Mary Draper

I am currently writing an environmental history of the maritime British Caribbean. In a region settled by European and Indigenous powers as well as peoples of African descent, sea lanes and shorelines became battlegrounds for territorial claims and resource extraction. Environmental knowledge was key to living, laboring, and empire-building in the British Caribbean. My research reconstructs that knowledge, paying close attention to how—and from whom—British colonists amassed information about the region’s ever-changing waterscapes and landscapes. In doing so, it charts how London officials came to recognize the importance of this local knowledge to the imperial project.

Blending approaches from environmental, maritime, and climate histories, this project draws on manuscript sources from twenty archives across Great Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States, mining them for descriptions of the Caribbean’s weather, landscapes, and seascapes. These sources—from letters to unpublished histories to personal papers—provide valuable insight into how people conceived of and adapted to their ever-changing surroundings. Whereas the writings of London officials or published works often relayed incorrect or outdated information, personal papers and written correspondence—from people living and laboring in the region—capture a more intimate understanding of the Caribbean’s changing environments. Residents understood how daily winds, churning tides, and complex currents shaped life in ways that officials failed to initially recognize. As a result, my research not only contributes to our understanding of how local actors facilitated empire-building in the early modern British Atlantic, it also expands our understanding of the environmental history of the Caribbean by centering transimperial seascapes and contested coastlines, rather than plantation landscapes.