| dc.description.abstract | Weathering Extremes demonstrates how seventeenth-century climate changes mingled with cultural, social, economic, agro-ecological, and geopolitical forces to catalyze three simultaneous, though geographically disparate, indigenous resistance movements between 1636 and 1645. In Brazil, Curaçao, and the Hudson Valley, indigenous peoples deployed violent and non-violent means of resistance to confront the Dutch West India Company. This broadly interdisciplinary project utilizes natural proxy sources such as pollen samples, ice cores, and tree rings in conjunction with ethnohistorical and Dutch archival sources to reconstruct how early seventeenth-century extreme weather events catalyzed these movements. El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, volcanic eruptions, and reduced sunspot activity led to drought, heavy rain, and abnormally cold temperatures throughout the Americas. Extreme weather compounded the worst consequences of European colonialism on indigenous societies including disease epidemics, livestock destruction, and political instability. Harvest failures exacerbated the Company’s financial ills, decreased cash and subsistence crop production, and led to local abuses of indigenous groups. Indigenous peoples and the Dutch West India Company responded to climate-induced situations based on culturally, politically, and geographically contingent factors. The diversity of responses in each case study illustrates how climate is only deterministic in its ability to provoke human responses: the Wappinger of New Netherland responded to climatological changes and European colonialism through direct militant confrontation; the Tapuyas and Brasilianen of Dutch Brazil reacted via shifting diplomatic allegiances and intermittent violence; and the Caquetio of Curaçao invoked foot-dragging, desertion, and false compliance. This project makes several contributions to environmental, early modern Atlantic, and indigenous peoples’ history. First, it draws attention to the impact of seventeenth-century climate on indigenous and Dutch interactions in the Americas. Next, it uses paleoclimatological sources to show how climate-induced vulnerabilities provoked diplomacy, negotiation, and/or conflict in colonial settings. It reverses common assumptions of indigenous dependency and demonstrates the importance of indigenous peoples, labor, and sovereignty in shaping European colonialism. Finally, it deploys an intercolonial analysis to move beyond local case-study and world-system examinations of the Dutch Atlantic to explore how the Dutch West India Company emerged as an interdependent and overlapping web of connections. This project argues that the three climatologically-induced indigenous resistance movements coincided with the Company’s territorial zenith and collectively led to the Company’s destabilization, 1674 bankruptcy, and eventual re-establishment as a key player in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. | |
