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Even today the word 'tropics' brings to mind a set of significations for Western tourists: bright sunshine, lush vegetation, the need for vaccinations and the challenges of cross-cultural communication. Historians of science can now benefit from a more sophisticated and careful exploration of the genesis of ideas of tropicality. The two books under review significantly alter the perspectives derived from such theorists as Michel Foucault and Edward Said. Instead of seeing the emergence of a tropical view as a simple imposition of European ideas and institutions, through such technologies as the travel journal and photography, these books suggest that the idea of the tropics emerged out of the restless work of Europeans in immediate contact with the climate, people, natural history and topography of regions astride the equator. The creation of the tropics was a subjective process, which was linked to the intellectual formation of colonials in the field. It was unexpected and unpredictable, for the environment itself could play a part in unsettling European ideas and identities.
There is no intention here, however, to deny the power of the European imagination. David Arnold is particularly keen to stress this. For him the tropics were invented in order to legitimize colonial rule, even as rule over nature became a model for rule over Indians. In the period he studies, which witnessed the dramatic expansion of the territories under the East India Company's control, Arnold's natural historians and botanists were as much on the move as the armies of the regime, and their tenuous connections to the state mirrored the insecure status of colonialism. Yet this way of locking tropicality to colonialism is balanced out by other theoretical approaches, especially in Felix Driver and Luciana Martins's stimulating edited volume. Key buzzwords are 'hybridity', 'contestation', 'boundaries'...