Leida Fernández Prieto (IH) coescribe el capítulo “Land Use in the Caribbean in the Colonial Period: Plantations and Livestock on the Islands” en Land Use

Leida Fernández Prieto (IH) escribe junto a Reinaldo Funes Monzote (Universidad de La Habana) el capítulo “Land Use in the Caribbean in the Colonial Period: Plantations and Livestock on the Islands” en Land Use. Handbook of the Anthropocene in Latin America I, Edited by Olaf Kaltmeier, María Fernanda López Sandoval, José Augusto Pádua, Adrián Gustavo Zarrilli, CALAS, Bielefeld University Press, 2024, pp. 157-176.

Abstract: This chapter focus on the evolution of farming and ranching practices from the beginning of European colonization until the early nineteenth century. Slave plantation agriculture was the most prominent element, whose long-lasting effects and legacies of colonialism led to the successive deterioration of ecosystems. The plantations had a greater impact in terms of land use. However, if the Antillean archipelago is taken as a whole, it can be seen that most of the land was still covered by tropical forest, whether dry or humid, or dedicated to extensive cattle raising, conducted also largely in the interior of the forested areas. This has to do with the fact that the classic plantation system began on some of the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles in the mid-seventeenth century and, in the eighteenth century, spread to larger areas on the islands of Jamaica and the western half of Hispaniola. But on these two islands, and especially in Cuba, there were still extensive territories dedicated to other uses. Therefore, in an overall view of the region, plantations and sugar were not yet the central components of the landscape. Rather, the landscape was characterized by the forests and extensive cattle ranching of Cuba, Santo Domingo (in the east of Hispaniola), and Puerto Rico, whose combined area represents approximately 72 percent of the area of the insular Caribbean.