Book Review

Comparative/World

Richard P. Tucker's book satisfied my appetite. This is a magnificent, sweeping history that examines about 250 years of Western expansion to uncover sources of food and raw materials or to discover sites for the plantation production of food and industrial raw materials. Since the eighteenth century, growing materialism combined with a swelling population to stress the earth's resources. Tucker examines the historic U.S. relationship to six products fundamental to the modern world: sugar, bananas, coffee, rubber, cattle, and timber.	1
In fact, the story offers more than the introduction and table of contents promise. Tucker subordinates the histories of secondary tropical crops such as sandalwood, pineapples, tobacco, cocoa, nutmeg, cloves, and others to the six selected plantation products. Although the title singles out the United States, Tucker sketches the roles of other nations in the degradation of the tropical world. One subtheme of this study is the recurring conflict between thinkers (those who read, reflect, and study as long as it takes to respond to social needs or problems) and doers (freemarketers, technocrats, and developmentalists who respond in reflex to perceived problems or opportunities).	2
I hope that scholars of U.S. foreign relations will place this work high on the list of essential reading for their graduate students. The book presents a wide-ranging treatment of a major international point of contention, yet one seldom dealt with head on in the history of U.S. foreign relations: ecological policy and the natural environment. Diplomatic historians have skirted this issue, usually treating ecological matters as aspects of bilateral (or multilateral) disputes. Examples that come to mind include the sealing, whaling, and fisheries disputes going back into the early nineteenth century and the water rights controversies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries over the Rio Grande, the Colorado, the Red, and the Saint Lawrence Rivers on the two borders.	. . .