by Celine Sarraf
Natural disasters may appear to be purely natural events, but their paths often trace the contours of empire. Storms and earthquakes rarely strike with equal consequence, their devastation follows the geography of historical exploitation. This is to say that in former colonies, exposure to extreme weather is not simply environmental — it is structural. Hurricanes that devastate the Caribbean or floods that submerge South Asian regions work to expose the inherited vulnerabilities of colonial rule. The legacies of imperial economies determine a myriad of local structures, from where houses stand to who can afford sturdy infrastructure.
Colonialism is often perceived as synonymous with the invasion and settling of a foreign people. In New Zealand, British settlers implanted a new society on Maori land with relative ecological stability, while Haiti, a planter colony designed to fuel France’s wealth through sugar and coffee, faced deep ecological ruin. This distinction, between settlement and extraction, is crucial for the understanding of recent natural disaster in Jamaica.
When Hurricane Melissa ravaged the island last November, the destruction was vast. Gurney’s Mount Baptist Church, which stood as a symbol of resistance during the 19th-century rebellions, faced destruction. Its collapse, beyond physical loss, demonstrated unwavering structural weakness and inability to withstand weather conditions despite its powerful history.
Britain’s rule in Jamaica was not centred on permanent settlement but on resource exploitation, specifically of sugarcane. Hence, infrastructure here was never meant to serve social development, but was engineered to extract and export profit while leaving the island exposed. Roads led from plantations to ports, not between inland communities—flooding wealth strictly outwards. This demonstrates the deeper ecological dimension of colonial rule: with efficient wealth production taking priority, colonisers reshaped landscapes without regard for the climatic knowledge accumulated by local populations.
Before European conquest, Jamaica’s inhabitants had developed a form of harmony with their environment. Their settlements rarely clustered the coast, where tropical storms provided clear risk. Agricultural cycles reflected close observation of the weather as harvests and planting would be shifted and adjusted according to storm seasons. British planners inverted these well-serving strategies. They presented coastal development as an indicator of modernity, populating coastal areas and building warehouses and plantations directly in zones of highest hurricane risk.
Jamaica gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1962, a moment that did not erase the structural inheritance of vulnerability. As historian Robert Parkinson effectively said, “invasion is a structure, not an event.” Economic dependence and infrastructural weakness persist as ongoing forms of incomplete decolonisation. One manifestation of this is disaster colonialism, which can be defined as the exploitation of crises by powerful entities, under the guise of aid or reconstruction. Loans are extended to finance rebuilding, but the steep interest rates or policy conditions mean that the same nations whose carbon emissions fuel more extreme weather conditions profit through Jamaica’s indebtedness.
Each new disaster deepens a vicious cycle. Already weak infrastructure fails; the state borrows to rebuild; repayment limits effective public investment; and soon enough another storm strikes. External interventions operate by framing disasters as singular events that justify “emergency” action, which can mask continued imposition and control, subtly a continuation of imperialism through disaster management.
So, the Jamaican prime minister’s remark before Hurricane Melissa, “there is no infrastructure in the region that can withstand a Category 5,” speaks volumes. The infrastructural weakness is not accidental but inherited, the colonial objective of extraction produced systems suited for export, not endurance. Then even today, reconstruction projects in the region rely on global supply chains and financial institutions whose hierarchies mirror imperial structures.
Ultimately, environmental hazards alone do not create disasters. The escalation of an earthquake or hurricane to a large-scale catastrophe is determined not just by the scale of the event itself, but by the unequal histories and the compounding of structures dominated by colonialism. To understand climate vulnerability then, one must consider not only meteorological patterns but imperial ones.
Le Dragon Déchaîné 