“ILLUSORY RICHES”: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE

TROPICAL WORLD, 1840-1950

David Arnold
Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London, UK

ABSTRACT

This article traces the emergence of a negative strain in European and North American representations
of the tropics, as earlier images of natural abundance were supplemented, and partly supplanted,
by the fears and frustrations of would-be colonisers and the growing realisation of the technical
difficulties of tropical “development”. Taking Pierre Gourou’s The Tropical World (1947) as an
exemplary text that embodies attitudes accumulated over the previous century of scientific activity
and colonial administration in the tropics, it is possible to see how, despite recognition of wide
regional variations, the tropics as a whole were seen as constituting an impoverished and pestilential
region, largely unsuited to white settlement and agriculture, and yet reliant upon outside agency
for prospects of development. Without entirely ceasing to be landscapes of desire, the tropics
represented a more primitive world than the northern temperate zone, a domain of largely untamed
nature that served, by contrast, to demonstrate the moral and material “superiority” of northern
climates, races and civilisations.

INTRODUCTION

In 1947 the French geographer Pierre Gourou
published his magisterial survey, Les pays
tropicaux (Gourou, 1947). Translated into
English six years later (1953a), and twice
revised and republished by 1961, The Tropical
World was both a summation of Gourou’s
earlier research in pre-war Indo-China (Gourou,
1931, 1940) and a source of inspiration for a
new generation of studies in tropical
geography (Études, 1972). The Tropical World
rapidly became not only a widely cited and
respected work of modern geography; it was
also a classic example of a “geography of the
mind” (Lowenthal & Bowden, 1976), a high
point in the discursive representation of the
tropics (which will be referred to here as
“tropicality”) that had formed over the
preceding century of imperial expansion and
control. Written when Gourou was in his late
forties, and published at a time when he had
already made the giant leap from being a lycée
teacher in Hanoi to holding a prestigious chair
in “tropical studies” at the Collège de France
in Paris, Les pays tropicaux carried forward
into the metropolitan geography of the 1950s
and 1960s many ideas and preconceptions that
had their origins in the pre-war world,
especially in colonial Southeast Asia, but
which also sought to grapple with ideas of
environmental determinism and “possibilism”
that had been circulating in European and
North American scientific and academic
thought for decades. The text thus tells us as
much about a collective (but by the 1950s
already rather dated) northern world-view of
the intra-tropical zone as it does about the

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 21(1), 2000, 6-18

 Copyright 2000 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, and Blackwell Publishers Ltd

Arnold.p65 2 2/18/00, 3:13 PM

 Representations of the Tropical World
“tropical world” it seeks to depict. While
tropicality embraced a variety of cultural
tropes, The Tropical World predominantly
stands for one particular strand of this
geographical and political discourse – a belief
in the intrinsic “inferiority” of tropical as
opposed to temperate environments and hence
in the primitivism of the social and cultural
systems to which the tropics gave rise.
TWO SIDES OF THE TROPICS
Before elaborating on Gourou’s work and its
significance, it is first necessary to
understand the historical emergence of the
tropics as a conceptual, and not merely
physical, space. European ideas about the
tropics, as they had developed as a result of
exploration, conquest and colonisation since
the late fifteenth century, were necessarily
diverse, but fall broadly into two categories.
Once Europeans had overcome the ancient
belief that the “torrid zone” was too hot to be
habitable (Oviedo, 1959:29-30), there emerged
a powerful perception of the tropics as
paradisiacal. As is evident from the
Caribbean voyages of Columbus (Cohen,
1988), the tropics were seen as lands of great
natural abundance, alive with luxuriant
vegetation and exotic birds and animals, and
blessed with perennially warm climates.
Spared the cold and hunger of northern
winters, humans in the tropics could enjoy
easy, year-round, subsistence in return for
minimal labour. The tropics, especially the
islands of the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean
and latterly the Pacific, conjured up visions
of an earthly paradise, a veritable Garden of
Eden. Owing much to early voyages of
discovery and subsequently to travellers’
tales and novels like Paul and Virginia
(Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 1982), the
representation of the tropics as landscapes
of desire was heightened by an intensified
“feeling for nature” in eighteenth-century
Europe (Charlton, 1984:109). By that time “a
full-fledged myth of tropical exuberance” had
become established in Europe (Curtin,
1964:60).
Arnold.p65 3 2/18/00, 3:13 PM
7
The discourse of tropicality parallels the
idea of Orientalism as a cultural and political
construction of the west discussed by Said
(1978). The tropics, too, represented an
enduring alterity, but one which qualifies and
extends the Orientalist paradigm, not least by
demonstrating that historically Europe
possessed more than one sense of
“otherness”. Ideas of the tropics did not easily
conform to a single stereotype. As Duncan
(1990:182) remarks, “landscapes never have a
single meaning; there always exists the
possibility of different readings”. The
symbolism of the tropics was deeply
ambivalent, for a landscape of seeming natural
abundance and great fertility was also
paradoxically a landscape of poverty and
disease, and debate raged about the tropics
and how they might most effectively be
brought into productive subordination to the
north (Livingstone, 1999). Broadly speaking,
the tropics were represented as a landscape in
which the power of nature dominated human
existence and to no small degree determined
its characteristics and quality. Partly because
of this perceived dominance of nature and the
role that naturalists, physicians and
geographers played in constructing ideas
about the tropics and in shaping colonial
practice in the tropics, the emergence of
tropicality was intimately associated not just
with the visual arts and literature of Europe
and North America, but also with its scientific
disciplines and technical specialities.
Representations of the tropics evolved
symbiotically with the natural and human
sciences: botany, zoology, anthropology and
geography in particular bore the imprint of
Europe’s sustained encounter with the tropical
world.
While it is beyond the scope of this
discussion to explore the tropics’ role in the
scientific disciplines of Europe, it needs to be
stressed how important scientific ideas and
academic authority were to the construction
of the northern idea of the tropics. Particularly
influential here was the German naturalist
Alexander von Humboldt. Through his
 8 Arnold
Personal Narrative of Travels to the
Equinoctial Regions of the Americas (1814-
1825) and his pioneering studies in
biogeography, Humboldt helped invent the
tropics both as a field for systematic scientific
enquiry and a realm of aesthetic appreciation
(Nicolson, 1990). Humboldt, who saw art and
literature as vital aids to a holistic
understanding of the science of nature,
embodied the Romantic belief in the
fundamental unity of the natural world. In his
“ecstatic” response to the tropics, he
discovered a world of “organic richness” and
“abundant fertility” so different from
temperate Europe and yielding irrefutable
proof of the Cosmos as a “harmoniously
ordered whole” (Humboldt, 1901, I: 2, 13). He
inspired a number of North American painters
to visit tropical America to try to capture on
canvas the “romance of the tropics” and the
dramatic landscapes Humboldt had described
(Manthorne, 1989). He also tempted a
generation of British naturalists, led by Charles
Darwin, Joseph Dalton Hooker and Alfred
Russel Wallace, to investigate the tropics for
themselves.
There already existed a cult of the tropical
picturesque in European travel accounts of
the period, but the legacy of Humboldt added
to the rich fusion of scientific and aesthetic
appreciation in naturalist writings. Darwin’s
descriptions of Brazil during the voyage of
The Beagle (1831-1836) are full of Humboldtian
delight in tropical nature. Other visitors to
Brazil, like H. W. Bates, whose sojourn on the
Amazon lasted from 1848 to 1859, gave further
authoritative evidence of the abundant natural
riches and “teeming profusion” of the tropics.
On the coast at Para, Bates found the climate
“one of the most enjoyable on the face of the
earth” and the soil “fertile in the extreme even
for a tropical country”. Inland at Barra “every
inch” of the soil was of “the most exuberant
fertility”, while at Ega it was “of marvellous
fertility, even for Brazil” (Bates, 1873:4, 19, 177,
275). Not all naturalists shared Humboldt’s
aesthetic appreciation of the tropics, and in
an age in which professional scientists were
Arnold.p65 4 2/18/00, 3:13 PM
replacing enthusiastic amateurs, many strove
for greater objectivity of language and to
distance themselves from impassioned
Romanticism. Wallace, Bates’s companion in
Brazil from 1848 to 1852, was depressed by the
monotony of tropical forests and homesick for
an English spring (Wallace, 1889). Despite a
further period of residence in tropical
Southeast Asia, Wallace (1878:vii) remained
convinced that travellers and naturalists had
combined “to praise, and not infrequently to
exaggerate, the charms of tropical life”. Yet, as
late as the 1880s, the German naturalist Ernst
Haeckel (1883:102-03) was still discovering in
Sri Lanka an “Eden”, a “paradise”, filled with
all the “endless marvels” of tropical nature.
But Europe’s engagement with the tropics
contained, almost from the outset, a duality
that made the tropics appear as much
pestilential as paradisiacal. Powerfully
negative representations of the tropics centred
on images of primitiveness, violence and
destruction – the speed and fatality of tropical
diseases, the destructiveness of tropical
storms, the ferocity of tigers and other
carnivorous beasts prowling in malarious
jungles (Oviedo, 1959:37) – as well as the
detrimental effect of tropical abundance on the
moral and physical well-being of human
inhabitants, whose easy subsistence bred
indolence and provided no stimulus to
technological innovation and the arts of
civilisation. While early encounters with the
Caribbean evoked visions of a terrestrial
paradise, subsequent European attempts to
colonise the region spawned more negative
images, centring on excessive heat, high
mortality and the failure of white settlement
schemes (Kupperman, 1984). For centuries “the
tropics” signified for Anglo-Americans the
coasts and islands of the New World from
Jamestown to Bahia, a region that produced
such valued crops as cotton, sugar and
tobacco, over which the tropics enjoyed a near
monopoly. But since these lands were, despite
their riches, seemingly unsuited for white
labour and settlement, recourse was had to
African slaves, thus accentuating the paradox
 Representations of the Tropical World
of a region of apparently great natural wealth
being exploited through a primitive and
inhumane system of labour. Early European
writers on the West Indies saw little that was
intrinsically unhealthy about the region, but
by the second half of the eighteenth century,
as plantation economies expanded and
imperial rivalries intensified (bringing
unprecedented numbers of white soldiers and
sailors to the islands), a growing body of
English and French medical treatises described
the many dangerous diseases prevailing there
and their greater virulence compared to those
of Europe. There was a significant duality to
this literature. In dwelling on the exceptional
vulnerability of European constitutions, it
reflected on their status as frail exotics exposed
to tropical heat, humidity and disease, and the
concurrent dangers of “intemperate” conduct
in a hot climate. But it also described diseases
suffered by African slaves that were
detrimental to productive labour as well as
being a danger to white slave-owners and their
families (Sheridan, 1985:17-40). The perils of
the tropics came increasingly to be located in
such diseases as yellow fever, dysentery and
malaria, and in ideas of race as well as place.
The fact that many diseases originated
outside the region, especially in West Africa,
prompted physicians to look beyond the
Caribbean and to generalise about the climate
and diseases of the tropics as a whole. A
parallel development was the interest, first
pursued by the Portuguese (Russell-Wood,
1992) but later systematically developed by
the Dutch, French and English, in the
dissemination of “useful” plants that would
not flourish in northern climes but could be
moved from one tropical or sub-tropical region
to another, thus strengthening the visual
impression as well as the economic utility of a
single “tropical world”. Although the complex
of ideas associated with the tropics was first
assembled in the Caribbean, it did not remain
confined there. Even before the abolition of
slavery in 1834 and the subsequent decline in
the region’s economic and political
importance, the concept of the tropics was
Arnold.p65 5 2/18/00, 3:13 PM
9
being exported, particularly through medical
and botanical texts, to other intra-tropical
regions, such as India and Southeast Asia,
despite their lack of plantation slavery and their
very different environmental and cultural
conditions (Arnold, 1998). As Anderson
(1992:140-41) has remarked, by the 1830s
“whether a tropical region was defined most
accurately by vegetation, parallels of latitude,
isotherms, humidity, or a relative discomfort
index may have remained open to dispute, but
that such a place did exist, and was peculiar in
some definable way, was no longer in doubt”.
Gourou, writing in the 1940s, exemplified
this relatively recent, but by then well
established, idea of a “tropical world”,
endowed (despite its evident diversity) with a
large measure of environmental homogeneity,
viewed from an external, European perspective,
and judged by the exacting standards of the
northern temperate zone. It is striking that while
Gourou, like many earlier authors, recognised
considerable diversity within the tropics, as
in his account of Tonkin (1931), with its
sustained contrast between the malarious,
mountainous interior and the populous Red
River delta, he nonetheless found it
meaningful to generalise about “tropical” Indo-
China and subsequently the entire “tropical
world”. While naturalists and geographers
commonly distinguished between hot, wet
lowlands, dry savannas, and cold alpine areas,
the first of these was generally taken to typify
the tropics as a whole. This view was partly
encouraged by a tendency to see upland
regions as semi-European in their temperate
flora and fauna (and thus not part of the true
tropics at all), and to regard savannas as
“unnatural” landscapes caused by
deforestation and the subsequent degrading
of vegetation and soils (Belt, 1888:185-87; cf.
Gourou, 1940:381-91). It is, by contrast,
indicative of the power of the ruling idea of
the tropics that when Europeans encountered
a landscape that did not conform to
expectations of tropical fecundity and
exuberance, they were disappointed or felt
obliged to apologise for its deficiency. In 1880,
 10
a British geologist thought it necessary to
remind his readers that many parts of eastern
India did not look like the imagined tropics at
all. Around Raniganj, he wrote, “There is
generally a harshness and dryness about the
vegetation of these jungles, together with want
of varied colours, which I did not expect to
meet with ... I soon found that the tropical
luxuriance and density of undergrowth in the
forests which I did expect, need not be looked
for in these parts of India” (Ball, 1880:23). He
was not alone in feeling acute disappointment
that the tropics failed to match the
conventional image of tropical abundance
inspired by travel accounts, the writings of
naturalists and displays of tropical vegetation
in greenhouses at Kew or in botanic gardens
in the tropics themselves. Having relished the
luxuriant vegetation at Bombay, his first
“tropical” port of call in the East, Haeckel
(1883:69) was dismayed to find, when he
travelled into the Western Ghats, “the total
absence of the gorgeous vegetation of the
tropics”. Delighted by the botanic garden at
Peradeniya near Kandy, he was equally
perplexed by his first experience of unruly
jungle, growing “without any kind of order”
and “in wild confusion” (Haeckel, 1883:120-
26).
In Gourou’s account of the tropics there is
scarcely a trace of the Edenic: poverty and
pathogenicity are all pervading. The tropical
world is full of “horrors”, a region where
climate and disease are “terrible foes” to
mankind (Gourou, 1953a:12). Domesticated
animals (so prominent a feature of the
European scene) are rare, resulting in deficient
human diets and poor transportation. The
tropics, unaided, can nurture nothing higher
than a “vegetable civilisation” (Gourou,
1953a:66). The famed fertility of the tropics is
dismissed as a myth. The soils are “infertile”;
laterite, for Gourou one of hallmarks of tropical
poverty, is represented as a kind of
“pedological leprosy” (Gourou, 1953a:21;
Gourou,1940:87). The overwhelming
impression is of the “inferiority” (Gourou,
1953a:97, 141) not just of soils, but of the entire
Arnold.p65 6 2/18/00, 3:13 PM
Arnold
tropical region compared to the temperate zone.
Situating himself firmly in the latter, Gourou
(1953a:6) observes: “We who live in temperate
lands find it difficult to realise how baneful
Nature can be to man or to understand that in
unreclaimed regions water may swarm with
dangerous germs, myriads of blood-sucking
insects may inject deadly microbes into the
human body, and the very soil may be harmful
to the touch”. But this negative representation
of the tropics was nothing new: indeed, to a
large extent Gourou was simply recycling and
dramatising pessimistic judgements that had
long circulated in scientific and geographical
discourse. It is striking that even when Gourou
cites a recent source, Nutrition in the
Colonial Empire (1938-39), that does not
subscribe to earlier environmental and racial
ideas to explain tropical backwardness but
deploys in the colonies, as for the metropole,
the “new knowledge” of nutrition, Gourou still
incorporates this into his gloomy
essentialising about the physical constraints
that condemn humanity to poor health and
low productivity in the tropics.
THE “PRIMITIVE” TROPICS
Created as much as discovered, the tropics
were made to bear a moral message that
flattered Europe’s sense of superiority while
denigrating its alien “other”. Although
describing the tropics as “nature’s garden”
might seem to suggest unqualified approval,
in an age obsessed with improvement and
progress, with racial origins and competitive
evolution, there were definite disadvantages
to being the denizens of an earthly paradise.
This was a primitive world, a land that time
forgot and civilisation had shunned. The
“primordial” character of tropical landscapes
was most forcefully suggested by the vast
and seemingly inexhaustible forests.
Whether naturalists found the forests of
Amazonia grand or gloomy, they understood
them to be an obstacle to progress and the
advance of civilisation: Wallace (1889:32)
was not alone in anticipating that the
“woodman’s axe” would be the “pioneer of
 Representations of the Tropical World
civilisation” in Brazil as it had been in
Canada.
To northern visitors, tropical landscapes
were landscapes of regression, at times
pleasurably so, for they evoked a child-like
wonderment and excitement. To arrive on the
Sri Lankan coast as dawn broke recalled for
James Tennent (1859, II:99) “in an intensified
degree, the emotions excited in childhood
by the slow rising of the curtain in a
darkened theatre to disclose some magical
triumph of the painter’s fancy, in all the
luxury of colouring and the glory of light”.
Landing at Bombay, Haeckel (1883:66)
“rushed like a child” to “seize all these new
wonders”. To naturalists the vegetation and
wildlife of the tropics were even more
suggestively windows onto an ancient
world, providing (as for Darwin on the
Galapagos Islands) clues to the origins and
evolution of life itself. Wallace (1878:vii),
who identified many “remarkable forms of
life” now confined to the tropics, believed
that “the relations of these to extinct types
which once inhabited the temperate zones”
opened up “many interesting questions as
to the past history of the earth”. At the very
least, the tropics enabled northern
naturalists to visualise a world that could
only otherwise be found in the fossil record.
In Sri Lanka, Haeckel was intrigued to find
ferns that closely resembled those of the
Carboniferous era. Many of the plant groups
at Peradeniya reminded him of “the fossil
flora of earlier geological ages, as
represented by Meyer in his ingenious
reconstructions of the scenery of the
primaeval world” (Haeckel, 1883:139).
Perceptions of “primitiveness” in nature
inevitably extended to the human inhabitants
of the tropics as well. While in the temperate
north, the races of Europe had, by their own
estimation, gained an unprecedented
mastery over nature, in the tropics nature’s
rule still seemed absolute. If the tropics were
an Eden, it was one in which indigenes
remained lost in the childhood of Man.
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11
Dwarfed by the landscape around them,
tropical people (even in a society like Sri
Lanka’s, with the still visible relics of an
ancient civilisation) were the “simple
children of nature”, giving to the outsider
“some conception of that...primaeval
paradise into which the human race was
born” (Haeckel, 1883:154). Darwin, like many
of his scientific contemporaries, was struck
by what appeared to be the dominance of
northern life forms over those of the tropics
and southern latitudes, and readily extended
this concept of biological superiority from
plants to people (Browne, 1983:130).
Wallace, with Darwin, co-founder of the
theory of natural selection, saw evidence in
tropical forests of a wider struggle for
survival between living organisms, but in
general he believed that the “genial heat and
ample moisture” of tropics, which had
“probably changed little even throughout
geological periods”, was more conducive to
a greater diversity of species than the
harsher conditions of the temperate world,
which had been subjected to repeated
climatic fluctuations and periodic glaciation.
It was natural to assume that temperate races
had needed to acquire similar qualities: in
the tropics, by contrast, the “struggle for
existence as against the forces of nature was
...always less severe” (Wallace, 1878:66,
122).
It was widely believed that humans had
originated in the tropics, close to their
primate cousins (Browne, 1983:170). But as
the American geographer Ellen Churchill
Semple put it, though born in the tropics,
mankind only grew to maturity in the
temperate zone: “Where man has remained
in the tropics, with few exceptions, he has
suffered arrested development. His nursery
has kept him a child” (Semple, 1911:635).
Alternatively, in the other belittling
stereotype of the colonial age, tropical men
resembled women, whether from their
unfamiliar appearance or because tropical
heat, humidity and disease had sapped their
virility. Tennent (1859, II:107) noted of the
 12
Singhalese that, “With their delicate features
and slender limbs, their frequent want of
beards, their use of earrings and their
practice of wearing a cloth round the waist
..., which has all the appearance of a
petticoat, the men have an air of effeminacy
very striking to the eye of a stranger”.
Evidently, “masculine” races were born of
harsher climes, a presumption elevated to a
principle of governance in the “martial races”
theory of late nineteenth-century India, with
Sikhs, Pathans and Gurkhas favoured for
military recruitment over the “effeminate” and
“non-martial” races of tropical Bengal and
Madras.
Describing the eastern regions of the
Indonesian archipelago, Wallace reversed
cherished notions of tropical idylls by arguing
that the islanders suffered by the “excessive
cheapness” of their staple, sago. Its sheer
abundance was a “curse rather than a
blessing”, a cause of “great laziness” and
“extreme...misery”. The “habit of industry” not
being acquired through “stern necessity”, all
labour was “distasteful” to them: sago-eaters,
in consequence, lived in squalid huts and wore
scant clothing. This led Wallace (1862:136) to
reflect on the “singular fact that no civilised
nation has risen within the tropics. That rigour
of nature which some may have thought a
defect of our northern climes has...been one
of the acting causes of high civilisation”. From
Wallace in the 1860s to Gourou eighty years
later it was virtually axiomatic among northern
writers that there could be no indigenous
civilisation in the tropics, for civilisation was
the product of humans moving from their
original home in the tropics, where the climate
was kind and the living easy, to the more
physically and mentally challenging temperate
zone. Wallace (1864:164) argued that harsh
soils and inclement seasons were more a
stimulus to the emergence of a “hardier, more
provident and social race” of men than year-
round plenty: “Is it not the fact that in all ages,
and in every quarter of the globe, the
inhabitants of temperate have been superior
to those of tropical countries? All the great
Arnold.p65 8 2/18/00, 3:13 PM
Arnold
invasions and displacements of races have
been from North to South, rather than the
reverse; and we have no record of there ever
having existed, any more than there exists
today, a solitary instance of an indigenous
inter-tropical civilisation”.
Gourou (1953a:32) likewise reasoned that the
tropics, by and large, had supported only
“primitive” modes of cultivation and
civilisation. Even the civilisations of Indo-China
were essentially “vegetable” ones, trapped in
an ancient primitiveness, not far removed from
the neolithic, and dependent on the products
of nature, rather than industry, for food,
clothing, utensils, and housing (Gourou,
1940:192-95). This was a strikingly negative
conclusion for him to arrive at given his own
account of intensive rice cultivation in the Red
River delta and its capacity to support a high
density of population; but even here Gourou
(1931:82-90, 109, 241), operating within the
colonial developmental logic of the time, saw a
society that was still in its “infancy”, dependent
on the paternalistic care of French officials for
maintaining river dykes, improving
communications and transport, curbing disease,
and ushering in the benefits of the modern age.
Gourou acknowledged wide cultural differences
between Asia and the tropical regions of Africa
and America, but nonetheless concluded that
Southeast Asia was no exception to the general
rule that the tropics were incapable of creating
their own civilisations, for that of Tonkin was,
he believed, essentially derived from the ancient
Chinese, just as India was indebted, not to any
indigenous race like the Tamils, but to Aryan
invaders from the north (cf. Gourou, 1953b:78-
81). He likewise sought to explain the apparent
paradox of Mayan civilisation in Central
America through traces of a more temperate
origin and saw in the decline of the Maya
evidence from the past, still pertinent to the
present, of how intensive agriculture and
demographic growth could rapidly outstrip the
productive capabilities of poor tropical soils
(Gourou, 1953a:43-52). Civilisation could only
arrive and be sustained in the tropics through
outsiders’ energy and agency.
 Representations of the Tropical World
In an age of imperial expansion and colonial
rule, the fate of past civilisations carried stern
warnings for the present. For many late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
thinkers, entering the tropics threatened a loss
of masculine vigour to temperate races from
the north. The tropics thus represented an
impenetrable barrier to the worldwide
expansion of the white races and sapped them
of the racial superiority derived from their
northern homelands. These themes were most
forcefully articulated by geographers like
Semple and Ellsworth Huntington, who
deployed a mixture of environmental
determinism and Social Darwinism to
demonstrate that northern climates bred
vigour and intelligence while the tropics were
conducive to racial decay. According to
Semple (1911:10), “The debilitating effects of
heat and humidity aided by tropical diseases,
soon reduce intruding peoples to the dead
level of economic inefficiency characteristic
of the native races”. Thus, the history of Aryan
civilisation in India was a tale of the moral and
physical degeneration of a once-white race
succumbing as a victim to the enervating,
disease-sodden environment of tropical South
Asia. “Everywhere in the Tropics the
enervating effects of heat, moisture, and
abundance make not only the natives averse
to steady work, but start the energetic
European immigrant down the same easy
descent to Avernus” (Semple, 1911:627).
Although critics denounced Semple’s
arguments as crude, self-serving and
simplistic (Febvre, 1925:95, 172), Huntington’s
“moral discourse of climate” (Livingstone,
1991, 1994) gained wide approval, though he
too proposed, and sought to demonstrate
historically and scientifically, that the
temperate regions of northwestern Europe and
the northeastern United States represented
the “optimum conditions” for the development
of human intelligence and physical vigour in
contrast to the torpor and degeneracy of the
tropics. In Civilization and Climate, first
published in 1915 and intended as a
contribution to “the new science of
Arnold.p65 9 2/18/00, 3:13 PM
13
geography”, Huntington (1924:56) observed
that, whatever the cause, “it is generally
agreed that the native races within the tropics
are dull in thought and slow in action. This is
true not only of the African Negroes, the South
American Indians, and the people of the East
Indies, but of the inhabitants of southern India
and the Malay peninsula”. Native lassitude
was more than an obstacle to material progress
in the tropics; it was also a threat to the white
races that ventured there. “Experience shows
that the presence of an inferior race in large
numbers tends constantly to lower the
standards of the dominant race”. The tropics
dragged even “superior” races down to their
own “primitive” levels.
TRANSFORMING THE
TROPICS
Huntington’s views were remarkable for their
crudeness and sweeping pan-tropical
generalisations. It was more common among
those who travelled and worked extensively in
tropical areas to distinguish between races or to
offer a variety of explanations for the alleged
backwardness of tropical peoples – to reason,
for instance, that it was oppressive Spanish rule
that had reduced the native Indians of Nicaragua
to poverty and indolence (Belt, 1888:170), that
the African “Negro” (“the true child of tropical
climes”) was better adapted to the hot, wet tropics
than the natives of Amazonia (Bates, 1873:283),
or that Indian or Chinese immigrants were
essential for a productive work-force (Willis,
1909:12). For Gourou, as for many of his
immediate predecessors, the concern was not
with a distant vision or transient experience of
the tropics as a site of pleasure or repugnance,
but as a practical locale for economic
development. At the heart of the paradox of the
tropics and the problem of their exploitation lay
nagging doubts about the suitability of the
tropics for the white settlement that had displaced
more “primitive” races and transformed the
“wildernesses” of North America and
Australasia into regions of productive
agriculture.
 14 Arnold
The arguments for and against white
settlement in the tropics were well rehearsed
even by the mid-nineteenth century. They drew
not just on the fate of ancient civilisations or
the collapse of Caribbean ventures, but also
on what was seen by Anglo-Saxon writers as
the failure of Iberian attempts at colonisation
and the spread of civilisation. Indeed, much
of the British and North American discourse
on tropicality in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries reads as a critique of
Spanish and Portuguese “miscegenation” and
tropical degeneration, and hence as an
argument for maintaining, by contrast, the
vigour and purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. In
1843, Arthur Thomson, a Madras Army
surgeon, surveyed the entire tropical world,
but could find no region where Europeans had
ever successfully established themselves.
Where traces of European settlers were to be
found, as in Latin America, it was only, he
believed, as a result of racial intermixing and
the consequent degeneration of their origin
racial stock. He concluded that there was “little
doubt” that “the tropical parts of the world
are not suited by nature for the settlement of
the natives of the temperate zone. European
life in those parts is with difficulty prolonged,
much sickness is suffered and their offspring
become degenerate and cease to propagate
their species in a few generations” (Thomson,
1843:132). A decade later Frederic Mouat of
the Bengal Medical Service noted how all
attempts to establish white colonies in the East
Indies had failed: so adverse were climatic
conditions that “the progeny of the third
generation [of whites] was almost entirely
female” and the majority of these were “sickly
and barren”. Only on the salubrious island of
Reunion did he find Creoles who had escaped
descent into “effeminate forms” (Mouat,
1852:63, 72).
And yet it was hard for naturalists and
geographers to envisage the lasting
transformation of the tropics without white
settlers. Thomas Belt, a mining engineer and
amateur naturalist, anticipated that Mexico
and all of Central America would one day
Arnold.p65 10
succumb to colonisation by the United States.
Railways from the north would penetrate into
the tropics and a “constant stream of
immigration” would “change the face of the
country”, filling it with “farms and gardens,
orange groves, and coffee, sugar, cacao and
indigo plantations”. “No progress”, he added,
“need be expected from the present
inhabitants” (Belt,1888:178). If , as critics
maintained, white settlement was not
practicable (or achievable only at terrible cost),
how could tropical agriculture ever be
improved? How could the tropical world be
made more productive and efficient without
the stimulus and example of white labour?
Were the tropics inherently unsuitable for
Europeans, or could they be “made safe” by
modern medical and sanitary science?
The debate raged back and forth, gaining
renewed vigour from the expansion of the
British, French, German and American empires
in the 1880s and 1890s and by their direct
engagement with the practical difficulties of
ruling tropical lands and seeking to tap their
native wealth. As late as 1939 Grenfell Price
revisited the question why it was that the
northern races had failed to colonise the
tropics. He reviewed the work of those, like
Huntington and Andrew Balfour of the
London School of Tropical Medicine, who
appeared pessimistic about the possibility of
white settlement even with the advantages of
modern medicine and sanitary science. But
Price was more inclined to the views of those,
like William C. Gorgas in Cuba and the Panama
Canal Zone or Raphael Cilento in Queensland,
who through their part in the “scientific
invasion of the tropics”, had shown that
whites could live safely and labour efficiently
in the tropics (Price, 1939). But, with recent
developments in India and the Philippines in
view, Price (1939:38) was forced to admit that
the “progress of science” had not improved
the political position of whites in the tropics.
In the 1930s, Gourou (1931:42), too, saw it as a
valid test of Tonkin’s climate to ask whether it
suited the white man, though he had in mind
colonial administrators rather than settlers. By
2/18/00, 3:13 PM
 Representations of the Tropical World
the 1940s, the issue was virtually dead: the
prospects for white settlement anywhere in
the tropics (Queensland apart) were
increasingly remote as the Second World War
gave way to insurgent nationalism and
imminent decolonisation. Interest shifted from
white colonisation to settling Vietnamese,
Indonesian and Filipino migrants in the less
populated portions of their own regions
(Gourou, 1940:183-8; Pelzer, 1945; 1957).
The emergence in the 1890s and 1900s of
tropical medicine and tropical agriculture
exemplified the intensified search for practical
solutions to the paradox of the rich-but-poor
tropics. But these new specialties brought not
only a new technical specificity to the
investigation of the tropics, but also
reinforced many negative representations. This
was most evident in tropical medicine. Patrick
Manson, the “father” of modern tropical
medicine, investigated filaria in Amoy before
retiring to London: his work inspired others,
notably Ronald Ross of the Indian Medical
Service in his quest for the cause and mode of
transmission of malaria in the 1890s. Manson
confessed he had difficulty in defining the
boundaries of the tropics as far as disease was
concerned, but based his call for Britain to
introduce “special education in tropical
medicine”, firstly, on the fact that, since Britain
had become the centre of “a great and growing
tropical empire”, it needed to develop a
corresponding medical specialism, and,
secondly, that tropical disease was “in many
respects ... widely different from the diseases
of temperate climates”. There were “dozens”
of diseases, “more or less special to the
tropics”, which needed “special knowledge”
for their diagnosis and successful treatment.
(Manson, 1897:842). Where earlier writers had
blamed the climate, or lethal “miasmas”
generated by tropical heat, humidity and
decomposing vegetation, Manson could
identify specific causes – parasites, insect
vectors and “germs” – many of which were
unknown or uncommon in temperate regions.
With the experience of British India (rather than
America and yellow fever) in mind, Manson
Arnold.p65 11
15
identified the malaria parasite as “by far the
most important disease agency in tropical
pathology”. Not only did it cause fatal fevers;
it also undermined the health of millions,
exposing them to other ailments, sapping their
powers of resistance and recovery. Directly or
indirectly, malaria was “the principal cause of
morbidity and death in the tropics and sub-
tropics” (Manson, 1898:1).
Ross similarly argued that malaria was
responsible for between a quarter and a half
of all sickness in tropical regions, but, more
than that, malaria was the great obstacle to
civilisation in the tropics. Malaria was “the
great enemy of the explorer, the missionary,
the planter, the merchant, the farmer, the
soldier, the administrator, the villager, and the
poor”. It was responsible for rendering “the
whole of the tropics comparatively unsuitable
for the full development of civilization” (Ross,
1910:vii-viii). The identification of malaria with
tropical backwardness and torpor became a
recurring theme, and nowhere more so than in
Gourou’s writing between the 1930s and 1950s.
For Gourou (1953a:6) malaria was “the most
widespread of tropical diseases”, and though
(on the basis of French colonial research) he
ingeniously explained the role of human
activity in suppressing the disease in the Red
River delta, he still saw it as one of the most
important factors in causing low productivity
and in inhibiting development throughout
tropical Asia (Gourou, 1953b:30-3). To some
extent he shared Ross’s belief that through
modern medicine and sanitary science, and the
eradication of the anopheles mosquito, malaria
could be overcome and the tropical world
developed for the benefit of whites and
indigenes alike. Even before the advent of
DDT, the “conquest” of malaria seemed
synonymous with the “conquest” of the
tropics. This underscored the more general
message of the time – that modern science
had the capacity to make the tropics truly
productive, to meet the world’s (i.e., the
north’s) expanding needs for raw materials from
timber to palm oil, and to open up the tropics
as the last remaining “new lands” left on earth.
2/18/00, 3:13 PM
 16
And yet Gourou seemed to remain somewhat
sceptical as to whether natural conditions
would ever make this ideal of tropical
development possible.
The effect of tropical medicine, like tropical
agriculture, veterinary and soil science, was
as much to publicise the perils of the tropics
as to advance practical solutions. The image
of the tropics as a world set apart by nature, a
world characterised by poverty, disease and
backwardness, thus acquired a new scientific
authority and specificity: the foundations had
been laid for a reconceptualisation of the
“backward” tropics as the Third World (much
as package tourism authored a revised version
of the tropical Eden). Thus, at a time when
environmental determinism seemed less and
less appropriate for northern temperate lands,
it retained its influence in accounts of the
“tropical world”. Gourou (1953a:151)
anticipated that, aided by modern science,
change was now possible in the tropics, but
solely along lines allowed by nature’s
“directions” and “vetoes”. Any attempt, for
instance, to impose temperate agriculture on
the tropics would simply fail: “Tropical
conditions” could “only be commanded by
being obeyed” (Gourou, 1953a:119).
Gourou denied that the physical world
simply and crudely determined human activity
and social forms. He sought in his later works
to distance himself from the climatic and
environmental “determinism” of Ratzel, Semple
and Huntington and also from the
“possibilism” of Paul Vidal de la Blache
(Gourou, 1953b:47). But in the eyes of many of
his contemporaries, including the Annales
historian Fernand Braudel, whose own work
sought a union of history with a deterministic
geography, Gourou remained broadly within
the latter tradition (Braudel, 1971:7). In the
1920s, Lucian Febvre, another founder of the
Annales School, had also sought to eschew
crude determinism in favour of the Vidal de la
Blache’s “possibilism” (Livingstone, 1992:266-
9), but when he looked at the tropics he could
not fail to see a clear example of how
Arnold.p65 12
Arnold
powerfully nature could inform the human
condition. In a manner that anticipated at least
some of Gourou’s later findings, Febvre
denounced the “illusory riches” and
supposed natural abundance of the tropics as
the product of an “over-idealistic geography”.
The tropics had been misguidedly represented
as “lands of promise”, where nature,
“generously heaped her treasures on man”.
Experience had, conversely, shown that the
tropical rainforest (which Febvre took to be
the archetypal tropics) was “a difficult place
to live in”. Despite superficial impressions of
“inexhaustible fecundity”, the fertility of the
soil was “more apparent than real”: the tropical
forest was, in fact, “a desert, covered with
verdure”. Even if scientific agriculture were
introduced, “too many enemies” lay in wait
for it fully to succeed. Viewed objectively, he
argued, “the balance sheet” of the tropics, was
“poor” (Febvre, 1925:183-88). It is hard not to
see the roots of Gourou’s own pessimism
about the tropics in this broadly deterministic
geographical tradition, accentuated by the
ambitions and frustrations generated by
European and American tropical colonies, and
articulated over more than a century through
recurrent northern notions of tropical alterity.
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