At Stanford, Tracing the Roots of a Pan-American Connection
The Curaumilla Coast in Chile (FoundArt via Flickr)
Edward (“Ted”) Melillo is an Assistant Professor in the History Department and the Environmental Studies Program at Amherst College, where he teaches courses on global environmental history and the history of the Pacific World. Over the winter, Melillo spent three months at the Center as a visiting scholar.
During my time at the Bill Lane Center for the American West, I was able to use Stanford’s extensive historical collections to finish revisions to my forthcoming book, Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection, 1786-2008. In January, I had the chance to give a lunchtime talk about my research as part of the Center's seminar series, and among the attendees were several Chileans and Bay Area residents of Chilean descent who stayed afterwards for a lively discussion.
My book charts a series of unexpected routes along a north-south axis, in order to rediscover sites where the women and men of Chile and California profoundly altered each other’s social and environmental histories. These zones of engagement are countless. Between the 1780s and the 1930s, new crops, foods, fertilizers, mining technologies, laborers, and ideas from Chile radically changed California’s development. Likewise, systems of servitude, exotic species, and capitalist development schemes from California dramatically shaped Chilean history from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Strangers on Familiar Soil unfolds along a chronological arc, extending from 1786 when a French expedition brought the potato from Chile to California to 2008 when Chilean President Michelle Bachelet made a major diplomatic visit to the Golden State. From the earliest botanical exchanges to the most recent cooperative agreements, the peoples and environments of Chile and California have been deeply interconnected with each other and with a wider Pacific World.
The peoples and environments of the Pacific are also central to my most recent article, “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930,” which appeared in the October 2012 issue of the American Historical Review. During my residency at the Bill Lane Center, I was honored to learn that the piece received the Alice Hamilton Prize from the American Society for Environmental History for the best article of the year.
I also spent some of my three-month fellowship co-editing a volume with James Beattie of the University of Waikato, New Zealand and Emily O’Gorman of the University of Wollongong, Australia. The book, Networks of Nature in the British Empire: New Views on Imperial Environmental History (London: Continuum Press, 2014), brings together twelve scholars from North America, Europe, South Asia, Africa, and Australasia to examine the networks of environmental exchanges connecting various parts of the British Empire in the nineteenth century and the outcomes of these transfers for cultures and ecosystems across the globe. In mid-February, I travelled to New Zealand to meet up with my colleagues and hike among the North Island’s extensive stands of California redwoods and Monterey pines. With a bit of human help, California’s botanical legacy has found its way to nearly every corner of the Pacific!
In the future, I will return to California, New Zealand, and Chile to continue research for my second book, which explores the maritime connections between the island of Nantucket and the peoples and environments of the Pacific World. The Nantucket Historical Association recently named me their 2013 Verney Fellow. As part of my fellowship, I will travel to Nantucket in October to deliver a public lecture at the Nantucket Whaling Museum.
