The role of colonial pasts in shaping climate futures: Adaptive capacity in Georgetown, Guyana

Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession, disasters, justice, and repair across the Caribbean archipelago

“…The quality of public infrastructure such as drainage, patterns of urban/rural, and coastal/ inland development, as well as the geography of housing all reflect colonial regimes of property and regional planning that prioritized the plantation economy (Look et al 2019;Robinson et al 2023a). The role of these colonial factors in shaping material conditions of life means that "disasters" are not aberrations nor unmitigable mishaps, but recurrent consequences of constrained sovereignty, racist disaster management, and organized abandonment in emergency response (Moulton and Machado 2019;Bonilla 2020a).…”

The contours of environmental justice in the Caribbean

“…In the Caribbean, which encompasses the islands and mainland countries such as Belize, Guyana, and Suriname, there is an almost uniform experience of colonisation and capital exploitation that was based on chattel slavery and plantation economies (Beckford, 1972; Robinson et al, 2023; Williams, 2001). The lengthy periods of conquest by various European powers, primarily the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish, have served to fracture the region (Besson, 2002; Robinson et al, 2023), displacing Indigenous peoples, creating economies dependent on intense extractivism (e.g., mining, tourism), alongside significant variability in national‐level governance structures, and ethnic and linguistic fragmentation (see Bonilla, 2015; Robinson et al, 2023). The resulting ‘long‐standing patterns of power that [have] emerged as a result of colonialism … [help] define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations’ (Maldonado‐Torres, 2007, p. 243).…”

“…Given the region's almost uniform experience of colonisation and capital exploitation that was based on chattel slavery and plantation economies (see Robinson et al, 2023), it has a long history of resisting imperial domination and control. From the 17th century until emancipation in 1838, enslaved workers in the Caribbean resisted their conditions in order to survive.…”