.
Scottish colonisation of the Americas comprised a number of failed or abandoned Scottish settlements in North America; a colony at Darien on the Isthmus of Panama; and a number of wholly or largely Scottish settlements made after the Acts of Union 1707, and those made by the enforced resettlement after the Battle of Culloden and the Highland Clearances.
The Mystic massacre – also known as the Pequot massacre and the Battle of Mystic Fort – took place on May 26, 1637 during the Pequot War, when a force from the Connecticut Colony under Captain John Mason and their Narragansett and Mohegan allies set fire to the Pequot Fort near the Mystic River. They shot anyone who tried to escape the wooden palisade fortress and killed most of the village. There were between 400 and 700 Pequots killed during the attack; the only Pequot survivors were warriors who were away in a raiding party with their sachem Sassacus.
Pekka Johannes Hämäläinen is a Finnish historian who has been the Rhodes Professor of American History at the University of Oxford since 2012. He was formerly in the history department at University of California, Santa Barbara.
Colonial American military history is the military record of the Thirteen Colonies from their founding to the American Revolution in 1775.
Jack Philip Greene is an American historian, specializing in Colonial American history and Atlantic history.
Ada Ferrer is a Cuban-American historian. She is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American Studies at New York University. She was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book Cuba: An American History.
The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prizes are awarded each year by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Nominees must be women normally resident in North America who have published a book in the previous year. One prize recognizes an author's first book that "deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality", and the other prize recognizes "a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality."
Joseph McLean Hall Jr. is a professor, writer, and historian at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine where he specializes in early modern American and Atlantic history, particularly focusing on Native American, European, and environmental interactions in North America. He is a nationally recognized historian for his research in Native American history and in addition to his work in academia, he often writes articles that contribute to newspapers and gives presentations to public audiences. Hall is currently working on a book project concerning the Maine Coast and the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area in collaboration with Bates faculty in the natural sciences. He is an associate professor at Bates in the History department and the Environmental Studies (ES) program, having recently chaired the ES program and multiple hiring committees for new ES faculty. He also received the 2009 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching and the honor of delivering the 2018 Convocation Address at Bates.
Lorenzo Veracini is a historian and professor at Swinburne University of Technology’s Institute for Social Research. He is the editor in chief of Settler Colonial Studies and has been a key figure in the development of the field of settler colonialism. His 2010 book Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview was described as "comprehensive though succinct" and "probably the best justification of the imperative to view settler colonialism as significantly different from traditional or classical colonialism".
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 is a nonfiction book written by American historian Gordon S. Wood. Published as a clothbound hardcover in 2009 as part of the Oxford History of the United States series, the book narrates the history of the United States in the first twenty-six years following the ratification of the U. S. Constitution. The history Empire of Liberty tells privileges republicanism and political thought, characterizing the early United States as a time of growing egalitarianism unleashed by the American Revolution. The story involves both Federalists and Jeffersonians. Empire of Liberty tends to sympathize with Jeffersonians.
The Barbadian Adventurers were groups of English-descended colonists who migrated from the English colony of Barbados to establish and settle the Province of Carolina.
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