Conclusion: Caribbean Environmental History since 1850

Abstract

Abstract The concluding chapter sketches the continuing evolution of Caribbean landscapes and seascapes, the regimes of disease and health, and the role of natural disasters in the period after c.1850. It again centers Alexander von Humboldt, who, before his death in 1859, witnessed some of the new forces transforming the Caribbean environment, including the burgeoning power of the United States, the fracturing of the colonial system, the decline of slavery, the rise of peasant smallholdings, new technologies as in railroads and steamships, and rapidly growing urban populations. The region’s health history since 1850, and especially since 1970, has seen overall improvement and a reduction in the toll of infectious disease, due in part to an unusually rapid epidemiological transition from an old regime in which infectious disease and child malnutrition exerted the strongest influences upon mortality to a new one in which “diseases of affluence” end the vast majority of lives. Still, epidemics continued to batter the modern Caribbean, and healthcare remained unequally distributed. Dramatic and traumatic disasters likewise continued to beset the region, their impact shaped by ever shifting social, political, economic, and cultural forces at work—particularly in the modern era, increased urbanization and tourism. In sum, the environmental history of the Caribbean since 1850 has remained a function of the region’s place within the global economy and of its geographical and deep historical legacies. Although many key forces gradually diminished or disappeared, including slavery, the long legacies of the past still exert their grip across the Caribbean region.