Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World

Theory and Practice

Sara Miglietti, John Morgan, Sara Miglietti, John Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317200284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Throughout the early modern period, scientific debate and governmental action became increasingly preoccupied with the environment, generating discussion across Europe and the wider world as to how to improve land and climate for human benefit. This discourse eventually promoted the reconsideration of long-held beliefs about the role of climate in upholding the social order, driving economies and affecting public health. Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World explores the relationship between cultural perceptions of the environment and practical attempts at environmental regulation and change between 1500 and 1800. Taking a cultural and intellectual approach to early modern environmental governance, this edited collection combines an interpretative perspective with new insights into a period largely unfamiliar to environmental historians. Using a rich and multifaceted narrative, this book offers an understanding as to how efforts to enhance productive aspects of the environment were both led by and contributed to new conceptualisations of the role of 'nature' in human society.

This book offers a cultural and intellectual approach to early modern environmental history and will be of special interest to environmental, cultural and intellectual historians, as well as anyone with an interest in the culture and politics of environmental governance.

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Climate, travel and colonialism in the early modern world

Rebecca Earle

Introduction: travelling bodies

In an oft-reprinted early modern text, the Spanish humanist Diego Rodríguez de Almela offered the following thoughts on the emotional ties that bind men to their patria, or homeland:

The love that men feel for the land where they were born or raised forms part of their very nature… and wise men even say that there are certain ailments that can afflict men far from the land where they were born and raised that can be cured only by returning to that land. This is because their complexions suit the air of the place where they were raised and different airs can and do make men ill; and this affects even the dead, for they say that cadavers rest more easily in the lands where their forefathers are buried than in any other.¹

Many writers in the early modern era made similar comments about the deep love that individuals naturally felt for their homeland.² The author of a late-sixteenth-century general history of mankind thus included a chapter entitled ‘How all men feel deep love and longing for their natal soil in which they were born and raised’. Diego Rodríguez de Almela’s insistence that men who absented themselves from this soil risked all manner of illness was widely shared.³

This, of course, was precisely the era in which Europeans were embarking on overseas travel on an unprecedented scale, which took them first to Africa and then to the Americas and Asia. The Portuguese had been exploring the west coast of Africa since the early fifteenth century, and in 1488 Portuguese navigators rounded the Cape of Good Hope to reach the Indian Ocean. In 1492 Columbus’s crew sailed in a south-westerly direction hoping to reach Asia; a few years later Vasco de Gama’s fleet reached India by sailing east. Between 1519 and 1522 the crew of Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet of five ships circumnavigated the globe, and for the next century European sailors and explorers ventured ever farther from their homelands in pursuit of trade and conquest. It is thus a notable feature of Europe’s colonial expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that it occurred in a moment in which European writers were placing particular emphasis on the deep love that individuals naturally felt for their natal soil. The voyages of discovery and subsequent colonial ventures, in other words, took place at a time when conventional wisdom affirmed that prolonged absence from home was likely to induce almost unbearable homesickness. Of course great things could not be expected from those timorous souls who remained forever at home, but venturing overseas was nonetheless recognized as an emotionally wrenching and therefore dangerous experience.

How did Europeans negotiate these challenges during the age of discovery? This chapter charts the ways in which settlers sought to mitigate against these threats to health and corporeal integrity, using the Spanish experience in the new world to illustrate broader attitudes characteristic of travellers and colonists from many parts of western Europe. These ideas about the dangers facing the body in motion form part of the history of early modern European expansion. They also shed light on the ideologies that underpinned the colonialisms that followed in its wake. Early modern Europeans perceived many similarities between the ways their bodies responded to displacement and the responses of other bodies set in motion by European colonisation and the Atlantic slave trade. Travelling bodies therefore lie at the heart of the relationship between colonialism and the emergence of race.

Scholars have long recognised the threat that unfamiliar climates were believed to pose to the European body and have increasingly drawn connections between European anxieties over the detrimental impact of colonial environments and the emergence of racial ideologies. Building on the foundational research of Antontello Gerbi and Clarence Glacken, many scholars have studied how European critiques of ‘tropical’ environments resonated with critiques of the peoples who inhabited these regions.⁴ A significant and stimulating body of research now asserts that the idea of race grew out of this dual critique of extra-European environments and extra-European peoples. In a series of influential works, Jorge Cañizares Esguerra for instance argued that colonists in early modern Spanish America came to believe that their bodies differed in permanent and fundamental ways from the bodies of Amerindians. In his view, the driving force behind this early articulation of ‘race’ was the American climate. Cañizares Esguerra maintained that colonial scholars posited a radical discontinuity between European and indigenous bodies because they could not otherwise account for the fact that Europeans appeared to thrive in the, American environment, while Amerindians sickened and died.⁵ In his analysis of colonial Peru Bernard Lavallé likewise argued that in the view of settlers, ‘the American climate’ was responsible for the corporeal differences that distinguished Europeans from native peoples.⁶ Scholars working on Anglo-America have advanced similar arguments about the seventeenth-century English settlements. The scholarship on eighteenth-century ‘climatic determinism’ similarly posits close links between the intertwined histories of climate, colonies and race.⁷ Such interpretations have provoked a lively debate about the origins of racial thinking and its possible links to early modern colonial expansion. Underpinning much of this debate is the conviction that the idea of race is closely associated with European responses to the extra-European environment.

This research highlights the dilemmas that overseas colonisation posed to Europeans and helpfully focuses attention on the fact that early colonial actors ascribed great significance to the differences they perceived between their bodies and those of peoples they encountered as they voyaged ever farther from their own lands. Nonetheless, an unfamiliar climate was but one of the challenges faced by the early modern traveller. By separating climate from the larger humoral framework that animated all early modern understandings of corporeality, we risk losing an appreciation of the underlying ideas that helped Europeans make sense of these differences. Shifting from a singular focus on climate permits a fuller appreciation of the ways that early modern Europeans believed that travelling bodies of all sorts interacted with their environments.

‘The safety and health of travailers’ ⁸

Leaving one’s natal soil was dangerous because, as Rodríguez de Almela explained, each person’s complexion was best suited to the air, water and food of their homeland. Humoral theory, which provided an understanding of the human body universally embraced in early modern Europe, offered a coherent explanation of why this should be the case. The origins of humoralism lay in the writings of classical authors such as Hippocrates, but, as the Introduction argues, it offered an enduring model for making sense of the body’s interactions with its environment that persisted well into the eighteenth century.⁹ The humoral body was understood to consist of a balance of the four humours that both governed health and gave each person their individual complexion. Each person was born with a particular complexion or temperament, terms which referred equally to both physical appearance and character, but the particular balance of humours acquired at birth was unlikely to remain constant throughout one’s life. Alterations in an individual’s pattern of eating, sleeping, exercise and digestion, in the airs and waters that surrounded them, or in their emotional equanimity could induce imbalances in their humours, which could in turn provoke changes in mood, well-being and character. The complexion was thus changeable, varying both over the course of a lifetime and in accordance with changes in lifestyle or environment.

Such transformations, however, were fraught with danger. Sudden changes of any sort were to be avoided. ‘Changing your habits can be lethal’, ran the saying.¹⁰ Doctors liked to cite Hippocrates’ warning that even healthy people could be harmed by an abrupt alteration and that any shift, even from a bad to a good diet, was potentially dangerous.¹¹ Only with great care should an individual alter their basic complexion by introducing changes into their regimen, thereby acquiring a ‘second nature’. Indeed, for this reason some writers argued that it was best to ensure that one’s normal diet was not too limited, as otherwise the slightest disturbance in the availability of food could prove dangerous. It was better slowly to accustom oneself to a variety of foods rather than be reliant on only a handful of foodstuffs.¹²

Changes in environment were equally challenging to the humoral body. Since the time of Hippocrates European writers had drawn connections between the environment in which individuals lived and their characters, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the influence of climate on the human constitution was universally acknowledged. As one Spanish scholar put it in 1608, ‘people to a certain extent resemble the place where they are born’.¹³ This meant that in general people were ideally suited to their home environment. At the very least, exposure to an unfamiliar climate was likely to upset the balance of humours, thereby causing illness. Some climates were inherently more healthy than others – damp, swampy places were generally viewed as dangerous – but it was considered unwise to undergo sudden alterations of environment, even from an unhealthy to a more salubrious climate, just as it was dangerous to alter one’s diet precipitously. More dramatically, prolonged residence in a different environment might provoke significant transformations of the overall complexion. Writing in the early seventeenth century, the Dominican priest Gregorio García explained that although Ethiopians were, like all men, the sons of Noah (who García believed had been white), because they now lived in the heat of the torrid zone, their skin had darkened. Lengthy exposure to a hot climate profoundly altered their appearance.¹⁴ Overall, in the words of a German cosmographer, a change in climate could result in a change in ‘talent, vivacity and condition’.¹⁵

Clearly, long-distance travel was likely to present the traveller with both new climates and unfamiliar foods. As one seventeenth-century writer warned, such changes were challenging even to the most robust complexions. Travel was particularly ill advised for old men, who, he insisted, ‘shall never be able to endure the frequent changes of diet and aire, which young men cannot bear without prejudice to their health, except it be little and little and (as it were) by insensible degrees’.¹⁶ Abrupt changes in eating patterns were perhaps the most obvious challenge to the traveller, and for this reason medical writers had long advised that travellers take particular care over their diets. For example, the health manual composed by the ninth-century Baghdad-based physician Qusta ibn Luqa for a client intending to undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca offered detailed advice on which foods were most suitable in helping the body cope with the rigours of travel. He stressed that keeping to a healthy diet was vital if the traveller was to avoid illness. An appropriate diet, in turn, would protect against sickness. ‘If he keeps to this regimen the humours of his body will not become sharp and no fatigue or other diseases will befall him, which originate from the intense movement during a long journey’, the doctor noted.¹⁷ Ideally, in fact, the traveller would bring his own supply of food, precisely to ensure that he did not further stress his already fatigued body with strange foodstuffs.

Early modern advice echoed this view. Such travel guides repeated cautionary tales drawn from both classical antiquity and more recent history to illustrate the dangers that befell travellers who failed to attend sufficiently to their regimen. For instance, sudden changes of clothing were extremely ill advised. One guide to foreign travel warned of the case of ‘One Tho. Randolph in Queen Elizabeths time being Embasssador to Ivan Vasilonoch Emperor of Moscovia, reporteth himselfe to have narrowly avoided death or extreame sicknesse, which he had gotten, by changing his English habit over-quickly into a Russian apparel’.¹⁸ As Thomas Neale, the guide’s author, explained, ‘the sodaine change of any habituated Custome is so dangerous, that sometimes ordinary things disused bring on the necessity of death’. Neale therefore advised that travellers adapt themselves slowly and ‘by degrees’ to the customs of their destination. In this way, he assured his readers, they could avoid illness or, indeed, death. Avoiding ‘over-quick’ alterations to one’s usual routine was thus essential for safe travel. Writing in the early seventeenth century, the English aristocrat Thomas Palmer stipulated that during travel, ‘let the diet of all men, for eating, drinking, sleeping, clothing and such like, be answerable to ever...