No Wasted Land: Reclamation as a Global Settler Technology

In US environmental history, “reclamation” is typically associated with the arid West—dams, canals, and federal water management projects that remade landscapes, enabled settler expansion, and dispossessed Indigenous peoples. However, decades before the establishment of the US Bureau of Reclamation in 1902, the US federal government deployed reclamation as a settler colonial technology in the south. Through the Swamp Acts of 1849, 1850, and 1860, Florida claimed authority to drain freshwater landscapes to produce settler capital and communities. My paper focuses on how settlers deployed European methods of canal construction and adapted them to the local Florida landscape to produce plantation economies. These plantations largely focused on sugarcane, which allowed Florida and the US at large to compete in the global sugar commodities market. But sugarcane waste—bagasse—was also used to produce insulation tiles that were exported globally to create architecture in hot and cold climates alike. Florida plantation economies therefore facilitated the urbanization of not only fragile ecosystems in South Florida, but also the establishment of settler homesteads globally.