| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, editors. Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 279. $25.00.

This collection, edited by Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, explores the tropics as it has figured in the post-Enlightenment European imagination. An exemplarily interdisciplinary volume, the book incorporates historical, literary critical, geographical, scientific, philosophical, and art historical perspectives to compose a thick description of tropical histories and fantasies and their imbrication in European representation. The editors draw attention to two streams within European tropical exploration: a group of enthusiasts who accumulated marvelous, if often unsynthesized, collections and observations; and visionaries, of whom the main exemplar here is Alexander von Humboldt, whose encounters with the tropics shifted the emphases and paradigms of European thought. Similarly, the collection itself combines exotic oddities—essays richer in detail than theory—with thought-provoking research that demonstrates as well as argues how the tropical encounter instantiated and revised binary modes of thinking about the globe.

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