2024/06/26 by Damian Clavel, Susanna B. Hecht · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Environmental Science · #Historical Geography and Geographical Thought #Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography #American Environmental and Regional History
paper · pdf · doi:10.1215/00182168-11384938
openalex publication_date 2024/06/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
Abstract The 1815 eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora triggered a subsistence crisis in Europe, especially in Switzerland. This article retraces the founding of Nova Friburgo, a colony in the mountains near Rio de Janeiro composed of several hundred Swiss families, mostly from the rural canton of Fribourg. This study shows how the unusual central European settler migration to the Brazilian tropics was facilitated by a new class of entrepreneurial go-betweens, acting as dynamic mediators between the effects that the climatic catastrophe caused by Tambora had on Swiss agriculture and politics and the development requirements for building new settlements in a metamorphosing South American continent. By positioning Brazil in the broader environmental history of Tambora, as well as the fallout from the Napoleonic Wars, this article sheds light on how the study of climatic teleconnections requires multiple scales of analysis to understand better how the different politics and scopes of action, and sets of unlikely processes, move into play. These teleconnections were, in fact, socially mediated with eventually wide-reaching social and racial transformations that became foundational prototypes for Brazilian land colonization throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.