| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Mark Harrison. Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850. New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 263. $29.95.

This cogent, fascinating, readable book connects climate, health, and race in India. It starts with the argument, also made elsewhere, that Europeans, believing in monogenesis, and more or less ready to receive non-European knowledge, found themselves unable to "acclimatize" and hence partially abandoned universalism. They constructed the "tropical"—and "Indian," an important variant—as physically, culturally, and ethically unwholesome. Mark Harrison relates the change initially to humoral medicine and to developing European notions of hygiene and propriety, but especially to a more pessimistic environmental determinism. In turn, "race" became immutable, innate and biological, going (a small way, in my view) beyond Linnaean categorization based on external characteristics. . . .

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