An interview with Damian Clavel and Susanna B. Hecht, authors of “Colonial Exiles: The Tambora Volcanic Explosion, Environmental History, and Swiss Immigration to Nova Friburgo, Brazil, 1815–1821”
Damian Clavel is a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione postdoctoral fellow at the University of Zurich and author of the recently published Financing Sovereignty: The Poyais Scandal in the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Susanna B. Hecht is professor of international history at the Geneva Graduate Institute and professor of planning at the Luskin School of Public Affairs and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose books include Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon, The Scramble for the Amazon and the “Lost Paradise” of Euclides da Cunha, The Social Lives of Forests: Past, Present, and Future of Woodland Resurgence, and Soy, Globalization, and Environmental Politics in South America. She has won the AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography. You can read their article “Colonial Exiles: The Tambora Volcanic Explosion, Environmental History, and Swiss Immigration to Nova Friburgo, Brazil, 1815–1821” in HAHR 104.4.
Interview by Rebeca Martínez-Tibbles
Writing Teleconnections
1. What inspired you to explore the connection between the Tambora eruption, environmental history, and Swiss immigration to Nova Friburgo, Brazil?
Susanna Hecht (SH): As a child I spent some time in Fribourg with my family (my father was Swiss) and because of my Amazon focus, I didn’t think that much about the dynamics of European migration into Southern Brazil other than noting that much of it occurred in the late ninteenth century with Italians and Germans filling up the labor demands of postslavery Brazil during the agrarian expansion in Southern Brazilian coffee plantations and colonization efforts in the Brazilian southern states. From the 1980s forward their offspring was part of a new wave of Amazonian territorial settlement, especially as part of the BR164 settlements. This was a much later immigration—by close to a century—than the Swiss story Damian and I came to tell . . .
The rather “hidden” dynamics of global Swiss colonization exemplified in the childhood classic Swiss Family Robinson—or at least its presence in the wider Latin American story—came more into view when I was teaching in the International History and Politics Department of the Geneva Graduate Institute during the fall terms over the last decade. The question came into focus as part of a global atmospheric cataclysm triggered by the Tambora Volcano explosion of 1815, a largely forgotten yet globally traumatic short-term climatic event with profoundly transformative effects. Swiss Family Robinson was written in the late eighteenth century and reflected early international information flows about places (the island they land on is a colonial hybrid of every place), and what they describe is the ideal innovative settler colonist. In the early nineteenth century, Swiss commerce was active in this early dynamic of globalization and geopolitics as the Iberian powers began to falter and flail in the face of more direct European interventions in Latin America and the rise of new forms of international finance. The International History and Politics Department had at the time economic historians who took an interest in some of the more unusual dynamics of the Atlantic world linkages, such as Marc Flandreau, who took more ethnographic approaches, and a graduate student we shared, at the time, Damian Clavel.
I was also teaching a class on climate change and history, the early part of which focused on the Tambora Volcano explosion. Few places were more affected, in complex and broader cultural ways, than Switzerland; the eruption affected its agrarian economy and its scientific community, in addition to stimulating Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as she and the rest of Lord Byron’s coterie, vacationing in the Alps, amused themselves amid the dangerous, tempestuous weather by creating horror stories. I could see Byron’s villa, where this durable classic was written, across the lake from my apartment and from the institute’s balconies—which was a regular reminder of the volcanic winter’s impact and a mnemonic device about teleconnections, about environmental history, and about the value—-even indirect!——of the environmental humanities as context and trigger.
The Tambora Volcano and its volcanic winter also affected members of the Agassizes, a family linked to British finance who had a part in the development of early nineteenth-century science in Switzerland and, though less known, of US scientific institutions. Louis Agassiz was a founders of early glacial studies and also founded the Harvard Museum of Natural History. He married Elizabeth Cabot and thus was allied with a powerful and wealthy Boston Brahmin family. He traveled to Brazil with a cohort of wealthy students. The Thayer expeditions included the scions of great US fortunes, including one William James, founder of the US pragmatist philosophical approach and of US psychology and brother to Henry James, the great US novelist. The trip is infamous for photography events in which Agassiz photographed naked women of Amazonia in a studio in Manaus in order to document the complexity of the races in Brazil.
Agassiz extolled Nova Friburgo as exemplifying the supposed virtues of the white race and of Swiss and middle European culture. Novo Friburgo was greatly and publicly appreciated for this reason by Brazil’s ruler, Emperor Pedro II (who supported Agassiz’s Amazonian travels and lent the expedition his yacht); this gave Nova Friburgo a salience that, as we argue in our essay, contributed to, and was critical for the racist ideologies in Brazil that underpinned the later support for migration from Europe at the end of the nineteenth century as a means of “whitening” to improve the genetic stock of Brazil its large Black, Indigenous and mixed population. Agassiz’s prestige provided this racist view with a scientific and political imprimatur.
Damian Clavel (DC): My interest in this topic also has personal roots. I spent my teenage years in Fribourg, surrounded by the characteristic pre-Alpine landscapes dotted with cows—a sight that seemed in a way timeless and immutable. Growing up between a city where medieval history blended with industrialization and rural towns centered around what appeared to be a characteristic dairy industry, my adolescence was principally oriented toward regional history, focused rather on its integration into a mountainous landscape and a dairy economy. The Château de Gruyères perfectly exemplified this layered history—a medieval fortress that houses traditional regional historical exhibits in the middle of the region where the eponymous cheese is produced (in addition to the striking HR Giger Museum, embodying how older and contemporary culture were presented to coexist in this landscape, yet remained in a way very much local.)
However, my perspective began to shift, perhaps unknowingly, as I encountered a renewed interest in global economic and colonial history—indeed, a kind of (re)discovery of a national narrative through the works of historians like Patricia Purtschert and, more importantly perhaps, Béatrice Veyrassat, who only recently reinscribed Switzerland into a more global perspective. I then began to perceive that Switzerland’s place in the world was far more connected than what a more traditional narrative—rather isolationist but at the same time rather open to a cosmopolitan world—had until then depicted. This more connected history revealed the involvement of an ever-growing number of Swiss actors in various histories, including some darker ones—i.e., the slave trade and plantation economies. These openings then allowed me to begin considering the regional history I had grown up with as potentially having much broader ramifications.
I had already had a first glimpse of these ramifications through a student exchange program that a Fribourg association had set up, organizing exchanges between Nova Friburgo and Fribourg students, attempting to celebrate and striving to maintain in a form of collective memory the existence of these links. While I hadn’t participated myself, my sister had been able to spend several weeks in Nova Friburgo, in exchange for which our family had hosted a Brazilian student for an equivalent duration. Indirectly, we perhaps experienced that a connection indeed existed between these two Fribourgs—without perhaps really knowing what foundations these ties rested on.
But it was only several years later that Susanna reminded me of this Nova Friburgo story and suggested considering its history as part of much more global dynamics. I was already familiar with Martin Nicoulin’s impressive work, which, while incredibly empirically grounded, had the remarkable merit of tracing the hopeful but eventually unfortunate journey of Fribourg emigrants to Brazil. However, in light of the more recent historiographical developments in both Swiss global and colonial history, it seemed that it was now possible to place the story of this journey in a much broader context—colonial and environmental.
The environmental dimension emerged as we began to understand how the Tambora eruption’s climatic effects created the conditions that made Swiss emigration not just possible but necessary. This environmental catastrophe became the trigger that activated existing networks of intermediaries and colonial ambitions, showing how local suffering in the Swiss countryside connected to global processes of migration, colonization, and racial ideology formation in Brazil.
2. Can you elaborate on the interdisciplinary approach that you used in this study, particularly how environmental history and historical archives were integrated into your analysis?
SH: Environmental history until quite recently hadn’t the methods or data or, in many ways, the interest to really to take on large-scale questions. One could get regional stories, which mostly focused on local archives, but these tended to be quite provincial (though interesting and useful) and hadn’t connected to large processes. In Times of Feast, Times of Famine: Climate History 1000 AD Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie had developed early integrative methods and was able to connect a long historical framing to climate, but he could only frame this within what were more regional information sources.
While magisterial studies had been linked to either large-scale regional socioenvironmental histories of Braudelian geographies (as pioneered in Braudel’s The Mediterranean and William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis), these were works of long time frames that lacked the helpful inputs of modern climatology. Furthermore, research on the real and disruptive historical effects of climate changes on human lives globally remained a historical topic enmired in a discredited (and ancient) history of ideologies of environmental determinism of human capacities and climatic theories of race, ideas widely deployed in various colonial periods and in Nazism and Social Darwinism to justify and actualize colonial and authoritarian rule, slavery, and genocide.
As the tropics have come more into focus as pivots of global climate, as the data sets became more elaborated and planetary in scope, and as questions of “nuclear winter” began increase focus on past volcanic events for informing global climate modeling, research increased into how singular events, or repeating intense events like El Niño, might have influenced social events and processes across the planet. As climate modelers and scholars ran the models “backward,” important discussions of teleconnections began to emerge on the historic planetary scale, including how the potential volatility of atmospheric CO2 and methane levels were reflected in land-use change. Ice cores, lake cores, tree cores, human records, and archaeology all pointed to a more volatile climatic world. For our purposes, we turned to studies of volcanoes’ impacts on global climate, but also to research on human changes, including migration, in reaction to climate.
Historical physical geographers and climatologists began to focus more on teleconnections, the links between actions at a distance from one another. This research suggested that the Great Dying, the series of epidemiological events and social disruptions that killed as much as 95 percent of the New World Indigenous populations triggered an immense recovery of carbon-absorbing tropical forests from previous burning areas that shifted global climates, especially in Europe, to the period that was known as “the little Ice Age,” and historians elaborated the complex socioeconomic dynamics that ensued. With emerging deep historical data on climate processes, the extraordinary archaeological discoveries about high population densities throughout the American tropics and especially Amazonia, and a better understanding of how carbon dynamics in multiple directions could change climate at large scales, the idea of impacts at a distance—teleconnections—was becoming empirically verifiable around some specific events.
The work on the Tambora Volcano eruptions—-in addition to its scientific value—is a monument to the importance and detailed archival, literary, and sociological research undertaken in the environmental humanities. Gillian D’Arcy Wood’s magisterial study on the global impacts of Tambora documents the diversity and range of cultural/political impacts from this short-terms event’s large-scale weather disturbances: failing agriculture, shifting disease profiles, agrarian changes, new sciences, and, of course, the impact on Switzerland, which was hard hit and has a rich documentary record. We combinedthis with more refined archival data on the agrarian collapse, including the labor and regional economic disruptions and the response to them. While the Great Dying triggered massive climate shifts that only changed with the rise of industrial emissions, the “mini ice age” of Tambora provides a useful and granular view of how significant global disasters inaugurate a range of socioecological dislocations. With our sense of modernist uniformity, we think that intense climate events will have a uniform outcome, but it’s much more complex, as the recent immolation of LA communities should make clear. Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World and Richard Grove’s El Niño in World History are also in this vein. But none of these excellent works address an event with the circumglobal effect of Tambora, nor do they offer the highly readable documentation of Wood’s book.
As we try to detail in our article, the climate impact of Tambora, though short lived, was immensely transformative far away from the site of primary impact in Indonesia, and the events and processes that it triggered played out not just at a physical or sociological level but also an ideological one. Woods documents in detail how Tambora changed a range of ideas, practices and vulnerabilities.
DC: I will not add much to Susanna’s answer here, except to note that the concept of teleconnection has invited us to reconsider how more localized narratives in Indonesia, Fribourg, and Brazil, when examined together, reveal patterns operating at vast scales. Wolfgang Behringer’s pioneering work on Tambora has, for example, inspired fresh thinking about the often-unsuspected ways in which events cascade across great distances within relatively compressed time frames. His work demonstrated not only how multiple teleconnections can emerge from a single cataclysmic event but, more significantly, the diverse forms and extraordinary geographic reach that these connections can assume—encompassing, as his scholarship so compellingly shows, population movements, and indeed the very Swiss emigration to Nova Friburgo that concerns us here.
Yet a certain frustration remained in attempting to grasp not only how these teleconnections materialized but the specific mechanisms through which they developed, recognizing that none of these processes occurred spontaneously. Put simply, we sought to understand the specific political and economic foundations that enabled these global linkages to take shape.
Examining one particular teleconnection in detail became in turn both intellectually fascinating and methodologically challenging. As scholars like Marc Flandreau have highlighted for the history of capitalism, studying a single historical phenomenon necessitates mobilizing different literatures and analytical tools—a methodological insight that proved essential to our approach. As Wood’s masterful analysis demonstrates, these connections not only develop through multiple sequential stages but also touch individual lives in fundamentally distinct ways at each juncture. Consequently, tracing the surprising trajectory of this specific teleconnection required an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor—this became especially evident when our research necessitated moving from uncommon meteorological records at Lake Geneva to the commercial networks of diamond merchants like Brémond. Each phase demanded distinct analytical insights to comprehend this singular historical phenomenon—from volcanic climatology to racial colonial ideologies, encompassing the complex relationships binding cheese production to international mercenary service. What proved particularly interesting was recognizing how intermediaries like Brémond and Schmidtmeyer did not simply facilitate these connections but actively shaped how the teleconnection itself evolved.
3. In your view, has Nova Friburgo and its racialized immigration policies influenced Brazil’s modern identity and development? If so, how?
SH: Nova Friburgo didn’t itself have racial policies, and the immigration it triggered was organized around distressed populations and even was supposed to handle homeless/stateless people. The racial policies that it incarnated reflected the racial ideologies about the inferiority of Black and Indigenous populations—and remember that Portugal had been involved in the African slave trade since the mid-fifteenth century, and that the enslaved in Brazil and elsewhere had been erupting in uprisings since the beginning of New World slavery, which became especially intense in the early nineteenth century triggered by the Haitian Revolution. The end of the Iberian empires destabilized governments and local governance and produced a period of very intense flight into kilombos, or slave refuges, that operated as autonomous political and sometimes regional units, creating what the Brazilian historian of slave uprisings João José Reis has called “the invention of freedom.” Given the intense geopolitical struggles unfolding in the Caribbean—the economic motor for much of the Atlantic economy, the Brazilian state thought that white central Europeans would be more trustworthy in geopolitical conflicts and other forms of defense than enslave people pressed into military service. As we point out, the Swiss migrants did not fare very well, but it was important that they be seen as a successful (white) colony so as not to jeopardize other Swiss investment projects at a moment of incredible political and economic volatility. This narrative of successful early white Christian colonization became the intellectual foundation for support of European migrants at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as influencing the idea of improving Brazil’s racial stock through whitening.
DC: Complementing Susanna’s analysis of how Nova Friburgo incarnated rather than created racial ideologies, I would like to add something about how this manufactured narrative of successful white colonization has had enduring effects that extend in a circular fashion back to Switzerland itself.
The transformation of Nova Friburgo’s initial failure into a success story—orchestrated by Schmidtmeyer and Swiss merchant-bankers concerned about protecting their broader investment projects—created a powerful template that influenced Brazilian development policies well into the modern era. As Susanna noted, this narrative became the intellectual foundation for massive European immigration at the end of the nineteenth century and influenced Brazil’s whitening ideology. But what’s particularly fascinating is how this story has come full circle to shape contemporary Swiss history. The manufactured success has developed deep roots that persist, creating what recent artistic works by Denise Bertschy have revealed to be a cultivated imaginary that continues to bind different points across the world together. This enduring connection manifests most vividly in the elaborate celebration of Nova Friburgo’s bicentenary, during which extensive cultural exchanges were organized—student exchanges, marching band performances, exhibitions, documentaries, and memorial concerts. Most symbolically, the city of Fribourg constructed a replica of Christ the Redeemer in one of its parks.
What’s most striking is the active process of historical selection at work here. The racial underpinnings that originally emanated from Nova Friburgo have been systematically forgotten—apparently erased from collective memory. Instead, these connections now serve to illustrate what current cantonal powers present as a curated anthology—a kind of florilegium—of Swiss excellence and the permanence of Helvetic presence abroad. We find ourselves in a situation where the racial ideologies that enabled Nova Friburgo to survive are completely effaced, replaced by a romanticized celebration of supposed Swiss global influence.
In essence, Schmidtmeyer’s rewriting of Nova Friburgo—originally designed to salvage Swiss commercial reputation during a moment of incredible Atlantic volatility—has taken on a life of its own, not just in Brazil but in Switzerland as well. This demonstrates how colonial narratives undergo continuous reappropriation and mythologization by both sending and receiving societies, with the original problematic racial foundations being actively forgotten while the narrative of Swiss exceptionalism lives on and flourishes.
4. Given the current global challenges of climate-induced migration, what lessons can policymakers and historians draw from the Nova Friburgo case?
SH: First, that the disruptions are real and profound and affect multiple countries, and that the way the migrants are characterized makes a big difference in their treatment and support. These impacts are far-reaching and will go on for some time.
Next, that the kind of support for this type of immigration that we describe—those Swiss had a lot of help—is not really available at this moment in history, when ethnic nationalism and other antimigrant ideologies that vilify migrants. Also, Brazil eagerly sought European—Italians, German, and Poles—after the end of slavery, for the expansion into the southern frontier and coffee plantations, and for the creation of a modern industrial economy, as Barbara Weinstein points out in The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil. Immigrants were seen as a boon rather than a burden to the economy and, quite specifically because of the question of race, as improving national character. Right now, ethnonational ideologies see immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country, to quote President Trump, and dehumanize them. The exception in the United States now is the white South Africans, who embody white nationalist values and are seen as an oppressed population, in an inversion of the long history of apartheid into one of antiwhite discrimination. Also, since climate denial is currently embraced in several countries, it is hard to make a humanitarian argument on that basis for asylum seekers, Finally, even the UN barely accepts climate refugees as an analytic category. So the lessons of Nova Friburgo are pretty varied, and unlike the support that these earlier climate refugees received, as they say, the overall climate is different now . . .
5. Read anything good recently?
SH: Well, I recommend Wood’s Tambora as a great text on this topic of climate change, as well as Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts. Greg Grandin’s America, América is something I am currently reading, and for really getting a feel about a place that gets battered with climate change, before this phrase was part of the language, few books match the magisterial work of Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertoes (translated to English as Rebellion in the Backlands).
DC: I have recently read Arnaud Orain’s The Politics of Utopia, which revisits the infamous history of John Law’s System. Orain’s work demonstrates how reexamining allegedly fraudulent schemes can challenge established narratives about French colonial and financial history. His approach of placing individual financial activities within their broader political and economic contexts reveals unexpected networks that shaped both financial and colonial ventures. Most importantly for our purposes, he shows how the seemingly scandalous aspects of these schemes can actually illuminate the deeper political foundations of these histories.