Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire

An impressive product of multidisciplinary collaboration, Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire brings together recent scholarship from such diverse fields as art history, geography, literature, and the history of science in order to address the ways in which Westerners perceived the tropical world from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-twentieth-century. As the editors Felix Driver and Luciana Martins explain, the volume has three main concerns: “the ways in which tropical places are encountered and experienced, the significance of travel for the process of producing knowledge about these places, and the relationship between geographical difference and generalized notions of ‘tropicality’” (3).

The contributors to the volume deal primarily with visual perceptions of the tropical world. In the introduction, the editors differentiate between two categories of visual perception: “views” and “visions.” Influenced by landscape painting as well as scientific coastal survey methods and mapping techniques, “views” are the product of a drive for distance and detachment from the subject being observed. Upon closer inspection, however, this distance and detachment often appear artificial. “Visions,” which are of more interest in this volume as the title would suggest, occur when the spectator becomes “an active participant in the scene.” Of particular importance are “unexpected visions” in the tropics, which, the editors argue, often had a jarring effect on the Western observer (6-7).

Comparing notions of tropicality to notions of Orientalism, the editors propose that dichotomies of the West versus the rest, such as the Occident versus the Orient or the temperate versus the tropical, need to be “problematized” (5) in response to a mischaracterization of both the Orient and the tropics as “fully formed” concepts “ready-to-be projected” on to the non-European world. Instead, they developed and evolved through processes of “negotiation” and “transculturation” (4-5). While acknowledging that Westerners and the indigenous peoples of the tropics participated in an “unequal exchange,” the editors argue that it was an exchange nonetheless. This exchange resulted in “disorientation, uncertainty, and novelty” in the minds of the Westerners that not only altered their preconceptions but also their self-conceptions. As the editors explain, “travel has the capacity to dislodge the certainty of the self.” But while the editors argue in the introduction that, “European conceptions of the tropics may have been shaped by interactions with a wide variety of peoples and places,” disappointingly little evidence of this is provided in the actual essays, with a few notable exceptions (8).

Following this sound introduction, the book is divided into three parts corresponding to “key modalities through which tropical views and visions are made”: “Voyages,” “Mappings,” and “Sites” (18).  In his opening essay, “‘On the Spot’: Traveling Artists and the Iconographic Inventory of the World, 1769-1859,”  historical geographer Claudio Greppi reveals that the multidisciplinary approach inspiring this volume can be traced through the relationships of any number of artists and scientists who reciprocally influenced each other. The landscape painter William Hodges learned scientific coastal survey techniques as the official artist for Cook’s second voyage and used the techniques he acquired to paint his landscapes of the tropical South Pacific and, later, tropical India. Not only did Hodges’ incorporation of scientific viewing methods influence the practice of landscape painting, but it also influenced the work of scientists concerned with the tropics, most notably, German scientist and explorer Alexander von Humbolt.  Humbolt’s expertise and status as the leading tropical scientist in the late eighteenth century were predicated upon his holistic approach to understanding tropical nature.  Humbolt grafted objective, scientific “views” onto admittedly subjective, artistic or literary “visions.”  Humboldt’s view of the tropics, informed by Hodges, would have a profound impact on later scientists, including Charles Darwin.

Historian Michael Dettelbach explores Humboldt’s holistic approach to understanding tropical nature from a different angle in the next essay of the “Voyages” section, “The Stimulations of Travel: Humboldt’s Physiological Construction of the Tropics.” Dettelbach describes how Humboldt learned to treat his body as a “recording instrument” while investigating the plant life and air quality in the mines of his native Prussia. Humboldt later journeyed to tropical South America where he used a similar approach. For example, in order to compare the “toxicity” of mosquitoes from different areas, Humbolt would prick his arms with thorns, rub ground-up mosquitoes into his wounds, and then take note of the results (48). Dettelbach argues that Humboldt developed this approach because he came to believe that “attending to the effects of the tropics on one’s own physiology (including aesthetic effects) was critical to establishing one’s authority as a philosophical traveler” (45).

The last essay of the “Voyages” section deals with another scientist who valued a direct, sensory experience with tropical nature. The article, “‘The Struggle for Luxuriance’: William Burchell Collects Tropical Nature,” is written by the editors of the volume, Luso-Brazilian scholar Luciana Martins and human geographer Felix Driver. The authors describe how Burchell, a British plant collector and philosophical naturalist, was “disorientated” by his encounters with tropical nature in Brazil and elsewhere. In Burchell’s own words, the reason for this was that tropical nature was “almost too luxuriant” for his sensibilities (59). Although perhaps more easily overwhelmed by tropical nature than the hardy Humboldt, Burchell also took a holistic approach by attempting to combine the hands-on experience of a plant collector with the detached perspective of a philosophical naturalist. Burchell’s drawings in particular reveal this synthesis. He drew pictures of tropical plants in situ with the authority of a trained scientist, something a mere plant collector would not feel qualified to do and a purely philosophical naturalist would never leave his ivory tower to do.

But while Burchell’s notions of the tropical world were formulated as he experienced nature, the authors argue that he was decidedly disengaged with the local people. The authors claim that he was impatient with the curiosity of Brazilians and, like many contemporary European tropical scientists, sought to distance himself from those he characterized as “a most ignorant & unsociable people” (71). But while Burchell, and other scientists like him, may have tried to marginalize local peoples in their writings, their influence on scientists’ visions of the tropics cannot be discarded. The authors do little, however, to place Burchell and his work within the context of these local people other than to mention that Burchell admitted he was assisted by a “‘very useful’ black boy” (71).      

The section titled “Mappings” is described by the editors as being about “the process and practices of mapping, through which particular places and zones across the globe are compared, contrasted, and made intelligible within a general framework” (18). In the first article “Dominica and Tahiti: Tropical Islands Compared,” literature professor Peter Hulme shows that these two islands were initially cast  as opposite extremes of tropicality, with Tahiti as island paradise and Dominica as an island of cannibals. Yet over time, they both came to be known as tropical island paradises, a shift resulting from changing imperial conditions as well as the development of climate-based racial theories that categorized brown-skinned tropical peoples from around the world as occupiers of a middle rung of humanity between civilized whites and barbarous blacks.

Felix Driver and Starr Douglas’ article in the “Mappings” section, “Imagining the Tropical Colony: Henry Smeathman and the Termites of Sierra Leone,” offers unique insight into the juxtapositions and comparisons that were made in the name of science in this study of Henry Smeathmen. A truly Atlantic figure, scientist and termite expert Smeathman combined observations from travel to the Caribbean, where he was impressed by the well-ordered plantations, and travel to West Africa, where the complex organization of termite colonies impressed him in equal measure. Smeathman noted the “wonderful economy” of the insects and the “good order of their subterranean cities” (99). He developed the opinion that both Caribbean slave plantations and West African termite colonies offered useful models for the development of Sierra Leone, a British West African colony for freed slaves.

Smeathman’s proposal reflecting a hierarchical ranking that places termites above humans may be best understood in the context of the scientific pecking order maintained by Joseph Banks.  Smeathman himself was a low-level member of the British scientific establishment headed by Banks who was marginalized in the final published version of his own material. After downplaying the contribution of West African “assistants and intermediaries” without whom Smeathman’s “work would have been simply impossible” (100), Smeathman himself was marginalized by Banks as close examination and comparison of the original illustration of the termite mounds with the final published version reveals.  The portrait that Smeathman had placed of himself drawing the termite mounds ‘on the spot’ was removed before printing. Like a hierarchical termite colony with all of the insects serving the interests of the queen, the authors assert that in the scientific establishment of Sir Joseph Banks, “there was only room for one presiding genius” (112).

Although interesting in its own right, the last article in “Mappings” does not fit with the other articles in the volume. In “Matthew Fontaine Maury’s “Sea of Fire”: Hydrography, Biogeography, and Providence in the Tropics,” historian of science Graham Burnett tells the story of a nineteenth-century United States Naval Officer who is considered a “founding father” of oceanography (117). In Burnett’s account, Maury was inspired by his Christian faith to develop a holistic understanding of the world that combined terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric phenomena. His faith in a divine creator caused him to seek order in the oceans, which had traditionally been viewed as dark and chaotic. After suffering an injury that prevented him from sailing, Maury continued his naval career from a desk at the US Naval Observatory in Washington and launched an ambitious project to map the world’s oceans. With the help of sailors around the world, especially sailors in the US Navy, Maury compiled an enormous sea chart which included information about climatic phenomena and the migratory patterns of whales. The article focuses on the religious aspects of Maury’s ideas about nature as well as the ups and downs of his career and post-mortem reputation.  Conversely, it offers little about Maury’s views on the tropics, which are mentioned once in reference to his conceiving of tropical waters as a “furnace” or “caldron” that produced oceanic phenomena such as the Gulf Stream and blocked the passage of certain whales. Since these whales inhabited both the north Pacific and the north Atlantic, Maury’s belief that the heat of tropical waters prevented their passage also led him to infer that “there is a north west passage”—at least one accessible to whales (133).

Part three, “Sites,” deals with the “representation and negotiation of particular sites” that are somehow relevant to tropicality, although some of the sites are technically outside of the tropics as conventionally defined (18). The Indian subcontinent is treated here—once outside the boundaries of the tropical world, its status changed during the nineteenth century. Historian David Arnold tells the story of scientist and travel writer Joseph Hooker in his article, “Envisioning the Tropics: Joseph Hooker in India and the Himalayas, 1848-1850.” Although well north of the Tropic of Cancer, Hooker still identified “tropical” plants. Hooker thought of these plants, which were conventionally associated with lands between the two tropics, as still tropical since they existed in tropical-like microclimates produced by the varying levels of elevation in places such as the valleys of the Himalayas. Hooker therefore shows the incredible resiliency of notions of tropicality. Plants formerly identified as tropical not only remained tropical when found outside of the tropics, they also made their habitats tropical as well.

Art historian Leonard Bell’s “Sites” section article, “Eyeing Samoa: People, Places, and Spaces in Photographs of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” is perhaps the most provocative contribution to the entire volume for the way it challenges stereotypical images and their interpretations. Bells reads indigenous agency in the photographs he analyzes from turn-of-the-century Samoa. Taken by Australian-born photographer John Davis, these photographs go against the grain, debunking stereotypical images of the South Pacific.  Bell does not deny that Westerners projected their own fantasies onto Samoa, and he mentions photographs in this genre by Davis and others, but Bell shows that images can also be found that break these molds and deconstruct these fantasies. One notable example is one of Davis’ photos of a Samoan dance performance whose frame included not only the dancers but also the crowd of Samoan and white spectators. Bell points out that several members of the audience, both white and Samoan, look back at the camera and in doing so break the illusion of the cameraman’s detachment from the scene. Bell also suggests that the dancers might be pulling a prank, therefore mocking the entire spectacle. The most stunning photo shows an unsmiling Samoan man with arms crossed standing in front of a large boulder. Peering over the top of the boulder from behind is a woman, presumably the man’s wife, and behind her is a hut, presumably the couple’s home. The stark reality of this image captures an indigenous agency thoroughly at odds with the inviting “beaches and coastal strips replete with palm trees” and bare-breasted “dusky maidens” bathing in waterfalls (160).

In the final article of the volume, “Returning Fears: Tropical Disease and the Metropolis,” English professor Rod Edmond discusses tropical medicine as it was practiced in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it focused on specific tropical areas within the British Empire such as India. As we have mentioned, India was dubiously tropical as conventionally defined, and so were many “tropical diseases.” Leprosy, for example, was categorized as “tropical” even though it was known to have existed in Europe and other “temperate” regions since ancient times. But tropical medicine was plagued by many false assumptions, such as the commonly held belief that India was inherently unhealthy for the British because they were not biologically disposed toward the warm climate.  Related misconceptions included the increasing difficulty of sexual reproduction for each generation of Britons born in India, in contrast to the purportedly remarkable fertility of dark-skinned tropical peoples in their home climate. These beliefs prompted fears that tropical peoples might overrun their white superiors once introduced to the more highly evolved European culture and technology.

Tropical medicine linked fears of the tropical “other” with trepidation over the growing British metropolis at home.  The urban slums of Britain were seen as at once unhealthy and teeming with life, albeit a lower form of life that could both survive and multiply in such dreadful conditions. As Edmond argues, a “parallel” to tropical contamination posited that “in Britain… a degraded urban working class was contaminating metropolitan society from within” (178). Practitioners of tropical medicine who worked in London anticipated the possibility that diseases would travel from the tropical periphery to the metropole through trade or migration, sparking outbreaks in the overly crowded and poorly sanitized metropolitan slums. This article offers compelling evidence of the ways in which the tropical colonial “other” shaped notions of British society.

In “Tropic and Tropicality,” geographer Denis Cosgrove surveys the history of tropicality from the concept’s ancient Greek origins to the present in an afterword that would have better served readers as an introduction since it gives useful explanations of concepts that are discussed throughout the book.  His discussion of the Western tendency to link tropical climates to the perceived inferiority of those inhabiting those climates  sharpens our understanding of indigenous agency and scholastic responsibilities: “in rehearsing—even with critical intent—the ways in which Europeans so closely and outrageously have bound tropical ethnography into a mutually deterministic embrace with the physical environments of the tropics, we risk perpetuating the silencing of voices speaking from within tropical space. The authoring of this collection has not escaped that dilemma, nor indeed does my own contribution” (198).

Bell, in “Eyeing Samoa,” makes a similar statement in discussing the photography of tropical peoples: “As a number of writings have noted, the re-representation or preoccupation with a limited range of such stereotypical images and the viewing of them in terms of objectifying possession, in which the photographed subject is allegedly rendered passive and silent, can serve, ironically, to reinscribe and perpetuate the stereotypes and objectifying vision that the writers are supposedly exposing and critiquing” (160). Bell’s is the only contribution to address this problem with any degree of satisfaction.

Though an invaluable contribution to the study of Western perceptions of the tropics and Western notions of the “other” in general, the editors’ attempts to cast as wide a net as possible in soliciting contributions from various disciplinary backgrounds resulted in a surprisingly limited range of perspectives;  despite the declared intention to confine the study to Western perspectives, those perspectives are  overwhelming British, with the German, Alexander von Humboldt, the only notable exception. Neither Spain, nor Portugal, nor even France are included. Ironically, the editors and some of the contributors have inadvertently reinforced the racism they attempt to criticize by privileging dominant voices. As Peter Hume so lucidly explains in his article, this period saw the development of climate-based theories of race which held that the Nordic races such as the Anglo-Saxon and the Germanic were superior. Members of these groups are almost exclusively the subjects of this volume. Even more surprising is the almost total absence of female voices, Western or otherwise. Only the photographed Samoan women discussed by Bell find a place in this volume.  Further scholarship on the tropical world is required to incorporate a broader variety of disciplines as well as a diversity of perspectives into the study of tropicality.