Detrimental Determinists: Applied Environmentalism as Bureaucratic Self-Interest in the Fin-de-Siècle British Caribbean

Abstract

Environmental determinism was by no means universally accepted at the end of the nineteenth century. It was nevertheless a useful philosophy for the men of the British Colonial Office who controlled the Crown's Caribbean colonies. Archival evidence confirms that these were men of modest competence who reinforced their own authority and presumed racial superiority through environmentally deterministic exhortations. Their exhortations were directed at the region's Afro-Caribbean peoples whom they governed and whose character and culture they “explained” in terms of a benign tropical environment that required neither hard work nor imagination for human survival. When confronted with evidence of hard-working blacks, British Colonial Office bureaucrats accounted for these anomalies by using facile population density arguments. Their geographical explanations were buttressed by received wisdom from local planters and the works of well-known writers who espoused deterministic and racist views. Opposing views, both published and well-known, were belittled or ignored. Environmental determinism achieved therefore the status of an orthodoxy that underpinned local policies and even local laws in the British Caribbean colonies.

Key Words:

• British Colonial Office
• bureaucracy
• Caribbean
• colonialism
• environmental determinism