Despite their relatively small landmass – only 2% of the earth’s surface (Ratter 2018, 2) – islands have played a march larger role in history than their small size may suggest. With 13% of world heritage sites on their land (Baldacchino 2006: 3), islands have stimulated abundant interest among researchers employing methods from the field of island studies to compare island(er) histories.
Before the field of island studies was established, island history was a part (and sometimes a very small part) of maritime history. Islands in maritime history often appeared as transitory locations along the way to somewhere else or as navigational obstacles on route. Useful as refueling stations, locations to wait out a storm, to recruit laborers, or sources of natural resources, islands in maritime history were more often studied as steppingstones along the way rather than as destinations in and of themselves. Island history within the field of island studies instead starts first with island-specific dynamics and then works ‘bottom-up’ or ‘inside-out’ to draw conclusions on the larger context (Baldacchino 2008). Several historians have been instrumental in their inclusion of islands and islanders, as well as promoting island studies as a bridge between maritime history and global history (Edmon and Smith 2003; Gillis 2012; Sivasundaram 2014; Sicking 2014; North 2018).
Island studies historians ask: what about the people who lived in the middle of the ocean? What about islanders who never boarded a boat (because they could not afford to or because they did not want to)? What is unique about their experiences, and can they be compared with other islands, coasts, or ports areas on the mainland? Indeed, islanders can teach us about a long past of coping with waves of migrations, epidemic outbreaks, and climate and environmental changes (Contable 2004; Santana-Pérez 2016; Abulafia 2000). Notably, many island societies, due to their locations along trade routes, needed to cope with cultural diversity, making them important locations to study multilingualism, integration, cross-cultural communication, hybrid religious practices, and peace-keeping initiatives (McCusker and Soares 2011; Wilkens 2014). Reoccurring traits, such as the use of islands for exile, prisons, or holy sites, or the changing of island environments by colonial invasive species, or the impact of weather on island life (e.g. from monsoons, floods, hurricanes) can be compared. Analyzing specific characteristics of islands because they are islands, leads to critical reflections that can contribute to larger public and academic debates, for example on innovative solutions to freshwater scarcity (see article on: Island Water Scarcity).
Abulafia David. 2000. Mediterranean Encounters Economic Religious Political 1100-1550. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Baldacchino, G. (2006). Islands, island studies, island studies journal. Island Studies Journal, 1(1), 3-18.
Baldacchino, G. (2008), Studying Islands: On Whose Terms? Some Epistemological and Methodological Challenges to the Pursuit of Island Studies. Island Studies Journal 3(1), 37-56
Constable Olivia Remie. 2004. Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World : Lodging Trade and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edmond, Rod and Vanessa Smith. 2003. Islands in History and Representation. London: Routledge.
Gillis John R. 2010. Islands of the Mind : How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World 1St Palgrave Macmillan pbk ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
McCusker Maeve and Anthony Soares. 2011. Islanded Identities : Constructions of Postcolonial Cultural Insularity. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
North, Michael. “The Baltic Sea.” Oceanic Histories. Eds. Armitage, David, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram. Cambridge: 2018, 209–233.
Ratter Beate M. W. 2018. Geography of Small Islands : Outposts of Globalisation. Cham Switzerland: Springer.
Santana-Pérez, Juan Manuel. “Diseases Spread by Sea: Health Services and the Ports of the Canary Islands in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries”. The Mariner’s Mirror 102.3 (2016): 290–302.
Sicking, Louis. “Islands and maritime connections, networks and empires, 1200-1700, Introduction.” The International Journal of Maritime History 26.3 (2014): 489–493.
Sivasundaram Sujit. 2013. Islanded : Britain Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wilkens, Anna E., Patrick Ramponi, and Helge Wendt, eds. 2011. Inseln Und Archipele : Kulturelle Figuren Des Insularen Zwischen Isolation Und Entgrenzung. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Laura Dierksmeier is a historian working in the German Research Foundation funded Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1070) “Resource Cultures” at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
For her 2016 dissertation on Mexican Indigenous history (University of Tübingen) she received the Bartolomé de las Casas Dissertation Award from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and the Albert C. Outler Prize from the American Society of Church History.
Currently, she is writing her second monograph within the field of island studies, analyzing the effects of water scarcity and flooding on daily life on islands under the Spanish Empire.
Laura Dierksmeier recently finished two co-edited books, one on indigenous knowledge transmission from Latin America to Europe and the other on the role of islands in Mediterranean history. She co-leads a German Research Foundation Funded academic network on island studies.
Christian Depraetere (PhD, Sorbonne, 1984) is hydrogeomorphologist at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development* and based in Montpellier at the Remote Sensing Centre.
He worked in various countries in Africa (including Madagascar) on the implementations of hydro/precipitation data base and hydro meteorologic monitoring. He was part of projects on environmental issues in the Balkanic region, the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Mediterranean.
He is the co-conceptor of the Global Island Database (GID, WCMC/IRD, 2010) and the Base de données Insulaires Mondiale (BIM, IRD, 2019) which paved the way to the present Global Island Explorer (GIE, USGS/WCMC/ESRI, 2020). Both GID/BIM includes climatic, hydrologic and biomic clues for islands greater than 1 km².
As member of ISISA*, his present main research focuses on the geohistory of insular regions in various part of the world to unfold large scale and “longue durée” processes of dispersal, diffusion and migration from the Neolithic to the present time.
* Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)
**ISISA: International Small Island Studies Association.
Oceanic islands are often at the top of the freshwater scarcity index; as paradoxical pieces of land, they are sea-locked but their fresh and brackish water supplies are land-locked. That is to say, in a metaphoric, analogic and geopoetic way, the tiny oceanic islands are fragile oases with limited freshwater amenities surrounded by a boundless desert-like salty ocean.
In addition to brackish groundwater and a lack of annually flowing rivers, some islands face a pollution of aquifers through toxic volcanic gasses, deforestation, desertification, and overexploitation of water resources (WR) through water-intensive monoculture crops and mismanagement of domestic water supplies. Even flashfloods can exacerbate limited freshwater supplies by dragging pollutants into water storage systems, such as cisterns. Islands receive proportionally more precipitation than continents due to their oceanic context, as they are directly under the influences of Tradewinds and westerlies. Conversely, as “sealocked” and relatively small pieces of land, they only collect rainwater from their area and cannot benefit from “WR externalities” such as large regional or continental aquifers or huge allochtone rivers with their source in more humid zones (i.e. the Nil). Consequently, due to their little size, their catchment basins are small with erratic streamflows with either sudden and devastating flash floods or no water flow at all during the dry season. The decennial “WR inertia” of small islands is limited to mitigate the interannual fluctuations of rainfalls which is a universal phenomenon on a hydroclimatologic mesoscale of about 10,000 km² corresponding to medium size islands (i.e. Cyprus) The driest islands are mostly located in the Red Sea, in addition to Socotra, Jerba, and the western Canary Islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura (Map 1).
Map 1: average precipitation per year over the period 1950-2000 on islands
The erraticism of variable oceanic weather patterns and terrestrial hydrological processes combined with a disconnection from large land-based water support prompts islands to reveal drastic signs of the worsening of climate and environmental changes before they appear on the mainland (Depraetere & Morell 2009). Also the geographical isolation of small islands and their limited physical size can make the effects of climate change and implications for water supplies more severe than on the mainland (Ratter 2018). The smaller and lower the island, the greater reliance on groundwater it has; a major drawback for islanders is the fragile equilibrium of the freshwater lens with the surrounding seawater and the difficulty of pumping floating freshwater without saltwater entering the supply; this is why Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) is more than elsewhere a vital approach to fulfil an optimal use of the resource for the locally-based various economic sectors, overall health issues, and island biodiversity, in short for social development (Depraetere et al. 2020).
A lack of freshwater is also detrimental for agriculture, tourism and island life at large. For example, it is a common trait of islandness that only a few crop varieties are grown on small islands, making the effects of crop failure harmful for the economy and local food supplies (Royle 2004). Also limited specialized labourers on small islands (e.g. engineers) may not be able to provide continuous solutions to hydraulic infrastructure problems created by storms, to which small islands are especially susceptible (Braje et al. 2017, cf. also “stone gardening” to avoid soil erosion and gullies on sloping fields (Mieth & Bork 2004). The governance structure and level of political corruption of a given society directly affects the distribution of water supplies. Especially on islands where freshwater supplies are in private hands, limited access to water exasperates already existing income inequalities; islanders without “hydraulic citizenship” may suffer from a diminished ability to participate in society (Anand 2017). Conversely, the availability of low-cost water when subsidised by local authorities generally induces an over-consumption and waste of water resources.
But the picture is not only bleak. Studying island water scarcity sheds light on the coping mechanisms, adaptations, and innovation of islanders over centuries (Schön & Dierksmeier 2021). In some cases, islanders provide examples that could be implemented mutatis mutandis on other islands or the mainland; as such they should be considered as bellwethers to cope with ongoing environmental changes and evolution of the societies to deal with mitigation/adaptation to climate change. For example, on the Canary islands from 1500-1800 (Map 2), a separate water police force was implemented to protect water supplies, water-yielding plant species called “Fountain Trees” were carefully guarded, low-cost domestic solutions to distil water were employed (“La destiladera Canaria”), extensive cisterns collected rain water, fog moisture was collected from pine trees, academic societies (Real Sociedad de Amigos del País) awarded prizes for innovation technological solutions, and communities came together to protest for their needs until news travelled to the mainland to reach people who could help them (Dierksmeier 2020; Gioda et al. 1995A and 1995B).
Map 2: average precipitation per year over the period 1950-2000 on the Canarian archipelago and the Selvagens islands
Water scarcity on islands also affects religious and cultural practices. For example, the “DiNapolito’s hypothesis” tries to explain the putative relations between the sacred zones with ahu statues and freshwater, one of the most critical resources on Rapa Nui. The hypothesis suggests that the locations of ahu are explained by their distance from coastal seeps, demonstrating the vital importance of coastal freshwater resources (DiNapoli et al. 2019). Despite the fact that Rapa Nui receives 1,177 mm/year of water on average, surface and sub-surface WR storage are erratic due the porosity and permeability of the volcanic basement. The utmost sign of precontact Pascuan populations’ dependencies on water resources stands on the fact that the hypnotic gaze of ahu are screening the island hinterland and NOT the open-sea; it illustrates the tight entanglement of hydrological and societal factors in constrained insular geographical contexts.
Water scarcity derives from manifold geological and geographical challenges, with a long history of solutions to one of the most significant enigmas of island life.
Anand N, 2017. Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Braje, T. J. / Leppard, T. P. / Fitzpatrick, S. M. / Erlandson, J. M. Archaeology, historical ecology and anthropogenic island ecosystems. Environmental Conservation 33:3, 2017, 286–297.
Depraetere C., Morell M., 2009: “Hydrology of islands”. In Encyclopedia of Islands, edited by Rosemary G. Gillespie and David A. Clague, Encyclopedias of the Natural World, n°2, University of California Press, July 2009, pp. 420-425.
Depraetere C., Soulis K.X., Tsesmelis D.E., Avgoustidis G., Spilanis I. (2020). Impacts of climate change on the evolution of water resources in the context of the Mediterranean islands using as an example two Aegean Sea islands : consequences for touristic activities in the future. In The anthropocene and islands : vulnerability, adaptation and resilience to natural hazards and climate change. Lago : Il Sileno, 3, 143-182. (Geographies of the Anthropocene ; 2).
Dierksmeier, L. (2020), Historical Water Scarcity on the Canary Islands, 1500-1800 AD. In: S. Teuber, A. Scholz, T. Scholten, & M. Bartelheim (eds.), Waters as a Resource. SFB 1070, Tübingen: University of Tuebingen Press, 39 – 47.
DiNapoli RJ, Lipo CP, Brosnan T, Hunt TL, Hixon S, Morrison AE., Becker, M (2019). Rapa Nui (Easter Island) monument (ahu) locations explained by freshwater sources. PLOS ONE Journal 14(1). Publisher Public Library of Science, January 2019, 27 pages.
Mieth, Andreas. & Bork, Hans-Rudolf. (2004). Easter Island – Rapa Nui : scientific pathways to secrets of the past. Kiel, Germany: Ecology Center. 109 pages, 49 figures. (cf. Figure 7 page 18, aerial view of the freshwater lake of Rano Raraku).
Gioda A., Hernandez Z., Gonzales E., Espejo R. (1995A). Fountain trees in the Canary islands : legend and reality. Advances Horticultural Science, 9, p. 112-118. https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010078642
Gioda, A., Maley, J., Guasp, R.E., Acosta Baladón, A. (1995B). Some Low Elevation Fog Forests of Dry Environments: Applications to African Paleoenvironments. In: Hamilton, L.S., Juvik, J.O., Scatena, F.N. (eds) Tropical Montane Cloud Forests. Ecological Studies, vol 110. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2500-3_10
Ratter, B. M. W. Geography of Small Islands: Outposts of Globalisation (Cham 2018).
S. A. Royle, A Geography of Islands: Small Island Insularity (London 2004).
Schön, F. & Dierksmeier, L. (2021), Water Scarcity at Sea: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on the Preservation of Freshwater on Volcanic Islands. In: T. Schade, B. Schweizer, S. Teuber, R. Da Vela, W. Frauen, M. Karami, D. Kumar Ojha, K. Schmidt, R. Sieler, & M. Toplak (eds.), Exploring Resources. Tübingen: University of Tübingen Press, 157 – 182.
Éric Fougère began his research on insularity with a thesis named “The voyages and the anchorage, insular space in the classical age” – Les Voyages et l’ancrage, espace insulaire à l’âge classique, in the original – (L’Harmattan, 1995) before defending an Habilitation thesis to direct research from which three works emerged: “The Penalty in literature and the prison in its history, solitude and servitude” – La Peine en littérature et la prison dans son histoire, solitude et servitude, in the original – (L’Harmattan, 2001), “The Great Book of the penal colony in Guyana and New Caledonia” – Le Grand Livre du bagne en Guyane et Nouvelle-Calédonie (Orphie, 2002), “Island-prison, penal colony and deportation” – Île-prison, bagne et déportation, in the original – L’Harmattan, 2002). His work has continued in two directions: literary (among others “Islands and beacons, scales in insular literature” – Île et balises, escales en littérature insulaire, in the original – 2004; “Literature to the taste of the world, space and reality” – La littérature au gré du monde, espace et réalité, in the original – (2011…), historical, (“The unwanted in the Désirade, history of the deportation of bad subjects” – Des indésirables à la Désirade, histoire de déportation de mauvais sujets, in the original – 2008; “The colonial prison in Guadeloupe” – La Prison coloniale en Guadeloupe, in the original – 2010; “The sick islands” – Les îles malades, in the original – 2018…). He runs an “Islands” collection, Des îles, in the original, at Pétra editions.
Godfrey Baldacchino PhD (Warwick), BA (Gen.) (Malta), PGCE (Malta), MA (The Hague) is Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology at the University of Malta, Malta. He served as an Island Studies Teaching Fellow, UNESCO co-Chair and Canada Research Chair in Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI), Canada, between 2003 and 2020. He is founding Executive Editor of Island Studies Journal (ISSN:1715-2593), and since 2018 founding Executive Editor of Small States & Territories journal (ISSN:2616-8006). He served as Visiting Professor of Island Tourism at the Universita’ di Corsica Pascal Paoli, France (2012-2015). He was Member and Chair of the Malta Board of Cooperatives (1994-2003) and core member of the Malta-European Union Steering & Action Committee (MEUSAC). In 2008-2010, he was Vice-President of the Prince Edward Island Association for Newcomers to Canada. In 2014, he was elected President of the International Small Islands Studies Association (ISISA). In June 2015, he was elected Chair of the Scientific Board of RETI, the global excellence network of island universities. In 2021, he was appointed (thematic) Malta Ambassador for islands and small states. He served as Pro-Rector for International Development and Quality Assurance (2016-2021) during the first Rectorate of Professor Alfred Vella at the University of Malta.
His research interests include: island studies, small state studies, political geography, sociology of work, international relations, island tourism, entrepreneurship, brain rotation, immigration, labour relations, human resource management, adult education, worker empowerment and the development of cooperatives.
Prof. Baldacchino has (co-)authored or (co-)edited some 50 books, reports and monographs; and has authored, since 1993, some 160 peer-reviewed journal articles or book chapters.
Prof. Baldacchino`s work has appeared in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Swedish (and apart from English and Maltese).
The very spatial limitation of islands can create an idea of self-containment that is reflected for tourists (in their perception of visiting a ‘complete world’) but can also more clearly connect their inhabitants to the place experienced (Grydehøj; Nadarajah, Markussen 2018). Islands haunted by tourism share an awareness of their limits both in cultural terms -their dissolution in a global market of holiday flows- and also in terms of the sustainability of their territory. Stephen A. Royle ( 2009) identifies this awareness in the essential limitation of islands whose cultural references can be translated or adapted to welcome the receiving public, even creating a particular concept for the visitors’ identity – for example, in Hazel Andrews’ (2011) study for the English visiting Magaluf in Majorca. The image of village to be preserved that these places of residence defend will, however, also always be an indirect product of tourism, a counterpoint generating authentic pre-tourist images that reuse the myth of insular isolation to defend a local identity threatened by globalizing tourism. However, as we have seen, the history of the islands is often one of constant contact. According to Eduardo Brito Henriques (2009: 43), what they share is not isolation but the hybridization to which their ports and their maritime vocation lead.
The debate on the cultural affectation of tourism in island environments shares its positions with that which takes place in the wider framework of cultural anthropology, and in which, roughly speaking, we can identify two positions: that of those who see in tourism, a form of acculturation of the local and that of those who understand – from different positions – that tourism can function as an engine of cultural preservation or of creation of new cultural forms. In the first position, we would mainly find analyses on how cultural commodification in island environments causes the modification of the local culture which, as Michel Picard (1996) has already noticed from his studies in Bali, changes when it becomes a performative representation for tourists. At the same time, Keith G. Brown and Jenny Cave (2010) note that they necessarily convert the relationship between tourist and resident into a relationship between consumer and producer, who can adapt their product to the expectations of the former. Access to local culture is therefore reserved for a few demanding tourists and often those with high purchasing power who, for example, when they arrive in Mallorca visit the tomb of Robert Graves in the picturesque – and expensive – municipality of Deyà and do not go out on the streets decorated with German or British flags in Magaluf or El Arenal.
Studying cultural tourism in the Trobriand Islands, Michelle MacCarthy reflects on the uses of the concept of authenticity in the valuation of cultural products consumed by tourists, an authenticity that its very presence could corrupt. However, in a constructivist position of the cultural element – she concludes -, authenticity as such that only exists as a projection of the tourist himself, is itself a tourist product sold by cultures in a constant process of evolution. From this point of view, Antoni Vives and Francesc Vicens (2021) analyse the link between tourist culture and local identity, and – so they believe – it is not very useful to understand tourism as a process of acculturation of pure and immobile pre-tourist identities. Tourism would also import complex and creative forms of cultural contact, which emerge – as Michel Picard also concluded from Bali – through the creation of new forms of modern cultural production.
Also in its environmental dimension, tourism promotes -since the first attempts to invent nature as a place of contemplation for visitors (Martínez-Tejero and Picornell 2022) – a patrimonialization of the natural element that has a double effect especially relevant in tourist insularities. On the one hand, it transforms nature into landscape, cancelling out, for example, the productive relevance of the rural or the need to respect changes in the environment and its resources. The drive to visit the patrimonialized landscape environment ends up, in a perverse paradoxical circle, raping the nature it celebrates, motivating urban exploitation, the media, the over-occupation of the territory. On the contrary, it generates an awareness of the very limits of the territorial, but in which these do not only refer to the awareness of the coastline, but also, to an evaluation of the very materiality of the land that derives, at the same time, in two interconnected registers: the generation of an ecological discourse where the island identity is largely linked to the natural space and, likewise, in a certain essentialisation of this nature as a place of reception of the roots of resident cultures that can lead to an almost nostalgic idealisation of pre-tourism as authentic, sometimes ignoring the stories of transit that, as we have seen, often condition the island histories and their most interesting literary determinations in terms of methodological innovation. Considering the terrain, the oppressions of the labour market, the constant reinvention of the local in its tourist projection and/or resistance, the global imaginary of the insular seems even more a literary construction, real in its ability to attract visitors and configure looks, as well as to evaluate how these looks are readjusted or answered by the local culture.
Andrews, Hazel (2011). “Porkin’ Pig goes to Magaluf”. Journal of Material Culture, 16: 2. 151-170.
Grydehøj, Adam; Nadarajah, Yaso; Markussen, Ulunnguaq (2018). “Islands of indigeneity: Cultural Disctinction, Indigenous Territory and Island Spaciality”. Area, 52(1): 14-22.
Martínez-Tejero, Cristina; Picornell, Mercè (2022). “From Pleasant Difference to Ecological Concern: Cultural Imaginaries of Tourism in Contemporary Spain”. Luis I. Prádanos, A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies. Londres: Tamesis Books. 195-205.
Picard, Michel (1996). Bali: Cultural tourism and touristic culture. Singapur: Archipelago.
Royle, Stephen A. (2009). “Tourism Changes on a Mediterranean island: Experiences from Mallorca”, Island Studies Journal, 4: 2. 225-240.
Vives Riera, Antoni; Vicens Vida, Francesc (2021). Cultura turística i identitats múltiples a les Illes Balears. Passat i present. Barcelona: Afers.
