Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783 (Hardcover)

Hurricanes created unique challenges for colonists in the British Greater Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These storms were entirely new to European settlers and quickly became the most feared part of their physical environment, destroying staple crops and provisions, leveling plantations and towns, disrupting shipping and trade, and resulting in major economic losses for planters and widespread privation for slaves. Matthew Mulcahy examines how colonists made sense of hurricanes, how they recovered from them, and the role of the storms in shaping the development of the region's colonial settlements.

"Path-breaking and original... Mulcahy has creatively exploited the paper trails left by major seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hurricanes as probes into changing social relations in the British Caribbean." -- American Historical Review

"A rich and engaging study. Readers of Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean will add hurricanes to the list of characteristics that define the early modern Caribbean: sugar, slavery, disease, war." -- William and Mary Quarterly

"Mulcahy's vivid descriptions of Caribbean hurricanes, their impact on colonial economic and social life, and their effects on the larger Atlantic world is a most valuable contribution to the recent number of books on disasters in history." -- Environmental History

"This book will interest not only scholars interested in how past groups have addressed the challenges of new environmental phenomena but also those interested in how people have learned or failed to learn from these events and how many of the fears and misconceptions of the past still shape and distort our viewsof disasters today." -- Hispanic American Historical Review

Matthew Mulcahy is an associate professor and chair of the History Department at Loyola College in Maryland.