Oscar Webber's Negotiating Relief and Freedom: Responses to Disaster in the British Caribbean, 1812–1907 joins a growing body of scholarship exploring the politics of disaster and disaster relief in various parts of the world. Webber's focus is on the British Caribbean across the long nineteenth century, starting with the eruption of La Soufrière on St. Vincent in 1812 and ending with the Jamaican earthquake of 1907. As with many studies of what might be termed the new disaster history, Webber is concerned with issues of vulnerability and resilience, and with understanding how historical forces and human choices create the underlying conditions and contexts that in turn shape the impact of, and recovery from, various natural hazards. He is interested particularly in the political calculations that determined how individuals and institutions responded to various disasters, what actions they took, how much financial assistance was made available, in what form, and to whom. For Webber, that means focusing primarily on the actions of planters, local officials, the British Colonial Office, and Parliament, although he is also attentive—to the extent sources allow—to the actions the region's majority Afro-Caribbean population took in the wake of disasters.

One of Webber's central arguments, and I think an important contribution, is to distinguish “between disaster response and disaster relief” (3). He argues that the former designates actions taken by elites in the wake of disasters that could involve efforts to relieve victims, but more often were designed to reestablish control. In his case, disaster responses were efforts to control the Afro-Caribbean majorities and force them to labor for planters or the government. Moreover, he suggests that the term disaster relief is somewhat anachronistic because such efforts remained ad hoc and informal during this period, as opposed to the more systematic relief of modern states that emerged in the twentieth century. What relief efforts did occur were rarely straightforward for the most vulnerable. Instead, relief was a “negotiated process” that usually involved “violence and coercion” as much as the actual “distribution of provisions and clothing” (3).

The book is divided into five chapters. The first provides an overview of the region's history and experience with disasters and some general background on shifting religious and scientific ideas about the causes of things like hurricanes and earthquakes in the early modern period. The second highlights how the “plantation mindset” (68) shaped the physical and social landscapes of the region. Planters, Webber argues, had little interest in developing or diversifying the region's economy because they had little sense of the islands as home, which in turn meant that they took few steps to reduce their vulnerability to various disasters, focusing instead on maximizing short-term profits. Chapter 3 explores some of the continuities that existed between the periods of slavery and emancipation. While local officials sometimes responded differently to disasters in these transition years, at times employing violence, at other times seeking to incentivize labor, the goal was the same: “quickly reasserting the colonially imposed racial order” (94) that disasters appeared to undermine. Such fears dominated the minds of whites even when little evidence existed for any organized resistance among Afro-Caribbeans. The fourth chapter explores relief efforts in the middle and latter decades of the nineteenth century at a time when Britain increasingly viewed the Caribbean as a backwater, unworthy of much investment given the declining profitability of the sugar trade. “Disaster response continued to be an exercise in, at best, neglect, and at worst, antagonism and violence” (101), Webber concludes. He also notes that local officials in his period increasingly borrowed language from poor relief efforts in England. They began to characterize the Afro-Caribbean population as “idle and disorderly” (105) and used such definitions to limit who received aid. The final chapter looks at factors that led Britain to provide direct financial assistance to various disaster-stricken islands as either grants or loans. Such assistance, Webber posits, was done more for economic or diplomatic ends than humanitarian ones.

Although the book is roughly chronological, some events, like the 1831 hurricane, appear in several chapters, which can be a bit confusing at times. The book is relatively short, which makes it useful for teaching, and Webber is a clear writer, but there are moments when he might have expanded discussion and analysis of issues. For example, negotiations about sugar bounties among various European nations appear in several places, but there is little background on how the bounty system operated or the effects of changes to it, which is important for contextualizing the larger market for Caribbean sugar in this period. Likewise, in his discussion of aid following the 1907 Kingston earthquake, Webber mentions American aid to Jamaica after a hurricane four years earlier, but he does not provide much detail regarding that earlier assistance. That said, Webber's book is a significant contribution to the literature on the nineteenth-century British Caribbean and to the literature on disasters and disaster relief. Scholars in those fields will want to have this book on their shelves.