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Book Review
| States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760–1940. By Stuart McCook. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. xiv + 201 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $50.00, paper $22.95.
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| In the export boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Spanish Caribbean was increasingly integrated into global economies. In States of Nature, Stuart McCook shows how botanists, naturalists, and plant breeders used the plant sciences to integrate "nature" into national economies, to nationalize nature. He traces botanists' and breeders' rhetorical and practical efforts to define the botanical landscapes of the new republics and their strenuous work to develop scientific agriculture. He argues that the plant sciences gave powerful groups new kinds of control over the natural world, which in turn contributed to their political and economic power in the human world. By following the peregrinations of people, plants, and pathogens, McCook skillfully portrays the complex ecological and political challenges inherent in nation-building and the institutionalization of the plant sciences in the Caribbean. |
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McCook begins his narrative with what he calls the "rediscovery of nature" in the eighteenth century Caribbean by Spanish and Creole elites. The Spanish crown and local elites sponsored botanical surveys before the wars of independence in the early nineteenth century, after which European and U.S. naturalists continued the job. The organizing principle of the first section is the career of Swiss botanist Henri Pittier, whose work in Costa Rica and Venezuela illuminates how scientists helped define the ecological character (and boundaries) of the nation and identify economically useful plants. By amassing large plant collections, giving specimens scientific names, and publishing inventories such as the Ensayo sobre las Plantas Usuales de Costa Rica (1908), Pittier and others conferred plants with a "civil status." |
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States of Nature hits its stride and maintains momentum when McCook turns to agricultural research programs on sugarcane. Just as the national botanical inventories helped to define the nation and identify potential economic resources, plant breeding programs contributed to the coalescing national identities of Puerto Rico and Cuba. McCook thoroughly documents the efforts of agricultural scientists to address the biological problems of the sugar crop and to advocate for the permanent support of plant breeding institutions. Results on both fronts were mixed and in many cases tilted more toward failure than success. The plant sciences and chemistry seemed to promise solutions to the sugarcane planters' problems of insects, fungi, erosion, and declining soil fertility. But the scientists' "rational" solutions often were not accepted by the sugarcane growers, who demanded a different kind of rationality—economic, rather than scientific or environmental. McCook aptly describes the scientists' struggles to put agricultural research on sound institutional footing up until the economic and political turmoil of the 1930s. |
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The botanical inventories are little revisited after the first third of the book; a tighter interweaving of them and the breeding programs in the conclusion would lend greater depth to McCook's final word on science and nation-building. But this book is an original and strong contribution to the field, as well as a welcome addition to syllabi for both graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses. Environmental history is enriched by books like States of Nature that integrate Latin American history and the history of science into the field. Environmental historians will find great value in this analysis of a "hidden history of catastrophic environmental transformations" (pp. 5–6) that reaches far beyond analyses of the microbes, plants, humans, or institutions could alone. |
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Karin Matchett is writing a book based on her dissertation on the science, culture, and politics of corn improvement in twentieth century Mexico. She is a postdoctoral associate in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. |
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