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註釋"Sea and Land provides an in-depth environmental history of the Caribbean to ca. 1850, comprising a close examination of some of the central forces and characteristics that defined the region, with a coda that takes the story into the modern era. It explores the mixing, movement, and displacement of peoples and the parallel ecological mixing of animals, plants, microbes from Africa, Europe, elsewhere in the Americas, and indeed Asia. It examines first the arrival of Native American to the region and the environmental transformations that followed. It then turns to the even more dramatic changes that accompanied the arrival of Europeans and Africans in the fifteenth century. Throughout it argues that the constant arrival, dispersal, and mingling of new plants and animals gave rise to a creole ecology. Particular attention is given to the emergence of black slavery, sugarcane, and the plantation system, an unholy trinity that thoroughly transformed the region’s demographic and physical landscapes and made the Caribbean a vital site in the creation of the modern western world. This volume integrates research concerning natural resources, conservation, epidemiology, and climate in a new general environmental history of the region. It makes environmental perspectives more accessible and more indispensable, to scholars and students alike, to foster both a fuller appreciation of the extent to which environmental factors shaped historical developments in the Caribbean and the extent to which human actions have transformed the biophysical environment of the region over time"--Publisher's description.