EUROPEAN COLONIZERS BROUGHT along their own belief systems and concepts of land use as well as new biological entities. Intense, direct control over the natural world, concepts of property, ideas for how a settlement should be laid out, and the priorities placed on maximizing output from a given portion of land represented a new, frequently traumatic experience for tropical landscapes and their occupants in what has become known as “ecological imperialism.” We can find one of the more obvious examples of this new ideology of exploitation in the form of Iberian desires for Neotropical silver and gold. Seeing the rich use of ores by Indigenous populations, the Spanish set about fervent survey and extraction. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, after just one hundred years, Spain alone had extracted three times Europe’s previous silver wealth. The scale of these operations shows in the size of mining cities that emerged, such as the high-altitude city of Potosí, Bolivia, which by 1660 was home to 100,000 people—more than Madrid and Rome at the time. Forced movement of enslaved individuals and the flocking of Europeans, among others seeking to make their fortune, led to rampant deforestation to fuel both mining and construction. Similarly, when rich gold deposits were found in the current state of Minas Gerais in Brazil in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the region’s dry tropical forests were destroyed to make way for mines, pastures, crop fields, and villages to support the thousands of people seeking quick enrichment. In the case of silver, more insidious environmental impacts also came about as a result of the use of mercury to more efficiently extract this precious metal from the sixteenth century onward. At mining locations such as Huancavelica in Peru, the release of mercury into soils, water systems, and the atmosphere, not to mention the lungs of forced laborers, had lethal, lasting consequences visible in the chemical contents of the soils of the exploited regions to this day, with ongoing impacts on the health of contemporary inhabitants. Some of these effects were documented in pre-Columbian periods in sediment cores. However, the invading Iberian powers undoubtedly ramped them up to whole new levels to support expanding colonial infrastructure, warfare, and their economic and political designs back in Europe.20
Colonial Iberians also brought their ideas of where and how to live to their new tropical colonies. In many cases, the Spanish built their administrative centers on top of the Indigenous cities they so admired. However, they often neglected the traditional knowledge that had dictated landscape use prior to their arrival. Hernán Cortés famously refused to abandon Tenochtitlan despite the fact that, without Indigenous knowledge of water and field management, the colonial residents were vulnerable to stagnant water and seasonal flooding. Similarly, in the Philippines, the Spanish built many towns and churches in river valleys, then later abandoned them due to flooding. In other cases, the Spanish, and their Portuguese counterparts, made their own towns and cities, often laying them out around central plazas, with key, wide streets and specified sectors for craft activities, just as they had back home. Environmental historian Shawn Miller has noted that, amazingly, nearly 50 percent of people in Spain’s American colonies lived in cities by 1600, something not achieved in England until the mid-nineteenth century. Although this figure is likely problematic, given that many Indigenous people deliberately fled into the hinterlands and rural areas to avoid census recording, it does show the emphasis that the Spanish placed on attaining their urban ideals. Across the wider landscape, analysis of historical records shows that the Spanish also tried to organize the populations in their new tropical realms for maximum political and economic control. This included the system of reducciones (or aldeias in the case of Portuguese realms) from the sixteenth century, which forcibly relocated many Indigenous people into settlements. This enabled easier taxation, census counting, enculturation, and recruitment of Indigenous populations through encomiendas, royal grants of effectively enslaved labor to chosen Spanish elites. In the case of the Philippines, this involved centralized cabacera towns that were frequently built around a church and town hall, with the former holding immense power over the labor and disciplining of local Indigenous populations. These systems often also benefited Indigenous alcaldes (mayors) and gobernadorcillos (low-level governors) who sought to gain influence. Still visible in the building plans and architecture of key cities such as Vigan and Taal today, these novel forms of settlement organization could all impact the landscape, demanding wood for construction, more intensive cultivation of fields for tribute and for larger, urban populations, and greater intensity of domesticated animals in a given locality. European ideologies as to how people should live were thus transplanted from the other side of the world into the tropics.21
While the effects of mining and new types of settlement and organization could leave deep scars upon local tropical landscapes, more pervasive changes occurred as a result of the imposition of plantation agriculture. The Spanish realized that many economically seductive crops could be more productively grown in their new tropical lands, away from native pests. Prime among these examples is sugar, which originated in the tropics of New Guinea. As early as 1493, on Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas, the Spanish brought sugar for cultivation in the Caribbean, and by the sixteenth century, it was also being grown across the Canary Islands, Mexico, and Central America. The Portuguese, meanwhile, had introduced sugar to the Atlantic islands of Madeira and São Tomé and, by 1516, the shores of Brazil, planting it directly within former Indigenous field systems as a morbid symbol of what was to come. While not always grown in a strict “monoculture” at this early stage, sugar sucked nutrients from soils and led to vast deforestation for both space and the fuel for its refinement. By 1550, Madeira’s forests were in tatters, and sugar production had to be abandoned; historian Jason Moore has estimated a cumulative deforestation total of around 155 km2 in just over a century. By the 1600s, the forests of the Canary Islands and Brazil’s Atlantic coast faced similar pressures. The same type of overexploitation can also be seen in the Spanish focus on “ranches” of livestock. Here, herds of hundreds of thousands of animals were used for profit rather than subsistence. These models of land ownership, land use, and demand-driven operation were new to these landscapes and still haunt them to this day. This is not to mention European merchants’ new market-driven patterns of exploitation of wild animals such as marine mammals off tropical coasts, civet cats hunted for their skins and scent glands, and parrots captured for their feathers.22
Figure 10.3. The streets and buildings of Vigan City in the Philippines are today a World Heritage site and show the way the Spanish sought to impose their ideals of urbanism in this part of the tropics. Jason Langley / Alamy
These changes in perception of the natural world, ownership of the land, and intensity of land use to feed wider, global tastes and demands undoubtedly had massive pantropical implications. However, once again, as the historians Amélia Polóna and Jorge Pacheco have highlighted, it is important to balance the global picture with the local result. As we have seen, environments, existing Indigenous populations and traditions, and different forms of European rule could shape the ultimate outcomes of colonial Iberian tropical endeavors. Ecologies, soils, and histories of use molded the nature and impacts of sugar production in different tropical island and mainland contexts. In contrast to the Americas, gold mining in Africa followed Indigenous patterns of exploitation until the nineteenth century, as the Portuguese, mainly located on the coast, were unable to interfere directly in the mines. Similarly, different patterns of reduccíon and aldeias, seen in historical and archeological records of colonial-period settlements, shaped demography and the spread of disease to variable extents between the Caribbean, Mexico, the Philippines, religious missions in Brazil, and traditional settlements in Africa. Finally, Indigenous populations, instead of being “uncontacted” and “isolated,” could be highly active in participating in and shaping these new economic systems. More traditional approaches to food production often fed the workers and enslaved people laboring in new agricultural fi
eld systems; meanwhile historical texts state how hunter-gatherers in India and Brazil brought honey and jaguar skins, respectively, to the worldwide market. Not only that, but a number of European invaders intermarried with Indigenous populations. Although this frequently entailed its own form of power dynamics, often involving European men marrying the daughters of local elites, it did eventually result in the forming of new colonial identities and cultural mixes or, in the case of some Europeans, the abandonment of previous ways of life and the joining of new families in tropical forest environments.23
The Philippines provides a particularly elegant example of some of these more local colonial experiences. In the present-day capital of Manila, although the Spanish erected a stone-walled town to develop a clear plaza and compact urban system that was more familiar to them, they were repeatedly distressed by the appearance of a sprawling “second” Manila outside its walls. This so-called Extramuros, or “city beyond the walls,” began developing as early as 1583 and included a district, known as the Parián, inhabited by Chinese merchants and their families eager to access silver from Acapulco. It eventually dwarfed the official city, and the Spanish tried several times to remove and destroy it. Similarly, as Filipino archeologist Dr. Grace Barretto-Tesoro of the University of the Philippines puts it, “The enculturation of Indigenous populations occurred at a different pace and to different extents across the archipelago and was often dictated by local populations.” For example, Indigenous populations on Mindanao, known as the Lumad, took advantage of Spanish presence to counteract the powerful Muslim groups of the southern Philippines. Back on the terraces of Ifugao, growing, politically powerful populations actively traded with the Spanish while also raiding and resisting them. The precolonial environmental and cultural situation of the archipelago also fashioned Spanish interactions with the environment. As environmental historian Greg Bankoff has elegantly noted, endemic termites, or “white ants,” meant that only thirty to forty species of tree could be profitably felled for forts, shipbuilding, and construction by Indigenous populations and Spaniards alike. Thus, although certain key species became threatened, archival reconstruction of forest cover through time shows that blocks of overall forest remained until nineteenth-century commercialization. These local colonial ecological and cultural experiences occurred across the new Iberian realms.24
THE DECAPITATIONS AND removals of statues of Christopher Columbus up and down North America in 2020 show the degree of controversy that his legacy continues to engender. More and more Indigenous activists and institutions are calling for the replacement of Columbus reverence with a celebration of precolonial Indigenous societies and an acknowledgment that the actions of European “explorers” and their consequences for tropical cultures, populations, and landscapes are by no means cause for fanfare. The rampant advance of European diseases, alongside active enslavement, murder, abuse, and invasion, meant that the previously significant population of the Americas did not reach its former levels until the nineteenth century. The introduction of new plants and animals often permanently reconfigured ecosystems, leaving lasting legacies and conservation challenges to this day (as we will see in Chapter 13). Yet the agency of Indigenous and other marginalized groups, tropical diseases, and difficult geography could still dictate or even prevent Iberian expansion into much of the Amazon Basin, the Caribbean, North and Central America, West and Central Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. In many cases, local elites, some of whom were subordinate to existing tropical empires, grappled to make use of incoming European soldiers to further their own political advantage. Precolonial exchange systems spanning continents, as well as trades in enslaved individuals, already existed in many parts of the precolonial tropics, meaning that Europeans often tapped into established economies to apply their new ideas of towns, mining, and profit-making agricultural and pastoral extraction. However, Europeans ultimately possessed the keys to this new globalized world. Following the decimation of Indigenous populations across the Americas, with a monopoly on naval power and technologies, Europeans alone routinely and regularly plied the world’s oceans. Intending to maintain global trade and dominance, they were left in a position to exploit the resources, labor, and landscapes of the tropics on an unprecedented scale.25
Although it is seldom discussed, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, to some extent, Iberian royal monopolies and administrative flaws could actually limit the transformation wrought on tropical landscapes by colonial enterprises. In Brazil, the Caribbean, and Mexico, kings and queens reserved forests and certain tree species for state interests in building ships or fortresses. The king of Portugal controlled sixteenth-century whaling activities off Brazilian shores. Indigenous enslaved labor on new Spanish plantations was also initially regulated by royally decreed encomiendas granted to chosen nobles. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, while the church was highly active in the settlement of the archipelago, the Spanish monarchy did everything it could to control the “galleon trade,” which sent silver and gold from the Americas to the shores of the Philippines and China and saw silk and porcelain return in the opposite direction. Indeed, you might have noticed that the Iberian empires themselves have also had something of a monopoly on this very chapter. This is because the expanding Spanish and Portuguese empires, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, with some limited exceptions, primarily initiated and sought to control novel economic and cultural exchanges into and within the tropics. These systems would have been unrecognizable to the supposedly “free market” consumers of the twenty-first century. As we will see in the next chapter, however, from the seventeenth century onward, other hungry European states, institutions, and private individuals, grappling for status and power on their own continent and seeing the riches arriving on the shores of the Iberian Peninsula, made their own increasingly aggressive advances into the tropics.26
The Dutch Empire of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries sought a foothold in the Caribbean and South America as well as South and Southeast Asia. The British Empire became the largest in history between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, ruling territories on every tropical continent across a territory on which the Sun was said to never set. By the nineteenth century, the French had also established a tropical colonial empire in the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, and the Belgians had done so in Africa. These jostling competitors broke down former Iberian domination, and benefits became distributed across an increasingly wealthy European elite. The resulting new trading opportunities were nevertheless not driven by homogenous empires but rather by lots of individuals, including mobile merchants, gambling chancers, and food producers of all cultures. The seventeenth to nineteenth centuries saw the laying of the framework for the system of competitive, global flows of capital and labor we know today, as Europeans expanded existing inequalities and systems of exchange into the global sphere. A consolidation of profit-driven approaches to tropical environments and to people from the tropics saw haunting commercialization and racialization of enslaved labor in the form of the transatlantic slave trade. Intensifying plantation agriculture stripped forests on new scales to produce “cash crops” as cheaply and as abundantly as possible, simultaneously shaping and being driven by European and northern North American consumer demand. The result was a wealth imbalance between Euro-America and the tropics. The result was tropical nations plagued by issues of limited economic development, lagging infrastructure, and conservation challenges. The result was racial discrimination and violence that continue to afflict twenty-first-century societies. The result was a situation where we all, whether we like it or not, are responsible for what happens in tropical forests in the twenty-first century.
Chapter 11
GLOBALIZATION OF THE TROPICS
Every day we turn on the TV or open a newspaper to new international political squabbles, economic difficulties, and catastrophic climate change. Many tropical nations, across the
Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, are on the front lines of these issues as they try to balance economic growth with the burning of fossil fuels, poverty alleviation with biodiversity conservation, and nationalism with international communication and global solutions. It is in the tropics where islands are already beginning to disappear underwater. As global temperatures increase, ice caps melt and sea levels in the Indian and Pacific Oceans rise at a rate of around four millimeters every year. It is in the tropics where increasingly unpredictable climates are leading to both droughts and floods in the same regions in the same years. It is in the tropics where, should all tropical forests become disturbed by human deforestation and infrastructural development, a mass extinction event is looming for plants and animals. Some predict declines of as much as 30 percent of all tree species and 65 percent of ant species, and bushmeat hunting and climate change provide further challenges for the disproportionate biodiversity of these regions. It is also in the tropics where many of the fastest-growing but also the poorest populations reside, some living on less than US $1 a day, placing increasing pressures on the public health, economies, soils, and forests of these nations. The frequency and urgency with which these shocking stories are conveyed to us, as well as their occurrence often many thousands of kilometers away, might allow us to think that they represent a recent, emerging problem that is detached from the pasts and behaviors of the rest of the world. Yet, no matter how hard some of our politicians try to convince themselves, and us, of this, nothing could be further from the truth.1
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