Climate and Curiosity: Human and Nonhuman in the Little Ice Age

This article traces the biases, grounded in race and class, attending the importation of maize into England and its exploitation in New England colonies. The acceleration of transatlantic commerce during the colonial period imported a diverse body of new world plants, animals and people into Europe which enabled new adaptive and transformative strategies attending the extraction and deployment of new world resources. English herbals and New English accounts of settler colonialism both register and promote the transatlantic enterprise that unearthed commodities whose strangeness unsettled established notions of the human, nonhuman, and more than human. “Curiosity,” as a mode of thought and as a descriptor aligning goods to a deserving, discriminating class, benefited the elite by providing them with strategies and resources to withstand the assaults of the Little Ice Age. Conversely, this notion deprived the poor of the means and resources needed to confront and survive weather extremes and the hazards associated with them. The curiosity of maize offers one instance in which the elite claimed their right to commodities while denying them to others and, in doing so, defined themselves as uniquely human.