What does human-caused global heating have to do with music history? That’s one of the main questions we’re asking on Sounding History. Climate change didn’t come out of nowhere. Many historians now agree that measurable human impacts on climate can be seen from around 1600, and have a direct connection to European colonial expansion. Colonialism reconfigured the world economy around the extraction of natural resources and the exploitation of humans to provide the labor for that extraction. A by-product of that exploitation was profound change to how people made, heard, and paid for music. In this episode we talk about what sound has to do with the Anthropocene, explore how profits from the slave trade had a direct impact on European musical life in the eighteenth century, and immerse ourselves in the soundscape, full of colliding cultural experiences, of a Jamaican dance hall at the turn of the 19th century.