"An Excellent Hunter": Environmental Creolization and the Paths to Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Amazonia

Abstract

Abstract: If slave societies in the Atlantic world were based on "creole ecologies," that is, on bringing enslaved African workers to the Americas to cultivate an Asian crop (sugar), then how would those workers' acquisition of environmental knowledge alter such a project? In this article I argue that a fruitful response to that question lies in the concept of environmental creolization: the process of familiarization with New World environments that enslaved people from Africa developed upon arriving in the Americas. After tracing its origins in the convergence between the historiographies of transatlantic slavery and environmental history, I discuss the trajectories of three Black individuals living in nineteenth-century Amazonia who used their knowledge of local environments to carve better working conditions inside the institution, and to slowly exit it. Their cases not only illustrate the centrality of environmental knowledge in the tropical and forested areas of the Americas, but also illuminate how a successful environmental creolization greatly impacted contests over autonomy and freedom throughout the Atlantic world.