Tropics and the Traveling Gaze

Offers a new interpretation of the history of colonial India and a critical contribution to the understanding of environmental history and the tropical world. Arnold considers the ways in which India’s material environment became increasingly subject to the colonial understanding of landscape and nature, and to the scientific scrutiny of itinerant naturalists.

An eminently readable book, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze unravels the mysteries of the tropics in India as constructed by nineteenth-century Europeans. . . . A richly documented and important book which will be useful to students from a range of interdisciplinary fields., The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze deserves a wide audience. Any historian of biology interested in British imperialism, Romanticism, scientific networks (particularly those linking metropolitan and colonial naturalists) and imperial environmental history will find it an enjoyable, informative, and intellectually stimulating read., The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze is a valuable book for historians and anthropologists..Despite the vast literature on all the themes presented in the book, none connects these various topics as elegantly as the current volume. Arnold's writing style is graceful, his arguments are persuasive, and his creative use of non-governmental sources allow for an original approach to a history of the land., David Arnold's absorbing study will reward anyone interested in botany and biogeography, scientific travel, colonial science, and the impact of Romanticism on nineteenth-century science., In The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze, David Arnold deftly untangles and analyses the nature of the connections between literary representations of the land, the development of botanical knowledge, and the consolidation of colonial power.

David Arnold is 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, including Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India and The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture, and European Expansion.