The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze considers the European representation and understanding of landscape and nature in early nineteenth-century India. It draws on travel narratives, literary texts, and scientific literature to show the diversity of European (especially British) responses to the Indian environment and the ways in which these contributed to the wider colonizing process. Through its close examination of the correlation between tropicality and otherness, and of science as a means of colonial appropriation, the book offers a new interpretation of the history of colonial India and a critical contribution to the understanding of environmental history and the tropical world. It will be of interest to historians of the environment, science, and colonialism; South Asianists; and cultural and environmental anthropologists and geographers.

David Arnoldis professor of the history of South Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of a number of books, includingColonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India andThe Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture, and European Expansion.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Itinerant Empire

2. In a Land of Death

3. Romanticism and Improvement

4. From the Orient to the Tropics

5. Networks and Knowledges

6. Botany and the Bounds of Empire

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index