Knowing Waters, Governing Empire

An Environmental History of the Caribbean

Christiane Hoth de Olano

European empires had mapped and studied Caribbean waters for centuries. The Age of Revolutions, however, changed the political conditions under which this knowledge was produced and used. As colonial rule was challenged and imperial competition intensified, existing knowledge was reassessed and new surveys were undertaken. Maps and charts were copied, exchanged, translated, and sometimes obtained through espionage.

This project examines the relationship between water, environmental knowledge, and imperial power in the Caribbean from the Age of Revolutions into the twentieth century. It asks how imperial actors sought to make Caribbean waters knowable, navigable, and governable, and how knowledge about aquatic environments was transferred and reworked across political and imperial boundaries. Rather than approaching Spanish, British, German, and U.S. expansion as separate histories, the project follows the ways in which maps, measurements, observations, and hydrographic intelligence were collected, appropriated, translated, and reworked by different actors over time.

The project brings environmental history into conversation with the histories of knowledge and empire and approaches the Caribbean as a waterscape rather than primarily as a collection of territories. It examines how knowledge about water informed maritime mobility, infrastructural projects, and resource extraction, but also where attempts at control encountered their limits. Caribbean waters were not passive objects of imperial designs. Sedimentation, flooding, and changing coastlines could undermine established knowledge and require new surveys, maps, and interventions. In this way, the project shows how efforts to know and transform Caribbean waters shaped imperial ambitions, while the material dynamics of water themselves conditioned what empires could know and do.