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Discusses the role of geopolitical ideas as both reflecting and stimulating concern over resource waste and competition on an international level. In succession, the views of Benjamin Kidd, William Eliot Griffis, Brooks Adams, and Frank Buffington Vrooman on natural resources, imperialism and conservation are considered, and their role as armchair architects of American empire is assessed. Controversies over the efficacy of “white” colonialism in the tropics and the importance of the idea of tropicality as a problematic are stressed.

Focuses on the practical experience of an encounter with new tropical colonies and potential colonies or spheres of informal influence in the underdeveloped/colonial world. Analyses the rise and role of the Bureau of Plant Industry and the work of David Fairchild to adapt tropical plants for the American insular empire and for other tropical and sub-tropical places as well as for domestic markets and farm products. Examines American responses to tropical forest riches in the Philippine Islands, and the assessment of forestry officials regarding the resources available for the colonial government there, and in Puerto Rico and Hawaii; discusses the relationship between the acquisition of formal colonies and the development of American tropical forestry. The impact of the acquisition of these forests on U.S. mainland forestry policy and on a discourse of forest shortage is examined along with the implications for wider conservation issues both for the United States and the rest of the world.

This chapter discusses how the space of the tropics was constructed as a space of comparison and circulation, using the examples of two very different islands: Dominica and Tahiti. This chapter compares the ways in which the peoples and landscapes of Dominica and Tahiti have been described by outsiders. As tropical islands, Dominica and Tahiti have some general similarities: they are roughly the same size, both are mountainous, they have roughly the same population, and Dominica is about the same distance north of the equator as Tahiti is south. However, the histories of Dominica and Tahiti are different in so many respects that the challenge is to find more meaningful ways of bringing them together, ways that might illuminate the nature of “tropical visions.” In trying to bring the islands together, particular attention is given to the ways in which they have been brought together over the past two and half centuries, the ways in which frames of reference have been created in which Tahiti and Dominica both have a particular place, and often a special place—the principal frame being that of the imaginative construction we have come to think of as tropicality.

The chapters in this book variously parse the discursive usages of “tropicality” as the concept evolved during the period of most intense European penetration into the geographic spaces and human worlds that bestride the equator. The term “visions” implies and as various chapters here testify, that Europeans did not arrive in tropical latitudes free from presumptions or anticipations about these regions of the globe. The framework of “Voyages,” “Mappings,” and “Sites” suggests a complex interplay of representation and experience within which encounter with actual places and peoples was mediated through the long premodern history of “Western” ideas and images about how the world between Cancer and Capricorn might be. Negotiation of meanings has been continuous between tropical imaginings and the sensuous, embodied experiences and subsequent representations of visionaries and voyagers, merchants and missionaries, conquerors and colonists.

Consciousness of tropical biodiversity exploded onto the scene in the 1980s following the 1986 National Forum on BioDiversity. Biodiversity was not a new concept to biologists, however. U.S. scientists’ engagement with life in the tropics already stretched back a century. During this time, scientists had struggled with questions of the biological differences of the tropics—especially its richness in species—and at the same time entangled themselves in U.S. corporate and government efforts to exploit tropical resources. American Tropics argues that both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern biodiversity discourse had significant precedents in biologists’ involvement in U.S. encounters with the tropical world over the course of the twentieth century, centered on the circum­Caribbean region. This book argues that the ideas, attitudes, and institutions forged at field sites in the colonies and neocolonies of the circum­Caribbean are crucial for understanding the emergence of this new paradigm in biology and conservation at the end of the century. Long before the BioDiversity Forum extended such ideas to the globe, U.S. biologists had begun both to articulate fundamental biological questions raised by the diversity of tropical life and to argue for its potential as a natural resource.

This chapter builds on the preceding discussion of urban development through an exploration of colonial socio-ecological relations that serve to contextualize contemporary forms of environmental injustice in the urban Caribbean. The chapter connects colonial interventions into Caribbean natural and built environments to discourses of difference and inequality. It focuses first on the imperial discourses and practices that worked on and through Caribbean natural landscapes, sketching the different development of links between imperialism, nature, and landscape. Early colonial narratives and policies, which framed Caribbean island landscapes as instances of threatened tropical paradise, were important in shaping a form of proto-environmentalism. The second focus is on locating antecedents to contemporary socio-ecological relations by exploring colonial urban interventions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries illustrated by two different episodes in the history of sanitary reform: a mid-nineteenth-century cholera epidemic in Jamaica and the early twentieth-century regulation of prostitution in Curaçao.

This chapter focuses on Claude McKay, who launched his literary career with creole poems written in the voice of Jamaican speakers that detail daily experiences and existential crises. It discusses McKay’s portrayal of the Jamaican peasantry in relation to tourist photography of the early 20th century, producing a new and powerful imperial way of representing the Caribbean called “tropicality”. McKay’s 1912 dialect poetry Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads constituted Jamaica’s first self-consciously national literature and was part of Jamaica’s emergent cultural nationalism, promoting Jamaican literature centered on the peasantry.