Lessons from the Southeast Pacific

Recent attention to the oceanic world has opened up a vast new realm to historians interested in complex connections across the globe. In the Southeast Pacific, the distinctive oscillations of the Humboldt Current marine ecosystem have long shaped rhythms of trade, migration, and ecological change. The marine environmental history of this region is punctuated by its extraordinary dynamism at both the long and short time scales—from catastrophic tsunamis and species collapses to mild seasonal shifts in oceanic currents. The ebbs and flows of this human-nature system are not only longitudinal, along the littoral, but also vertical, as the upwelling from the deep, or the dramatic relief between the ocean’s depths and the Andes mountain peaks. Rigid territorial laws and private property regimes, increasingly prevalent in the 20th and 21st century policy contexts, are often ill-suited to shifting oceanic environments. Such dynamics invite a different kind of historical inquiry that is interdisciplinary, rethinking the process of knowledge production about the oceanic past, and that also plays with the intersection of time and space in order to create new historical frames. In my presentation I will discuss how new and ongoing conversations about the (marine) environmental history of the Peru-Chile coastal region reveal its tremendous importance not only the trade, sustenance, and navigation of the greater Pacific but also in the contemporary global economic and geopolitical spheres.