ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Food, Scarcity and Knowledge in Colonial and Atlantic Worlds (1500-1800). Panel N. 1

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The “subsistence question” — how societies addressed the spectre of food scarcity — has been central to enquiries from social and economic histories to the history of science, knowledge, and medicine. Recently, environmental and intellectual historians renewed interest in scarcity’s history, focusing on its evolution in early modern and modern Europe and its links to sustainability and the Anthropocene. Yet, less attention has been paid to hybrid but asymmetrical technical and environmental knowledges mobilised to counter food scarcity in tropical climates and Atlantic economies, despite interest in colonial and non-European geographies and in how Europeans experienced the tropics. Similarly, links between food scarcity and other resource scarcities, or between food and labour scarcity in plantation economies, are under-explored.

This series of three panels fosters a shift in perspective by showcasing contributions on the knowledge and practices — environmental, indigenous, gendered, hybrid, and political — developed to address scarcity, along with the actors, European and non-European, human and non-human, involved in these efforts. The papers move between macro and micro scales, articulating these predicaments through case studies from diverse regions of the globe.

More specifically, the first panel, “Material Practices,” explores how scarcity prompted a reorganisation of botanical and artisanal knowledge in colonial worlds. The second, “Race and Scarcity,” examines how shortages of crops and of humans in plantation economies and colonial settlements intersected with racial discourses, projects of human improvement, and surveillance. The third, “Connectivities,” opens toward a trans-imperial and oceanic scale, analysing how concerns about food vulnerability shaped imperial botany, cash-crop cultivation, and the use of indigenous knowledge of non-human animals.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Samir Boumediene, CNRS; ENS University of Lyon

Individual Presentations

• “Necessary to human life:” Plants of Castile and food scarcity in the early colonial Spanish Empire - Antoine Duranton, EHESS, Paris

• « L’art de convertir les vivres en pain»: Scarcity, Technology and Hybrid Knowledge in the 18th-Century Antilles - Lavinia Maddaluno, Institut d'Études Avancées, Paris; University of Ca' Foscari in Venice (Italy)

• Drink scarcity, environmental crisis and Indigenous bodies in the colonisation of Mesoamerica - Ricardo Aguilar, The University of Warwick / Environmental Geography Research Centre at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Session Organizer

• Lavinia Maddaluno, Institut d'Études Avancées, Paris; University of Ca' Foscari in Venice (Italy)