Environmental History


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Peasant Power in Andean History

Like many global hot spots of the twentieth century, the Andes is marked by its history of structural inequality, racial conflict, and legacies of poverty and violence.

Indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorians Facing the Twenty-First Century: Marc Becker

A collection of essays on the construction and emergence of ethnic identities in the Ecuadorian Andes, edited by Marc Becker. The authors of the volume examine Afro-Ecuadorians and indigenous communities through the lens of politics, culture, religion, gender, and the environment to better understand the array of social problems facing the country. French sociologist Manuela…

The Deepest Wounds: Thomas Rogers

Thomas Rogers’ The Deepest Wounds argues that Pernambuco sugar planters “saw no distinction between land and labor” (8). Enslaved and free workers on cane plantations were demoted in elites’ eyes to a level equal with the animals and the earth – merely another natural resource to be commanded by the planters (72-73). This monograph shows…

Chilean Foreign Policy: 2008

What is Chile’s current foreign policy? Chile’s current foreign policy strongly resembles the foreign policy of the Portales period, emphasizing political neutrality, non-intervention, sovereign equality, regional stability, and commercial expansion. The types of problems it faces are also similar to that era, but not specific to it, insofar as it has yet to resolve territorial…

Brazilian Foreign Policy: 2008

What is Brazil’s current foreign policy? “Brazil is not a small country. It does not, and it cannot, have the foreign policy of a small country.”[1] These words, from the current Minister of External Relations express the essence of Brazil’s foreign policy. It is a country in pursuit of major power status and, as such,…

With Broadax and Firebrand: Warren Dean

Warren Dean’s With Broadax and Firebrand is a history of the destructive impact of human activity on the Atlantic forests of Brazil. Chronicling social attitudes towards nature and the impact of those attitudes on the forests from pre-Columbian times to the present, he highlights the ultimately unproductive exploitation of Brazilian natural resources, which left the…

Changing Fortunes: Karl Zimmerer

Karl Zimmerer’s Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in the Peruvian Andes looks at agriculture systems and species biodiversity in the Peruvian Andes in the late twentieth century. Focusing on an indigenous community in Paucartambo region, near Cuzco, the author explores the divergent fortunes of different communities in this area as they adapted to changing…

A Plague of Sheep: Elinor Melville

Elinor Melville’s A Plague of Sheep (1994) examines the effects of sheep ranching on the environment in the Valle de Mezquital in colonial Mexico. Melville traces the processes that turned a wooded, well-irrigated landscape into desolate pasture lands. She weaves disease, territorial control, ungulate irruptions, and the collapse and consolidation of regional land tenancy into…

Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador: Suzanne Alchon

Suzanne Alchon: Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador (1991) explores the relationship between epidemic diseases and indigenous populations in the north-central highlands of Ecuador in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Alchon argues that appreciating the role of epidemics in everything from food security to politics is critical to understanding changes in regional history in…

Del Valle al Monte: Christoph Stadel

Citation Stadel, Christoph. “Del Valle al Monte: Altitudinal Patterns of Agricultural Activities in the Patate-Pelileo Area of Ecuador.” Mountain Research and Development 6, no. 1 (1986): 53–62.

The Andean Past: Magnus Mörner

Magnus Mörner’s The Andean Past: Land, Societies, and Conflicts (1985) is a wide-ranging survey of Andean history since conquest, focusing on classic political, social, and economic themes. In his discussion of Andean rural history, Mörner says historians should view the development of haciendas in terms of their wider commercial networks and argues that international export…

Huarochirí: Karen Spalding

Karen Spalding’s history of colonial Peru, Huarochirí, begins with the origins of Andean society, following social changes from pre-Inca days until the height of colonial rule. Written in the mid-1980s amidst a brutal economic crisis that inordinately impacted indigenous communities in areas like Huarochirí, this monograph seems an attempt to revalorize Andean society at a…

Miners of the Red Mountain: Peter Bakewell

Peter Bakewell’s Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545-1650 (1984) looks at the changing systems of labor and production used at the silver mines of Potosí in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Bakewell questions the long-held assumption that the mines were overwhelmingly worked by forced laborers, arguing instead that declining…

Changes in the Land: William Cronon

William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) looks at environmental change and human landscaping in pre-Columbian and colonial New England. Cronon argues that what we think of as “nature” on the so-called American frontier was not an untouched and pristine wilderness, but a heavily landscaped environment where…

Farm and Factory: Nicholas Cushner

Nicholas Cushner’s Farm and Factory (1982) examines Jesuit hacienda holdings in the Los Chillos valley on the southeastern slopes of Quito between 1600 and the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. Cushner uses the Black Robes to look at the rise of agrarian capitalism in colonial Quito as seen through changing systems land tenancy in…

Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Steve Stern

Stern, Steve J. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Steve Stern’s Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 centers on colonial Huamanga, a strategic military and economic region along the route between Lima and Potosí. It was…

Conquest and Agrarian Change: Robert Keith

Robert Keith’s 1976 Conquest and Agrarian Change: The Emergence of the Hacienda System on the Peruvian Coast, explored the rise of Spanish plantations in seven valleys along Peru’s southern coast in the second half of the sixteenth century. Keith emphasized the legacy of pre-Colombian societies in the development of the hacienda, arguing that in addition…

Los Indigenas de Altura del Ecuador: Emilio Bonifaz

Emilio Bonifaz’s Los Indigenas de Altura Del Ecuador (1979) is an agricultural history of Ecuador’s northern highlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, told from the viewpoint of one of the country’s wealthiest elites. While much of the social analysis of indigenous communities is based on now-discredited theories of scientific racism, his study of…

Economic Organization of the Inka State: John Murra

John Murra developed his now-famous theory of the Andean “vertical archipelago” in Formaciones Económicas y Políticas del Mundo Andino (1975, trans. Economic Organization of the Inka State, 1980), which grew out of his research in the Peruvian highlands between 1958 and 1973. Murra argued that pre-Columbian societies in the Andes sought to control a range of ecological zones…