The goal of PAGES' new Landcover6k Working Group is to achieve Holocene landcover and land-use reconstructions that can be used to evaluate and improve the scenarios of anthropogenic land-cover change (ALcc) by Klein Goldewijk et al. (2011; HYDE) and Kaplan et al. (2009; KK) for the purpose of climate modeling studies (Gaillard et al. 2015). Landcover6k focuses on the last 6000 calendar years, i.e. the period in the Holocene when anthropogenic deforestation occurred in most continents, but it will also cover older periods in regions where significant human impact on vegetation occurred earlier.
This chapter examines the question of whitening as a process that required both family and nation to force ideological and behavioral commitments on individuals. Focusing on race-making behaviors in nineteenth-century Cuba, it interrogates the historical ambiguity of blanqueamiento, or whitening process, using a methodology that emphasizes the social construction of race. More specifically, it proposes the concept of “sexual economy of race” as a means to elucidate the conjunction between reproductive behavior and the social construction of race. It also explores the restriction of interracial marriages in Cuba as part of its whitening agenda, along with the ways in which racialized reproductive choices influenced the standard system of racial classification and fostered whitening in some cases and discouraged it in others. The chapter shows that whitening efforts in colonial Cuba were not as predictable or linear as previously theorized.
This essay reviews recent studies of freedom and human bondage in nineteenth-century Brazil and Cuba, situating these texts within the historiographic terrain of Dale W. Tomich's "second slavery." Several of these works explicitly attempt to give the concept greater analytical utility for the study of Atlanticworld modernity, while others implicitly promote the inclusion of more social-biographical perspectives that integrates micro-and macro-level historical methods. At its most narrow, the concept creates a subperiodization of the Atlantic world's "long nineteenth century," maintaining its traditional start with the French and Haitian Revolutions, but shortening it to either 1865, with the abolitionist victory of the US Civil War, or 1888, with final emancipation in Brazil. This era witnessed slavery's simultaneous expansion and crisis. Impressive new profits were generated by the export-oriented, plantation production of Brazilian coffee, Cuban sugar, and southern US cotton, while liberal notions of individual rights placed slavery's advocates on near constant defense against unprecedented charges of moral barbarism. 1 Tomich also offers the "second slavery" as a theoretical reflection on the constitutive links between modern slavery and capitalism, and challenges simple abstractions of this relationship. Although he is indebted to Immanuel Wallerstein's "world systems" framework, Tomich questions the hierarchical differentiation between metropolitan and peripheral roles in consolidating capitalism. Fundamental to Tomich's approach is Eric William's thesis delineating how the profits from British Caribbean slavery provided what Marxists would label as the seed "primitive accumulation" necessary for the rise of industrial capitalism. Tomich expands this issue into Brazilian and Cuban contributions. However, Tomich's second slavery is consistent
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