CONSTRUCTING THE TROPICS: INTRODUCTION
Felix Driver1 and Brenda S.A. Yeoh2
1
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
2
Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Our knowledge of the world and its
geographies is constructed in a variety of
ways, through experience, learning, memory
and imagination. This special issue of the
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography is
devoted to an exploration of some of the ways
in which the ‘tropics’ have been constructed
as a discrete assemblage of natural and human
forms and relations. “Calling a part of the
globe ‘the tropics’”, as the historian David
Arnold (1998:2) puts it, ”became a Western
way of defining something environmentally
and culturally distinct from Europe, while also
perceiving a high degree of common identity
between the constituent regions of the tropical
world”. The identification of the northern
temperate regions as the normal, and the
tropics as altogether other – climatically,
geographically, and morally – became part of
an enduring imaginative geography, which
continues to shape the production and
consumption of knowledge in the twenty-first
century world. Whether this otherness was
figured positively (as in the fantasies of the
tropical sublime) or negatively (as a
pathological space of degeneration), it served
to define the tropical as a twin to the temperate:
to all that was civilised, modest, enlightened.
As David Livingstone notes in his
Afterword to this collection, “the term
‘tropical’ is still routinely attached to
everything from disease to plants, from
rainforests to rainstorms, from resorts to
beaches, from urbanisation to soils”. We might
add, given the title of this journal, that the
term has also been used to define a distinct
field of geographical inquiry. In fact, the notion
of a ‘tropical geography’ has had a somewhat
complex history during the twentieth century.
The writings of perhaps its most famous
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 21(1), 2000, 1-5
 Copyright 2000 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, and Blackwell Publishers Ltd
Introduction.p65 3 2/18/00, 3:15 PM
exponent, the French geographer Pierre
Gourou, met with some scepticism amongst
his contemporaries in Britain: Robert Steel, for
example, simply asserted in a 1964 work
devoted to geographical research in the tropics
that “there is no branch of the subject to be
recognised as ‘tropical geography’” (Steel,
1964:2). Gourou’s almost pathological treatment
of tropical environments in his most celebrated
work, Les pays tropicaux (1947), was later to
attract much criticism from radical development
geographers within France (Bruneau &
Courade, 1984): as indicated by the title of one
of his own works, Terres de bonne espérance:
Le monde tropical (1982), even Gourou himself
attempted to redraw the starkly negative
portrait of the tropics with which he is still
associated (Claval, 1998:375-77; Gallais, 1981).
Tropical geography, in other words, is itself a
complex and contested field.
Little could be gleaned from the early pages
of this journal as to the intents and purposes
of its inaugurators in using “tropical” as an
adjective for its contents. The first number of
The Malayan Journal of Tropical Geography,
predecessor to the Singapore Journal of
Tropical Geography, appeared in October
1953. Published by the Department of
Geography of the then University of Malaya,
it was the product of a fund raised specifically
for the purpose in 1949 by members of the last
Raffles College Geographical Society. With
the birth of the University of Malaya, the
journal was “likened to a torch passing from
the geographers of Raffles College to those of
the University of Malaya” and represented “a
mark of continuing interest and enthusiasm”
in the pursuit of “tropical geography” (Dobby,
1953:n.p.). It could be surmised that the term
“tropical” was probably used un-
 2 Driver and Yeoh
selfconsciously, the way the other adjective in
the title, “Malayan” was used to claim a
provenance. The latter adjective was not at all
unusual in the christening of society-based
journals then, as clearly indicated in journal
titles of the time such as Journal of the
Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society
and Malayan Medical Journal and Estate
Sanitation. Interestingly, while the term
“Malayan” has undergone changes as Empire
gave way to independent nations which further
sub-divided (the adjective disappeared
completely between 1958 and 1979 (Journal of
Tropical Geography) and from 1980, resurfaced
differently as the journal split into the
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
and the Malaysian Journal of Tropical
Geography), the adjective “tropical” has
proved far more resilient.
For close to fifty years then, the term
“tropical geography” in the title of the journal
appears to have been taken for granted by
contributors to the journal (although the
subject of some debate among Editorial Board
members). In his paper on “Rural development
in tropical areas, with special reference to
Malaya”, however, Ooi (1959:viii-ix) sets out
to delimit the scope and extent of the term
“tropical” based largely on Gourou’s The
Tropical World:
…Gourou’s definition would seem to
fit the circumstances [of Ooi’s study].
He defines tropical areas as “lands
which have a mean monthly temperature
of at least 65°F and get enough rain for
agriculture to be possible without
irrigation.” These areas include most
of South America north of the Tropic
Capricorn except N.E. Brazil and the
Andes Cordillera, the West Indian
islands, and Central America with a
coastal extension beyond the Tropic of
Cancer along the Gulf of Mexico and
the southern tip of Florida. In Africa
the tropical lands are bounded on the
north by a line running north-west to
south-east from Cape Verde to the coast
Introduction.p65 4 2/18/00, 3:15 PM
of Kenya, and on the south by a line
from Boma on the west coast to
Courenco on the east coast. The
Equator roughly bisects the area
contained between these two
boundaries, except in the East African
highlands, where climatic conditions
are markedly different from those of the
rest of the area. The Eastern tropics
include the Indian sub-continent south
of the Himalayas, all the monsoon lands
of the Indo-Chinese peninsula, the
Malay Peninsula, the Malay
Archipelago, the Philippines and New
Guinea. In Australia, tropical
conditions are found in a narrow
coastal strip from Darwin in Northern
Territory to Hervey Bay in Queensland.
Few contributors coming after Ooi (1959)
have further interrogated the notion of the
“tropical”, and reviews of the journal and its
history (see for example, Raguraman & Huang,
1993; Wong & Gupta, 1993) have similarly failed
to investigate the term in greater depth. Yet, to
problematise the notion of the “tropical” is
necessarily to open an historical inquiry into
the term and its enrolment in a variety of
scientific, aesthetic and political projects. While
work on the genealogy of “tropical geography”
during the twentieth century is still in its infancy,
the longer-term history of tropical science,
travel and medicine has been a fertile area for
research. In recent years, as indeed the
following papers indicate, much attention has
been devoted to the writings of celebrated
travelling naturalists, including Alexander von
Humboldt (who once described himself as
“made for the tropics”; see Outram, 1999),
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace; to
the role of European scientific institutions and
global networks in shaping the emergent fields
of tropical botany, tropical medicine and tropical
climatology (see especially Miller & Reill, 1996;
Grove, 1996; McLeod & Lewis, 1988;
Livingstone, 1999); and to the idea of tropical
nature itself (Arnold, 1996). In very general
terms, as some of the contributors to this
collection suggest, Edward Said’s work on the
 Constructing the Tropics
discourse of Orientalism (Said, 1978) has
provided an important stimulus for studies of
the idea of the tropics, as it has for other studies
of European representations of the non-
European world. However, we might also note
here some of the limitations of Said’s analysis
in Orientalism: notably, its reliance on what
might be called a “projection” model of
representation, in which prior assumptions
about cultural difference are treated as
powerful labels, constructed in the process of
European expansion and pinned on other
cultures and other regions. This approach
tends to assume a degree of homogeneity and
coherence in European systems of knowledge
– the archive of Orientalism, in Said’s case –
which may actually reproduce the very thing
that critics wish to bring into question. In this
context, other works – for example Bernard
Smith’s classic European Vision and the
South Pacific – might provide alternative
models for historians of the idea of tropicality
(Smith, 1988; Thomas & Losche, 1999).
A focus on the history of trade and travel
between the temperate and tropical worlds may
in fact yield a different perspective on the
construction of tropicality: one which would
conceive the labour of representation in
transactional terms, as a process of (unequal)
exchange (Thomas, 1991). This might also
allow for a more discriminating view of the
coherence of the European view of the tropics,
one in which the experience of disorientation
and uncertainty had its place; it would raise
questions about the multiple practises through
which the tropics were known, by no means
all of them articulated in discursive terms; and
it would encourage greater attention to the
ways in which European conceptions of the
tropics may have been shaped by interactions
with indigenous peoples and places. It might
also lend itself to a greater appreciation of the
geography of the idea of tropicality, an
important theme within this collection of
essays. Unravelling the history of dominant
ideas of the tropics reveals a process of
circulation, in which plants, people and ideas
migrate from one part of the world to another.
Introduction.p65 5 2/18/00, 3:15 PM
3
In the process, the differences between
different regions in the tropical world were not
of course extinguished, even though powerful
stereotypes continued to dominate European
visions of tropical nature.
Together, the following essays make a
notable contribution to the growing literature
on the theme of tropicality. David Arnold’s
paper surveys the history of ideas of tropical
nature in general and tropical geography in
particular, treating Pierre Gourou’s book on the
tropical world as an exemplary text. In the
process, he also offers a strikingly
geographical perspective on the theme of the
collection, tracing the diffusion and
translocation of notions of tropicality across
the globe. While Arnold’s paper is concerned
with a predominantly pessimistic view of
tropical nature, Luciana Martins addresses the
origins and implications of the rapturous
account of tropical nature found in the writings
of Charles Darwin. Her argument is that
Darwin’s vision of tropical nature was
anything but the reflex of a dominant way of
seeing: it represented a process of negotiation
between inherited assumptions, experience in
the field and the process of writing. Darwin,
like Humboldt before him, used his experience
in the Americas to construct an image of the
tropical world as a whole: yet the experience
of other travellers, especially those who were
colonisers of the territory they encountered,
was quite different. Jim Duncan’s account of
the experience of coffee planters in the
highlands of Ceylon thus emphasises the
specificity of its (tropical) landscape. The first-
hand accounts of the planters themselves
suggest that the imaginative resources of
metropolitan popular culture – principally, a
version of moral masculinity – were put into
service of a vision of temperate labour in the
tropics. In his paper, Simon Naylor considers
a quite different landscape, that of tropical and
sub-tropical Paraguay, as seen through the
eyes of early twentieth-century surveyors.
Here, the techniques of survey and mapping
projected the tropics as a site to be cultivated
and ordered: a region ripe for investment.
 4 Driver and Yeoh
While the remaining papers all address ideas
of tropical nature, they do so in contrasting
ways. David Taylor’s paper examines the
conceptual underpinnings of Wallace’s
biogeography, especially its mapping
approach. He argues that while Wallace’s
approach has shaped a substantial tradition of
biogeographical inquiry, it is in many respects
at odds with modern theories of environmental
change. Nancy Leys Stepan engages with a
quite different kind of approach to tropical
nature – those materialised in the gardens of
the Brazilian landscape architect, Roberto Burle
Marx. This paper encourages us to look at the
intellectual, aesthetic and material encounters
between European modernism and (in this case)
the Brazilian intelligentsia: it thus raises
important questions about the re-working of
the tropical aesthetic beyond Europe itself.
Finally, David Livingstone concludes the
collection with some reflections on the
interpretative challenge posed by current work
on the construction of the tropics. Taking his
cue from hermeneutics (rather than say
postcolonial theory), Livingstone portrays the
geographical imaginary of the tropics as an
interpretative frame, constructed, enacted and
disciplined in the process of European
expansion into the tropical world. His paper
draws on each of the preceding papers, offering
something new in the process: we hope readers
will find their own paths through what follows
just as fruitful.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank all the authors and
referees for responding so quickly. Felix Driver
acknowledges the support of the Arts &
Humanities Research Board for their support
of a project on ‘Knowing the Tropics’, and the
London Group of Historical Geographers for
inviting several of the authors to present earlier
versions of these papers. Brenda Yeoh is
grateful to Victor Savage, Director, Singapore
Journal of Tropical Geography, and members
of the Editorial Board for their support and
assistance in putting this Special Issue
together.
Introduction.p65 6 2/18/00, 3:15 PM
REFERENCES
Arnold, D. (1996) The Problem of Nature:
Environment, Culture and European
Expansion, Oxford: Blackwell.
Arnold, D. (1998) ‘India’s place in the tropical
world, 1770-1930’, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, 26, 1-21.
Bruneau, M. and Courade, G. (1984), ‘Existe-t-
il une géographie humaine tropicale? A la
recherche du paradigme de Pierre Gourou’,
L’espace geographique, 13(4), 306-16.
Claval, P. (1998) Histoire de la géographie
française, de 1870 à nos jours, Paris:
Nathan.
Dobby, E.H.G. (1953) Untitled note located after
title page, The Malayan Journal of Tropical
Geography, 1, n.p.
Gallais, J. (1981) ‘L’évolution de la pensée de
Pierre Gourou sur les pays tropicaux (1935-
1970)’, Annales de géographie, 90, 129-50.
Gourou, P. (1947) Les pays tropicaux, Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Gourou, P. (1982) Terres de bonne espérance:
Le monde tropical, Paris: Plon.
Grove, R. (1996) Green Imperialism: Colonial
Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the
Origin of Environmentalism, 1600-1860,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Livingstone, D. (1999) ‘Tropical climate and
moral hygiene: The anatomy of a Victorian
debate’, British Journal for the History of
Science, 32, 93-110.
McLeod, R. & Lewis, M. (eds.) (1988) Disease,
Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on
Western Medicine and the Experience of
European Expansion, London.
Miller, D.P. & Reill, P.H. (eds.) (1996) Visions of
Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representa-
tions of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ooi, J.B. (1959) ‘Rural development in tropical
areas, with special reference to Malaya’,
 Constructing the Tropics
The Malayan Journal of Tropical
Geography, 12, i-x, 1-222.
Outram, D. (1999) ‘On being Perseus: New
knowledge, dislocation and
Enlightenment exploration’, in D.
Livingstone & C. Withers (eds.),
Geography and Enlightenment, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 281-94.
Raguraman, K. & Huang, S. (1993) ‘Forty
years of human geography in the Journal’,
Singapore Journal of Tropical
Geography, 14(2), 277-94.
Said, E.W. (1978) Orientalism, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Smith, B. (1988) European Vision and the
South Pacific, 1768-1860, 2nd edn., New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Introduction.p65 7 2/18/00, 3:15 PM
5
Steel, R.W. (1964) ‘Geographers and the
tropics’, in R.W. Steel & R.M. Prothero
(eds.), Geographers and the Tropics:
Liverpool Essays, London: Longman, 1-
29.
Thomas, N. (1991) Entangled Objects:
Exchange, Material Culture and
Colonialism in the Pacific, Cambridge
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Thomas, N. & Losche, D. (eds.) (1999) Double
Vision: Art Histories and Colonial
Histories in the Pacific, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Wong, P.P. & Gupta, A. (1993) ‘Forty years
of physical geography in the Journal’,
Singapore Journal of Tropical
Geography, 14(2), 295-303.