Content area
Full Text
Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History. By Gregory T. Cushman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xxii, 393. Illustrations. Acronyms. Bibliography. $99.00 cloth.
Gregory Cushman's book is surely the best thing published on guano since 1989. Such a big and complex book-its geographic and thematic aspirations go way beyond the Peruvian guano isles that inspire it-is difficult to capture in a brief review. Erudite, lucid, expansive, and even, at points, brilliant, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World pushes the envelope of both global and environmental history, and shows how these growth fields can shape how we think as Latin American historians. Yet much of Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World is actually a surprisingly robust narrative form of intellectual history. Does it all, in the end, come together? Of this I'm not sure, as this ambitious book, in my opinion, suffers from a lack of cohesion and overreach, in its claims that so much of our modern world was born from Peruvian guano.
Cushman's introduction greets us with no less than "seven" of the book's core global history arguments, emanating from the triad "Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Shit in His- tory." (How refreshing to see the "s-word" dropped into academic history!) Above all, the skyrocketing use of such fertilizers since the nineteenth century, initiated by the mid-century Peruvian guano boom, unleashed an intensifying and extensifying effect on world agriculture. The ongoing processes of scientific agriculture, for better or worse, fundamentally altered the planetary environment we inhabit, by multiplying human carrying capacity and reworking longstanding human-to nature relationships. The specific arguments range from Mother Nature's "agency" to recognizing the role of the Pacific World in fostering industrial revolutions.
Chapter 2, "The Guano Age," transcends the well-known Peruvian boom-and-bust export story to chart its global scientific and agrarian origins, and guano's forward impact on modernizing agriculture. (This is a green topic whose time has come, superbly treated as well by Edward D. Melillo in a 2012 American Historical Review essay.) Guano agriculture hastened the end of the "Old Ecological Regime" in Britain and other vanguards of commercial farming. Cushman suggests that guano, rather than an instrument of peaceful commerce, was the agent that intensified conflicts (as...