Gary Puckrein, “Climate, Health and Black Labor in the English Americas,” Journal of American Studies, 13, 2 (1979), 179–93, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800011403

When Jamaican Maroons from Trelawney Town who had been exiled to Nova Scotia made the case in 1799 for their relocation to the British colony of Freetown, Sierra Leone, they referenced their bodies, the soil, and their foodstuffs. As exiles from one British colony and dissatisfied migrants in another, Maroon Captains John Jarret, Andrew Smith, James Barrel, James Laurence, Thomas Johnston, and Charles Shaw argued in their petition that “the Soil of Nova Scotia will never answer to transplant Maroons in, nor will they ever thrive where the Pine Apple does not.”Footnote ¹ The success of their petition would result in the Maroons’ next migration to a place colonized a few years prior by formerly enslaved Black loyalists who had fled the United States after the American War of Independence. The Maroons’ petition to the House of Commons and their experiences illustrate why historians (including this one) and scholars of American studies are writing about Black labor, climate, and health in the English Americas. Maroons had good knowledge of agriculture, wild plants, famine foods, and game in tropical climates. As Ruma Chopra and Anya Zilberstein have shown, they negotiated and renegotiated other peoples’ expectations about their labor as they moved through different nodes of the English-speaking Atlantic World.Footnote ² Unhappy Maroon petitioners used their experiences of, and knowledge about, living in Jamaica beyond the control of the British Crown to make a point about their unsuccessful labor to grow pineapples in unsuitable, freezing soil. Their words emerge from script text in The National Archives to anticipate Gary Puckrein’s observations about Black bodies in hot and cold climates, on which later writers have expanded.

Puckrein’s 1979 essay was positioned between three important interdisciplinary conversations: one about disease and climate, another about race and labor, and the third about the relationships between the two, both as people in the past perceived them and as historians understood them in the 1970s. Puckrein built on Alfred Crosby’s foundational Columbian Exchange – about people and animals on the move – by beginning with the two types of mosquito that made people sick with malaria and yellow fever. He then considered how white colonizers responded to “the unhealthy effect of warm temperatures,” including disease, by changing their diets and avoiding strenuous labor (182). Colonists then developed ideas about race and enslaved Africans’ supposedly greater capacity to work hard in hot environments without becoming as ill as white colonizers did.Footnote ³

He observed that colonists of Virginia knew and recorded the fact that new migrants became ill in June, July, and August. The same year, Carville Earle and Karen Kupperman made connections between drought and salt poisoning in the Jamestown colony. Their scholarship emerged alongside new context and data about unprecedentedly cool temperatures during the Little Ice Age, which Katherine Grandjean discusses in a review essay from which this author has stolen her title. A decade after Puckrein, Rodney Baine and Louis de Vorsey made similar connections between seasons of hot weather and seasons of bad water in the place that became Georgia.Footnote ⁴ The result of this research is that historians now draw on cartography, dendroclimatology, ethnobotany, and oceanography. Following these lines of thinking, Kathleen Brown, Joyce Chaplin, and Rebecca Earle have added to what we now know about diet, gender, labor, and race in the early American South and Spanish America, and Virginia Anderson, Elinor Melville, Andrew Sluyter, and Joshua Specht have written excellent books about animals including cattle, pigs, and sheep.Footnote ⁵

This body of work, all of it connected to the climate, has expanded what we know about patriarchal colonizers’ monitoring of and interventions upon themselves and upon the bodies of the Indigenous women, enslaved Africans, and married and unmarried white women over whom they claimed mastery or power. This journal has published ideas about race and labor violence, and about Indigenous environmental stewardship that defends sovereignty and groundwater.Footnote ⁶ It is thus fair to say that since Puckrein urged historians to improve their awareness “that colonial ideas about health and morbidity can provide useful information on how the settlers adapted to their new environments” (180), many have answered his call. Authors have taken an interest in the dietary changes that colonists made or failed to make in response to temperature, climate, and inaccurate perceptions of Native Americans as unusually hungry.Footnote ⁷

As a historian who started her career discussing inept white colonists in seventeenth-century Jamestown before turning to Jamaican Maroons, Black loyalists, and Native Americans, I have only recently come to appreciate how deeply imbricated the scholarship on these seemingly disparate groups has become. The study of the Indigenous slave trade has benefited from and then expanded on Puckrein’s discussion of enslaved labor. Puckrein’s attention to the drive to legalize the slave trade in the Georgia colony – known as the “Malcontent” or “Grumbletonian” controversy – rightly concluded that Georgia colonists came to advocate for slavery because they believed that people of African descent were better able to perform difficult labor in Georgia’s climate.Footnote ⁸ Historians are constantly honing their abilities to interpret the past, and they are not usually keen to predict the future. Puckrein can hardly be faulted for not knowing how much more historians would come to learn about Native Americans.

Newer scholarship has pluralized and provided important context about the early American slave trades that preceded Georgia’s adoption of slavery in the mid-eighteenth century. We now know more about the “shatter zone” of disease, colonization, and Indigenous slave trading that developed east of the Mississippi river; about the explosion of a trade in guns and ammunition for enslaved Native Americans that was wrapped up in successive inter-imperial conflicts known as the Carolina–Creek War, Queen Anne’s War, the Yamasee War, the Tuscarora War, and the War of Jenkin’s Ear; about the abuses in the slave trade, failed efforts to reform it, and a shift in trade between English colonists and Native Americans, from trading enslaved Indigenous people to dressed deerskins; about the rise of the “maize and pease” complex that D. Andrew Johnson identifies, which was maintained by Native American women and on which plantations depended; about the increase in the enslaved African population as plantations expanded and shifted to rice production; and about the additional forms of labor that African enslavement demanded beyond Virginia.Footnote ⁹

Scholars now recognize that all of the people who labored in purportedly “English” colonies were connected to wider continental and Atlantic worlds. The ability to attend to these connections speaks to current scholars’ interest in the gendered labor and knowledge of enslaved Africans and Native Americans. Puckrein was ahead of his time in thinking about the importance of climate and soil to rice cultivation; twenty years later Judith Carney’s germinal book on enslaved women’s knowledge helped scholars of food studies and historians to think differently about African history, rice production, waterways, and women’s labor.Footnote ¹⁰ Readers will not be shocked to learn that Puckrein is the founder and now president and CEO of the National Minority Quality Forum, which aims to eliminate “premature death and preventable illness” disproportionately affecting racial and ethnic minorities.Footnote ¹¹ Puckrein and his contemporaries made it possible to reckon with the longer histories of race, health, and climate; his ongoing work reminds us of the urgency of continuing to do so.