ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the contributions of postcolonial ecocritical approaches to our understanding of early colonial cultural and environmental transformations in the first two centuries following the arrival of Spanish conquistadors to the Caribbean region, a period during which extractive economic practices and colonial institutions took shape. It analyzes colonialism and coloniality as a cascading series of “ecological revolutions,” each of them representing “an abrupt and qualitative break with the process of environmental and social change that had developed in situ” (Melville 1994, 12). The discussion expands our definitions of the environmental humanities to encompass early colonial writers and mapmakers engaging the rapidly changing ecologies of the region and addressing the ruination that European colonization brought in its wake, creating in the process damaged ecologies whose deterioration is still felt across the archipelago and its basin.
