Christopher Church's well-researched and innovative book is based on extensive archival sleuthing and covers a period of Caribbean history that has received relatively scant attention from scholars: the late nineteenth century through to the outbreak of World War I. With its principal geographic foci being Guadeloupe and Martinique, the study seeks to answer “two central questions: How did modern France reconcile its liberal convictions with its imperial ambitions? And how did a colonial citizenry transform the Republic and its concomitant definition of citizenship?” (236). Its “underlying theme,” meanwhile, is “the French identity of Antilleans” (237), which is creatively explored by way of Church's compelling analyses of numerous environmental and sociopolitical disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, labor strikes, conflagrations, and volcanic eruptions, none more devastating than the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée.
In accessible and engaging language, Church masterfully demonstrates how a critical reading of disasters and their aftermaths reveals a whole host of meaningful lessons about such things as race, racism, citizenship, identity, and the nation-state. “Disasters constitute a crucial aspect of a state's relationship to its citizens” (9), after all, and are uniquely adept at revealing its fractures. Even while Guadeloupe and Martinique had gained full representation in the Third French Republic's parliament as of 1881, for instance, and although Antilleans had obtained rights as French citizens a generation prior, for all intents and purposes the islands remained “colonies of extraction where economic profit was paramount and civil rights were curtailed” (5).
The impressive range of sources cited in this book show that Church is well steeped in both the academic literature and the relevant primary source material, and he is clearly comfortable working in French. Most impressive in this regard is the tremendous amount of archival work that Church conducted in both Basse-Terre and Fort-de-France, as well as in the National Archives of France in Aix-en-Province and in Pierrefitte-sur- Seine. Any experienced historian can attest to how laborious and, at times, tedious this research methodology can be. In addition, not every historian is adequately versed in certain additional methodologies that Church employed, like GIS mapping. Thus, besides a series of historical images that grace the book, Church has ably produced a number of original and informative maps, graphs, and tables, which add compelling layers to his analysis.
Readers of this review and of Church's excellent book would be interested to listen to the podcast of an illuminating interview that he gave to Alejandra Bronfman at the New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/christopher-church-catastrophe-and-citizenship-in-the-french-caribbean-u-nebraska-press-2017/. Here we learn that Church is a native of Florida who lived through the catastrophic 1992 Hurricane Andrew, which in part motivated him to take his Caribbeanist scholarship into the realm of environmental history. He offers insights into the relevance of the book for understanding things like 2005's Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the devastation in Puerto Rico wrought by Hurricane Maria in 2018.
Reading Church, for instance, shed new light for the present reviewer on the overarching social-structural implications of President Trump's subsequent visit to Puerto Rico; there, at a photo op, the Commander-in-Chief tossed rolls of paper towels to people of color mired in suffering, only to return to the mainland to offer comments that hardly reflected any appreciation that Puerto Ricans are actually US citizens. French Antilleans have long experienced similar dismissal by their own metropole. “Disasters are never natural” (3), as it were, but are always profoundly political and too often serve to expose and enhance social inequality and injustice, over and above the loss of life and limb that they cause.
