Pride and Practices, Prejudice and Perceptions: A Comparative Case Study in North Atlantic Environmental History

By Sharla Chittick

The Hebrideans of the Scottish Insular Gaidhealtachd and the Wabanaki of Ketakamigwa experienced tremendous challenges between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Climate change and extreme weather in the North Atlantic during the 'Little Ice Age' affected marine exploitation, shortened growing seasons, and complicated existing relationships with the natural world. Simultaneously, European fishermen, merchants, and imperial explorers sought out and laid claim to new markets and territorial holdings in both regions. This combination of environmental and imperial pressure transformed existing indigenous relationships, damaged natural environments, threatened cultural cohesion, spiked regional economic instability, and challenged native political sovereignty. By the eighteenth century, neither people had emerged unscathed. This long duree study treats the European colonial period in the history of the Hebrideans and Wabanaki as only one end of an interdisciplinary pendulum that swings back to deglaciation. It demonstrates how relationships between climate change, economic pressure, and human behaviour evolved on both sides of the North Atlantic. Exploring traditions in resource management, settlement behaviour, and material culture, this volume explains how attitudes, values, and behaviours often determined the degree of vulnerability to destructive external forces. By weaving together new research with an existing patchwork of North Atlantic historical narratives, this comparative environmental case study offers fresh insights into a subject of profound contemporary relevance: the relationship between climate change and global economic integration. By comparing and contrasting exhilarating historical scenarios of resource management, this study poses important questions about how and why communities succeed or fail in sustaining themselves, their environments, and their cultures when under duress.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 2503547516
• ISBN13: 9782503547510
• Release Date: October 2018
• Publisher: Brepols Publishers
• Length: 263 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.