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Tropical climate and moral hygiene: the anatomy of a Victorian debate

DAVID N. LIVINGSTONE

The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 32 / Issue 01 / March 1999, pp 93 ­ 110DOI: 10.1017/S0007087498003501, Published online: 08 September 2000

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How to cite this article:DAVID N. LIVINGSTONE (1999). Tropical climate and moral hygiene: the anatomy of a Victorian debate. The British Journal for the History of Science, 32, pp 93­110 doi:10.1017/S0007087498003501

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BJHS, 1999, 32, 93–110

Tropical climate and moral hygiene: theanatomy of a Victorian debate

DAVID N. LIVINGSTONE*

On Wednesday 27 April 1898, Dr Luigi [Louis] Westenra Sambon (1865–1931) addressed

the Royal Geographical Society in London on a topic of much interest to the Victorian

public. An Anglo-French medical graduate of the University of Naples, a Fellow of the

London Zoological Society and a recent visitor to Central Africa, he was well equipped to

tackle the subject of the ‘Acclimatization of Europeans in Tropical Lands’. The ‘problem

of tropical colonization’, he began, ‘ is one of the most important and pressing with which

European states have to deal. Civilization has favoured unlimited multiplication, and

thereby intensified that struggle for existence the limitation of which seemed to be its very

object…I know full well that the question of emigration is beset with a variety of moral,

social, political, and economic difficulties ; but it is the law of nature, and civilization has

no better remedy for the evils caused by overcrowding.’"

Even from these introductory remarks, it is already plain that Sambon’s project was a

compound product of medical diagnosis, colonial imperative, Darwinian demography and

moral evaluation. And it is the rhetorical zone roughly marked out by this quadrilateral of

disease, empire, struggle and virtue that I want to explore here.# First, however, it will be

instructive to return to that afternoon a century ago and spend a little more time listening

in on the deliberations.

GREAT GOOD FORTUNE, AND VERY CAREFUL LIVING

Dr Sambon was a romantic and colourful figure with what has been called an ‘electric

temperament’.$ By profession a medical practitioner who was decorated by both the

French and Italian governments for his work during the cholera epidemic of 1884, he was

a connoisseur of the arts, a cordon bleu cook, a brilliantly histrionic lecturer and (later) a

controversialist of considerable standing, arguing for the parasitic origins of sleeping

* School of Geosciences, The Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN.

I am grateful to Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, Mary Gibson, Nuala Johnson, Michael Worboys and two

anonymous reviewers for help in a variety of ways with the preparation of this paper.

1 L. W. Sambon, ‘Acclimatization of Europeans in tropical lands ’, Geographical Journal (1898), 12, 589.

2 I am fully aware that these four discourses do not exhaust the ways in which the tropical world was

constructed in Victorian Britain or, more especially, elsewhere in Europe. My claim is that they were particularly

prominent at the RGS, and are broadly reflective of British society at the time.

3 Basic biographical details are available from the obituaries in the Lancet (1931), 221, ii, 613, and the British

Medical Journal (1931), 2, 514–15. A brief sketch also appears in Sir Philip H. Manson-Bahr, A History of the

School of Tropical Medicine in London, 1899–1949, London, 1956, 132–6.

94 David N. Livingstone

sickness, pellagra and cancer.% In pursuance of these projects he constructed maps of

disease distributions as crucial to determining epidemiological aetiology.

At the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) debate, Sambon was nothing if not

grandiloquent in style, assured in judgement and pugnacious in tone. In the wake of the

new immigration restrictions governing both America and Australia, it surely seemed that

the ‘great tropical belt ’ was the prospective immigrants’ ‘Promised land’. Alas, he

reported, this vast territory was failing to fulfil its demographic potential, because ‘at its

gates stands a terrible monster – the Cerberus of prejudice ’. Pessimism about the effects of

tropical climate, though spawned in days of scientific ‘ infancy’, continued to afflict what

might be called the imagined geography of the tropics. And he saw it as his own special

mission to disabuse the Victorian public of such obsolete misconceptions.

Sambon thus began his analysis by querying conventional wisdom on the causal

connections between tropical climate and such conditions as anaemia, sunstroke, malaria

and tuberculosis ; rather, the source of many such diseases was to be found in parasites. In

this way he sought to redeem the tropical world from the negative environmental

stereotyping to which it had been subjected. Indeed in many ways, urban life in the major

European centres of civilization, he observed, was far more conducive to physical

deterioration through the ‘herding together of dense masses of population…a more

strenuous struggle for existence, alcoholism, and immorality ’.& ‘Surely not over the

colonies, but at the entrance of our cities ’, he urged, ‘should be written Dante’s inscription.

‘‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate ’’ (‘‘Abandon all hope, you who enter ! ’’).’ And in

response to the ‘superstition’ that children did not thrive in the tropics, Sambon quipped:

‘Surely those who lay so much stress on the weakly condition of European children in India

have never seen the bandy-legged little monsters of Glasgow, or the sickly, miserable

children that swarm in darkest London.’'

To counter such wholesale disparagement, Sambon insisted on the need to recognize the

tropics’ geographical diversity – climatologically, demographically and medically. The

tropics constituted ‘not one climate, but an infinity of climates ’ ; its different regions each

displayed their own distinct patterns of mortality ; and the complex ‘distribution of

tropical diseases ’ was such that its geographical pathology was only now beginning to be

elucidated.( As for the much vaunted view that Europeans were unsuited to manual labour

in the tropics, Sambon dismissed such comfortable politics with the quip: ‘The truth about

the labour problem is that white men will not work; they go to the tropics with a fixed

resolve to gain wealth by coloured labour, which only too often is another word for slave-

labour.’) Besides all this, Sambon called upon the support of Darwinian theory to confirm

4 Unlike his accounts of the latter two conditions, Sambon’s advocacy of the view that sleeping sickness was

caused by trypanosome transmitted by the tsetse fly, expressed during the early years of the twentieth century,

was later confirmed. His controversial intervention in priority disputes between the Liverpool and London schools

of tropical medicine over the discovery of trypanosome in human blood is recorded in Edwin R. Nye and Mary

E. Gibson, Ronald Ross, Malariologist and Polymath: A Biography, London, 1997, 110–12, 206–7. See also L.

W. Sambon, ‘The discovery of human trypanosome’, British Medical Journal (1902), 2, 1807–8.

5 Sambon, op. cit. (1), 591.

6 Sambon, op. cit. (1), 593.

7 Sambon, op. cit. (1), 592, 593.

8 Sambon, op. cit. (1), 594.

Tropical climate and moral hygiene 95

human adaptability to climatic conditions. The theory of evolution had swept away old

polygenist conceptions of human origins and thereby confirmed the ancient doctrine of

Hippocrates that ‘races are the daughters of climate ’.* Humans, plants and domestic

animals had all successfully adjusted to new climatic regimes, and the only obstacles to

human cosmopolitanism were ‘ the multitudinous living mites which teem in the tropics

like every other form of life ’. But advocates of colonialism need not fear. ‘We worship

Science ’, Sambon declared as he reached towards his final crescendo, ‘and that goddess

will surely lead us to victory’ :"!

If attempts at colonization in the past have often been unsuccessful, if they have always costimmense sacrifices in lives and money, it is because they were made in complete ignorance of theconditions essential to success. I hope that this afternoon’s discussion may finally extricate thequestions of tropical colonization from the old exploded theories, and place it on the sound basisof modern scientific knowledge. It would be ridiculous to continue further to dispute thepossibility of tropical colonization, now that over ten million white men and their descendantsare already settled within the tropics, laying the foundations of new and perhaps greatercivilizations.""

If Sambon felt that further discussion of the issue of tropical acclimatization was

‘ridiculous ’, then some of his interlocutors that afternoon succeeded only in heaping

ridicule upon themselves."# To be sure, supportive voices were to be heard. Not least of

these was the celebrated Dr Patrick (later Sir Patrick) Manson who enthused about the way

in which his own views accorded with those of the speaker. Like Sambon, Manson was sure

that germs were the direct cause of ninety-nine per cent of tropical diseases and that the

‘successful colonization of tropical lands is entirely a matter of knowledge and of the

application of knowledge’."$ Much later in the proceedings J. A. Wells insisted on British

cosmopolitanism and observed that many delicately constituted European children who

had grown to maturity in the tropics would not have survived at home. To him the tropical

world provided evidence that the ‘British race is an example of the survival of the fittest ’."%

But there the support ceased."& Sir Harry Johnston, explorer, recent British commissioner

to South Central Africa and currently Consul-General in Tunisia, was unimpressed."' His

9 Sambon, op. cit. (1), 595.

10 Sambon, op. cit. (1), 598.

11 Sambon, op. cit. (1), 599.

12 An anonymous reader points to the similarities between Sambon’s views and those of Paul Leroy-Beaulieu,

although Sambon makes no reference to him in his acclimatization publications. See Dan Warshaw, Paul Leroy-

Beaulieu and Established Liberalism in France, Illinois, 1991.

13 Patrick Manson, Discussion, Geographical Journal (1898), 12, 601.

14 J. A. Wells, Discussion, Geographical Journal (1898), 12, 616.

15 Dr Michael Worboys informs me that considerable antipathy to Sambon’s views was expressed in the

Anglo-Indian press where he was seen as a metropolitan expert lacking direct experience of tropical living. Dr

Worboys observes that this fits with the strongly environmentalist strand in Anglo-Indian medicine. See also Mark

Harrison, Public Health in British India : Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859–1914, Cambridge, 1994. The

environmentalist paradigm in Indian medicine throughout the nineteenth century is also discussed in David

Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, Berkeley, 1993.

See also R. Ramasubban, ‘ Imperial health in British India, 1857–1900’, in Disease, Medicine, and Empire :

Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (ed. Roy Macleod and Milton

Lewis), London, 1988, 38–60.

16 See Sir Harry H. Johnston, The Story of My Life, Indianapolis, 1923.

96 David N. Livingstone

earlier experience in India, for example, had convinced him that the bulk of Britons born

and brought up there did not reach ‘the same high physical and mental standard as those

others of their fellow-countrymen who had been born in the United Kingdom’. Moreover,

if acclimatization could be effected, it would only be at the cost of producing an ‘ inferior

race ’. As for the politics of colonial management, Sir Harry confessed that what was

needed was ‘knowledge of how a limited number of Europeans may rule the tropics,

because so inferior are all indigenous tropical races that there scarcely remains a single

tropical country which is independent politically, or whose independence is not more or

less threatened. What we desire to find out is how, without unreasonable loss of life, our

fellow-countrymen can govern tropical regions.’"(

Others were quick to take up Johnston’s lead. J. A. Baines, who reported having spent

some twenty years in the tropics, could not agree that acclimatization was feasible without

racial degeneration. In similar vein, Dr Robert W. Felkin, a recently appointed lecturer in

Diseases of the Tropics and Climatology at the Edinburgh School of Medicine, and a

traveller in East Africa, drew a sharp line between scientific theory and practical

experience.") To him, acclimatization might be a theoretical possibility, but did not come

‘within the region of practical politics ’."* Equally critical was Alfred Sharpe another

African explorer, as was the chairman, Sir John Kirk, who reported that his experience in

Africa had shown him that ‘apart from the question of health’, the races in the tropics were

competing on unequal terms; there the ‘black man is the best, because the cheapest,

labourer ’. He had no option but to throw his weight in with Johnston’s concern to

organize ‘a governing class that will rule and guide the black man’.#! In concluding the

proceedings Sir John further read the contents of a letter from Colonel James C. Gore,

Colonial Secretary of Sierra Leone, to the effect that ‘Europeans do not become

acclimatized’ to the tropics and that his own survival on the West Coast of Africa was to

be attributed ‘ to great good fortune, and, of course, being very careful in my living’.#"

THE ANATOMY OF A DEBATE

This exchange can be used as the vehicle for disentangling some of the different threads of

theory and practice that were woven together in late nineteenth-century portrayals of the

tropical world. For the RGS debate – typical as it was of a more widespread dispute in

Victorian Britain – was embedded in a suite of different, but related, discourses.

First, the acclimatization question was obviously deeply implicated in a medical

conversation about health, disease, hygiene and the body.## Sambon’s contribution, in fact,

17 Sir Harry Johnston, Discussion, Geographical Journal (1898), 12, 602, 603.

18 See D. Hamilton, The Healers : A History of Medicine in Scotland, Edinburgh, 1981.

19 Robert W. Felkin, Discussion, Geographical Journal (1898), 12, 605.

20 Sir John Kirk, Discussion, Geographical Journal (1898), 12, 605, 606.

21 Colonel J. C. Gore, Discussion, Geographical Journal (1898), 12, 606.

22 For general demographic and medical background, see Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s

Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, 1989. See also Karen Ordahl

Kupperman, ‘Fear of hot climates in the Anglo-American colonial experience ’, William and Mary Quarterly

(1984), 41, 213–40.

Tropical climate and moral hygiene 97

very substantially repeated the substance of a piece he had published the previous year in

the British Medical Journal where he insisted that ‘ the difficulties in the way of

colonisation are not due to climate, but to parasitism’ and that acclimatization ‘ is, to a

great extent, a mere question of hygiene’.#$ Indeed this was only one of a spate of medical

publications dealing, in one way or another, with tropical acclimatization as the Victorian

era drew to a close.#% In 1898 Patrick Manson – one of the participants in the RGS

colloquium – published his celebrated work on Tropical Diseases : A Manual for the

Diseases of Warm Climates, and the following year, 1899, founded the London School of

Tropical Medicine.#& Soon Sambon was to join Manson as a lecturer in the new institution

and emerged as a dedicated advocate of the germ theory. Moreover a couple of years later

Manson despatched Sambon along with George Carmichael Low to live for three months

in a highly malarious region of Italy – the Roman campagna – where, using the simple

precaution of spending each night inside a mosquito-proof hut, they retained their health

and vigour.#' Evidence such as this was used by Manson to support his mosquito-

transmission theory of malaria.#(

These interventions occurred on the cusp of a newfound confidence in the capacity of

medical science to comprehend and overcome ‘microbic processes ’. Manson’s new School

in London, and its counterpart at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine opened six

months earlier, attested to the growing legitimacy of tropical medicine as a scientific

specialism.#) The focus on the parasitology of the body and the microbic origins of tropical

diseases did much to move the debate about acclimatization away from older ecological

preoccupations. Certainly the medical paths of the London and Liverpool Schools diverged

in the early decades of the twentieth century and the relationship between Manson and

Ronald Ross (at Liverpool) descended into talk of libel.#* But both had been deeply involved

in the promulgation of the mosquito-malarial theory and were committed to tropical

23 L. W. Sambon, ‘The possibility of the acclimatisation of Europeans in tropical regions’, British Medical

Journal (1897), 1, 66. Sambon again repeated the argument in ‘L’acclimatation des Europe! ens dans les re! gions

tropicales ’, Bulletin de la SocieU teU de GeUographie, Lyon (1901), 17, 44–66. According to Manson-Bahr, the British

Medical Journal piece ‘was nearly the cause of his undoing’. Because he insisted that acclimatization was ‘simply

a matter of intelligent hygiene’, the ‘opposition was fierce and the clamour loud’. Manson-Bahr, op. cit. (3), 133.

24 I have discussed something of this in David N. Livingstone, ‘Human acclimatization: perspectives on a

contested field of inquiry in science, medicine and geography’, History of Science (1987), 25, 359–94.

25 See David Arnold, ‘ Introduction: tropical medicine before Manson’ in Warm Climates and Western

Medicine : The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–1900 (ed. David Arnold), Clio Medica 35, Wellcome

Institute Series in the History of Medicine, Amsterdam, 1996, 1–19. On Manson, see Philip Manson-Bahr, Patrick

Manson, the Father of Tropical Medicine, London, 1962; and P. Manson-Bahr and A. Alcock, The Life and Work

of Sir Patrick Manson, London, 1927.

26 M. J. Clarkson, ‘Manson, Patrick’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, New York, 1981, ix, q.v.

27 Manson-Bahr claims that this crucial test, carried out from early July to 19 October 1900, was a ‘decisive

operation’. Manson-Bahr, op. cit. (25), 99.

28 Dane Kennedy, ‘The perils of the midday sun: climatic anxieties in the colonial tropics ’, in Imperialism and

the Natural World (ed. John M. MacKenzie), Manchester, 1990, 118–40.

29 On Ross, see Nye and Gibson, op. cit. (4). The ‘Manson libel ’ is discussed on pp. 180–3. See also Eli

Chernin, ‘Sir Ronald Ross vs Sir Patrick Manson: a matter of libel ’, Journal of the History of Medicine (1988),

43, 262–74.

98 David N. Livingstone

medicine’s push to determine the taxonomy of vector species.$! With that professionalizing

impulse towards specialization, Sambon was in profound sympathy. At the RGS he did not

hesitate to dismiss as untrustworthy discussions of the acclimatization question conducted

in ignorance of the latest medical science, which was uncovering the real complexity of the

issues involved. Small wonder that ‘statesmen, geographers, meteorologists, and

journalists ’ were basing their judgements on obsolete and erroneous medical opinion. And

doubtless this was because there were ‘more practitioners than scientists in the medical

field’.$"

Even a cursory inspection of the RGS debate, however, discloses a second layer of

discourse – imperial expansionism.$# Sambon’s immediate couching of the acclimatization

problem in the language of what he called ‘ tropical colonization’ is itself illustrative. And

the fact that Manson was appointed as the Colonial Office’s first medical adviser is

indicative of the way in which tropical medicine came to be seen as integral to successful

imperial progress.$$ Of course, medical questions about tropical climate had long been

rooted in colonial politics, as the careers and writings of many of Sambon’s interlocutors

amply testify. Consider, for example, the Scottish physician-explorer Robert Felkin, who

contributed a variety of articles to medical journals on the subject, and who, as a council

member of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, kept the geographers abreast of what

he felt they needed to know about the acclimatization question.$% What excited Felkin’s

interest throughout was the connection between acclimatization and colonial potential.

Population pressure and commercial compulsion alike kept the subject on Britain’s

domestic political agenda, and Felkin laid out a series of conditions to be met if tropical

settlement was to succeed. Thus while there are ample signs in Felkin’s tropical medicine

of the environmental tradition increasingly marginalized by the new advances in

parasitology, it was no less energized by the self-same colonial imperative. It was, for

example, on successful acclimatization of Europeans that ‘ the advance of civilisation in

Africa ’ depended.$&

Precisely the same sentiments had undergirded Sir John Kirk’s intervention three years

earlier in 1895 at the Sixth International Geographical Congress when he spoke on ‘The

30 Michael Worboys, ‘Manson, Ross and colonial medical policy : tropical medicine in London and Liverpool.

1899–1914’, in Macleod and Lewis, op. cit. (15), 21–37, and ‘Germs, malaria and the invention of Mansonian

tropical medicine : from ‘‘Diseases in the Tropics ’’ to ‘‘Tropical Diseases ’’ ’, in Arnold, op. cit. (25),

181–207.

31 Sambon, op. cit. (1), 589.

32 For general background see Philip D. Curtin’s classic essay, ‘The white man’s grave: image and reality,

1780–1850’, Journal of British Studies (1961), 1, 94–110.

33 Indeed Worboys observes that the London School of Tropical Medicine ‘ thrived, being widely regarded as

the de facto medical department of the Colonial Office’. Worboys, ‘Manson, Ross ’, op. cit. (30), 25.

34 I have discussed Felkin’s thinking in op. cit. (24). See also Morag Bell, ‘Edinburgh and empire : geographical

science and citizenship for a ‘new’ age, ca 1900’, Scottish Geographical Magazine (1995), 111, 139–49. Among

Felkin’s contributions were ‘Can Europeans become acclimatised in tropical Africa? ’, Scottish Geographical

Magazine (1886), 2, 647–57; ‘On acclimatisation’, Scottish Geographical Magazine (1891), 7, 647–56; ‘Tropical

highlands : their suitability for European settlement ’, Transactions of the Seventh International Congress on

Hygiene and Demography (1892), 10, 155–64; ‘The distribution of disease in Africa ’, Report of the British

Association for the Advancement of Science (1893), Section E, 839.

35 Felkin, ‘Can Europeans? ’, op. cit. (34), 647.

Tropical climate and moral hygiene 99

Extent to which Tropical Africa is Suited for Development by the White Races or Under

their Superintendence’. For here he frankly confessed that ‘Climate is the most important

of all considerations in the choice of a home for Europeans in Central Africa.’$' Kirk’s

associate Arthur Silva White, secretary of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, was

likewise motivated in his concern to discriminate between healthy and unhealthy

colonization zones.$( When, in 1891, he produced his map of the ‘Comparative value of

African lands’, he built a climatic component into his assessment of their relative worth

‘ to any European power’ and explicitly declared that ‘all humanitarian motives may be set

aside as not being pertinent to the present inquiry ’.$) Earlier he had spoken of Central

Africa as ‘a virgin country which…will require years of exploitation and development to

open up to extensive trade’ – a project requiring ‘scientific commercial geography’ and not

‘ the haphazard, privateering style of bygone times ’.$* To assist in its advancement he

appended a commercial map which, he suggested, ‘should be studied like a game of chess,

or as Prince Bismarck is reputed to study the playboard of politics ’.%! What made such

perusal all the more necessary was that White drew a clear line between colonial settlement

and commercial exploitation. Climate forever scuttled the former, he believed, but the

latter remained very much on the agenda of practical imperialism. African lands could be

developed not least in regions where there was ‘an established native trade, which

necessarily implies the existence of slavery’ or ‘where the natives are capable of serving

under European tuition as labourers ’.%"

Such prognostications could be multiplied ad libitum. In 1886 the Scottish explorer

Joseph Thomson, for instance, told the Scottish geographers that an ‘overstocked world’

was compelling Europeans to discover ‘healthy regions for the surplus of population’.%# And

again, in September 1890, when Ernest G. Ravenstein directed the attention of his hearers

at the British Association meeting in Leeds to ‘Lands of the Globe Still Available for

European Settlement ’, his analysis of the tropics bore the stamp of his antipathy to those

supporting acclimatization. ‘To render tropical countries fit places of residence for

European colonists ’, he quipped, ‘ it will be necessary either to change the constitution of

Europeans or to bring about a change in the climate ’. To Ravenstein, then, widespread

tropical colonization was impossible and ‘the white man must be content to settle

36 John Kirk, ‘The extent to which tropical Africa is suited for development by the white race, or under their

superintendence’, Report of the Sixth International Geographical Congress, London 1895, London, 1896,

526.

37 A variety of similar projects is discussed in Morag Bell, ‘ ‘‘The pestilence that walketh in darkness ’’ :

imperial health, gender and images of South Africa c. 1880–1910’, Transactions of the Institute of British

Geographers (1993), 18 (NS), 327–41.

39 A. S. White, ‘Note on the distribution of trade-centres ’, Scottish Geographical Magazine (1888), 4, 595,

596.

38 A. S. White, ‘On the comparative value of African lands ’, Scottish Geographical Magazine (1891), 7, 192.

I have discussed this in ‘Climate’s moral economy: science, race and place in post-Darwinian British and

American Geography’, in Geography and Empire (ed. Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith), Oxford, 1994, 132–54.

40 White, op. cit. (39), 595.

41 A. S. White, ‘To what extent is tropical Africa suited for development by the white races, or under their

superintendence? ’ Report of the Sixth International Geographical Congress, London 1895, London, 1896, 543.

42 Joseph Thomson, ‘East Central Africa, and its commercial outlook’, Scottish Geographical Magazine

(1886), 2, 66.

100 David N. Livingstone

temporarily there, to teach the natives the dignity of labour, and to lead him to a higher

place of civilisation’.%$ Seen in this light, the tropical world, as Warwick Anderson tellingly

puts it, was ‘no place for a white man, and yet just the place for white dominion over man

and nature’.%% Further testimony is unnecessary. Debates about the nature of the tropical

world were part and parcel of a wider conversation congregating around matters of

colonial praxis and imperial health, even among those like Henry Morton Stanley who said

he could ‘not agree with a single word’ that Arthur Silva White and the troubling cohort

of ‘ theorists and pessimists ’ uttered.%&

No less discernible, however, is a third suite of discursive exchanges rotating in a variety

of ways about the theory of evolution. Chief among these were queries about organic

adaptation, plant and animal domestication, human origins and racial differentiation.

After all Charles Darwin himself devoted much time and effort to the question of variation

under domestication, the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica secured the services of

none other than Alfred Russel Wallace to compose the entry on Acclimatization for its

celebrated ninth edition of 1875, and Wallace’s successor – J. Arthur Thompson – in his

version of the same entry for the fourteenth edition vacillated between a Lamarckian and

Darwinian rendering of the phenomenon. For all these writers natural selection was the

most effective mechanism for preserving adaptive variations, but to one degree or another,

all suspected that environmentally induced constitutional modifications could be inherited.

Indeed Kuklick has gone so far as to claim that basic elements of the Darwinian schema

‘were the constituent components of acclimatization analyses ’. This must not be taken to

imply that acclimatization issues exhausted the scope of the Darwinian project ; but it does

suggest that interest ‘ in the outcomes of encounters between indigenes and colonial

invaders of every variety – plants, animal, and human – was not marginal to Darwinian

inquiry, but occupied its very center ’.%' After all, Darwin grew to intellectual maturity in

an age when the feasibility of moving plants and animals and people around the globe

dominated colonial politics.

Recall, then, that at the RGS, Sambon’s optimistic reading of the medical literature on

acclimatization was bolstered by his conviction that evolution had confirmed the ‘unity of

the human species ’, that races were ‘ the daughters of climate ’, and that ethnic history was

the story of ‘widespread migration and consequent acclimatization’.%( His entire diagnosis

of the tropical world was couched in the vocabulary of Malthusian struggle, hereditary

variation and environmental adaptation. It was therefore entirely understandable that,

when writing for the British Medical Journal, he would use evidence from the

43 E. G. Ravenstein, ‘Lands of the globe still available for European settlement ’, Proceedings of the Royal

Geographical Society (1891), 13 (NS), 30–1.

44 Warwick Anderson, ‘Disease, race, and empire ’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1996), 70, 63.

45 Henry Morton Stanley, Discussion, Report of the Sixth International Geographical Congress, London 1895,

London, 1896, 533.

46 Henrika Kuklick, ‘ Islands in the Pacific : Darwinian biogeography and British anthropology’, American

Ethnologist (1996), 23, 628. See also Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate : The English and Other Creatures in the

Victorian Age, Cambridge, MA, 1987.

47 Sambon, op. cit. (1), 595.

Tropical climate and moral hygiene 101

biogeographical distribution of the rabbit and thistle in Australia and New Zealand to

support his case.

In making this move, Sambon was hardly departing from precedent. For throughout the

nineteenth century, and indeed earlier, debates about acclimatization, or seasoning as it

was sometimes called, centred on the transplantation of plants and animals from one

climatic regime to another.%) Practices such as these raised – and not least in the pre-

Darwinian era – crucial questions about matters of biological type and evolutionary

transformism, notably in France where the Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of

acquired characteristics found itself institutionalized in the Socie! te! Zoologique d’Acclima-

tation under the direction of Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. This is entirely understandable

for acclimatization confronted head on the question of climatically induced hereditary

modification.%* France, of course, was not unique in this respect. Throughout the world a

spate of acclimatization societies came into being during the middle decades of the

nineteenth century, though no doubt the precise agenda differed from one national setting

to another.&!

All this flurry of activity can be seen as one moment in the European manipulation of

the natural world for cultural return.&" At the same time it was indicative of a destabilizing

of the animal world, a world in which species had hitherto been deemed fixed, but were

now believed to be subject to alteration. And it was precisely in this ambivalent context

of ‘a spectacular European appropriation of the new world for purposes of economic gain,

literary suggestion, and popular entertainment ’, alongside scientific programmes of animal

and plant transfer and interrogation, that botanical and zoological gardens assumed

prominence.&# In Adelaide, for example, the impulse towards constructing a local zoo

resulted in the formation of the Acclimatisation Society of South Australia, which was soon

engaging in an economy of exotic animal trafficking, and much the same was true of

48 The significance of botanical analogies for human ‘transplantation’ among nineteenth-century French

thinkers surfaces in A.-M. Moulin, ‘Expatrie! s Français sous les tropiques : cent ans d’histoire de la sante! ’, Bulletin

de la SocieU teU de Pathologie Exotique (1997), 90, 221–8.

49 The standard work on this subject is now Michael A. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of

French Colonialism, Bloomington, 1994.

50 See Christopher Lever, They Dined on Eland: The Story of the Acclimatization Societies, London, 1992.

Also Linden Gillbank, ‘The origins of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria : practical science in the wake of

the Gold Rush’, Historical Records of Australian Science (1986), 6, 359–74, and ‘The Acclimatisation Society of

Victoria ’, Victoria Historical Journal (1980), 51, 255–70; Douglas R. Weiner, ‘The roots of ‘‘Michurinism’’ :

transformist biology and acclimatization as currents in the Russian life sciences ’, Annals of Science (1985), 42,

244–60; R. W. Home (ed.), International Science and National Scientific Identity : Australia between Britain and

America, Dordrecht, 1991; Pauline Payne, ‘ ‘‘Science at the periphery ’’ : Dr Schomburgk’s Garden’, in Darwin’s

Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific (ed. Roy Macleod and Philip F. Rehbock),

Honolulu, 1994, 239–59. Some of this work makes clear that whereas scientific organizations, structures and

practices readily traversed international frontiers, the same was not always true of scientific theories.

51 Some of the diverse motivations for animal transfers – including landscape nostalgia and sport hunting –

are discussed in Thomas R. Dunlap, ‘Remaking the land: the acclimatization movement and Anglo ideas of

nature ’, Journal of World History (1997), 8, 303–19.

52 See Warwick Anderson, ‘Climates of opinion: acclimatization in nineteenth-century France and England’,

Victorian Studies (1992), 35, 135–57. See also the essays in R. J. Hoage and William A. Deiss (eds.), New Worlds,

New Animals : From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century, Baltimore, 1996.

102 David N. Livingstone

Melbourne.&$ Institutions of this sort had the added advantage of bringing the field home.

Knowledge of plants and animals did not have to be procured from the observation of

species in their natural habitats ; they could be seen in the local zoological or botanical

garden, which, by functioning as a kind of laboratory, also had the effect of elevating the

research of naturalists ‘ to the status of an experimental science’.&%

In the light of the intimate, though not universal, connection between zoo-botanical

acclimatization and matters to do with evolutionary theory, it is not surprising that

discussions of human acclimatization to the tropics were routinely embedded in the self-

same context. Consider Wallace’s 1875 entry on ‘Acclimatisation’ for the Encyclopaedia

Britannica. Having carefully discriminated between domestication, naturalization and

acclimatization, he appended a substantial concluding set of observations on human

acclimatization in which, drawing inter alia on the writings of the botanist Richard Spruce,

he vigorously opposed the anthropological anti-acclimatizationists, confirming that

acclimatization was an inevitable corollary of monogenism and cosmopolitanism, and that

‘man may become acclimatised with at least as much certainty and rapidity…as any of the

lower animals ’.&& Later in 1899 he followed up the theme when he wrote an article on

‘White men in the tropics ’ in which, like Sambon the previous year, he insisted that the

idea that the white races could not labour in the tropics was nothing short of myth-

making.&' Again, writing in the Philadelphia Medical Times for 13 June 1885, Isaac Hull

Platt comparably assumed that ‘ If we admit the principle of evolution, that of adaptation

to climate must follow as a corollary.’ And to the extent that tropical nature exacted a

heavy death toll on colonial intruders, even that had selective advantages for it permitted

‘ the race to be propagated only from its hardiest members or those best fitted to its new

surroundings ’.&(

Those more doubtful about the ease with which tropical acclimatization could be

effected were no less keen to bolster their diagnosis with the language of evolutionary

biology. Thus Felkin, who had taken part in the RGS symposium on the subject, conceded

that ‘ it has only been by a process of the survival of the fittest that…acclimatization has

been possible at all ’.&) Accordingly he felt compelled to agree with Herbert Spencer that

environmental conditions could induce hereditary modifications. Earlier he had insisted

that ‘acclimatisation may be in part effected by changes taking place in the individual or

in the race, and in part by hereditary modification of constitution…If we admit a power

of acclimatization, we take for granted certain permanent alterations in the functions of the

body, and a gradual modification in the habits of life.’&* What evolution did, by and large,

was to strengthen the hand of the monogenists who stressed the constitutional unity of the

53 Kay Anderson, ‘Culture and nature at the Adelaide Zoo: at the frontiers of ‘‘human’’ geography’,

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (1995), 20 (NS), 275–94; Linden Gillbank, ‘A paradox of

purposes : acclimatization origins of the Melbourne Zoo’, in Hoage and Deiss, op. cit. (52), 73–85.

54 Anderson, op. cit. (52), 142.

55 A. R. Wallace, ‘Acclimatisation’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edn, Edinburgh, 1871, i, 90.

56 Alfred Russel Wallace, ‘White men in the tropics ’, Independent (1899), 51, 667–73.

57 Isaac Hull Platt, ‘The problem of acclimatization’, Medical Times (1885), 15, 677, 678.

58 Felkin, ‘On acclimatisation’, op. cit. (34), 648.

59 Felkin, ‘Can Europeans? ’, op. cit. (34), 651–2.

Tropical climate and moral hygiene 103

human species, the admission of which forced many to conclude that adaptation to

climate was an inevitability.'! Evolutionary monogenism and pro-acclimatization were

thus mutually reinforcing, and the tropical world was portrayed as the great testing

ground, the empirical crucible, in which a grand acclimatization experiment was being

conducted.

If, for some, biological evolution rendered tropical acclimatization a real possibility,

cultural evolution made it an inevitability. For these advocates, the runaway triumphs of

human culture were outstripping the pace of biological adaptation. Sambon, for instance,

had no hesitation in using such claims to round off his aggressively pro-acclimatization

piece in the British Medical Journal. Any selective alteration to the European body through

its exposure to tropical climate was not to be feared, for the simple reason that the human

species by modifying its surroundings, had effectively substituted cultural ‘ selection for

that of Nature’, he concluded:

From the moment when the first skin was used as a covering and the first fire blazed at will, manwas no longer a slave to the universal evolution, and advancing civilization will enable him moreand more to keep himself in harmony with Nature – not by bodily changes, but by greater stridesin intellectual power.'"

In these scenarios, the tropical realm was imagined – one way or another – as an arena

of evolutionary struggle, and as often as not participants in the dispute conceived of this

in racial terms. For long enough discussions of the whole question had been couched in the

vocabulary of racial survival. The infamous Robert Knox, for example, hissing xenophobic

vitriol, opposed acclimatization in every shape and form as he expanded on such sinister

consequences of tropical colonization as infertility, sickly offspring and cultural

degeneration.'# Precisely the same was true of the American polygenist Josiah Nott who

entertained readers of the American Journal of Medical Science in 1856 with his ‘Thoughts

on acclimation and adaptation of races to climate ’ claiming that tropical colonists had

‘paid dearly for their migratory propensities ’.'$ In the post-Darwinian era, such neuroses

took different forms. For some the very definition of tropical acclimatization necessarily

involved the idea of the European race retaining its ethnic purity over generations ; for

others different races were believed to possess different capacities for climatic adaptation;

to yet others physiological immunity to tropical pathogens was racially determined.'%

Whichever, the tropical world was routinely portrayed as a site of a racial struggle for

60 It must not be assumed, however, that Darwinism swept aside polygenism. See George Stocking, ‘The

persistence of polygenist thought in post-Darwinian anthropology’, in Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in

the History of Anthropology, Chicago, 1982, 43–68.

61 Sambon, ‘The possibility ’, op. cit. (23), 66.

62 Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race Over the Destinies

of Nations, London, 1862. See the analysis in Livingstone, op. cit. (24), and Evelleen Richards, ‘The ‘‘moral

anatomy’’ of Robert Knox: the interplay between biological and social thought in Victorian scientific

naturalism’, Journal of the History of Biology (1989), 22, 373–436.

63 Josiah C. Nott, ‘Thoughts on acclimation and adaptation of races to climate ’, American Journal of

Medical Science (1856), 5, 324.

64 Warwick Anderson, ‘ Immunities of empire : race, disease, and the new tropical medicine, 1900–1920’,

Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1996), 70, 94–118.

104 David N. Livingstone

survival. And so it was at the RGS colloquy: Sambon spoke of the tragic ‘struggle between

the white man and the aborigines ’ as a ‘cruel page in the history of mankind, but such is

the struggle for life ’, while his critic Baines was convinced of the impossibility of ‘raising

up a white race in the tropics that will keep up to the European standard of efficiency’.'&

Interwoven with these medical, colonial and scientific constructions of the tropical

domain was a fourth discursive regime to do with moral regulation.'' Recollect Colonel

Gore’s concluding affirmation at the RGS meeting that his own long-time service in West

Africa was due to very careful living. As for Sambon, acclimatization might be ‘a mere

question of hygiene’, but that incorporated moral hygiene as well : ‘personal habits are of

the utmost importance; temperance and morality are powerful weapons in the struggle for

life…Sexual immorality under the influence of a tropical climate, and in the presence of

a native servile and morally undeveloped population, raises to a climax unknown amid the

restraints of home life, and becomes one of the most potent causes of physical prostration.’'(

Earlier in the century, standard medical treatments of tropical diseases, such as those by

Johnson and Martin, routinely delivered prophylactic advice on exercise, bathing, alcohol

consumption and the conduct of the ‘passions ’.') So too did Stanley who, in the mid-1880s,

expressed the opinion that ‘with due means to check the influences resulting from such a

total change in life as the tropic climate demands, and with proper moral conduct, I

maintain…the European [will be able] to thrive in a hot climate as well as in any climate

under the sun’.'* In much the same vein, Wallace concurred with the judgements of the

anthropologist Theodor Waitz that ‘ the English, who cannot give up animal food and

spirituous liquors, are less able to sustain the heat of the tropics than the more sober

Spaniards and Portuguese ’.(! The tropical world thus exerted its own moral compulsion

on would-be settlers. It demanded a therapy of moral hygiene every bit as rigorous as its

medical counterpart.

But what I have elsewhere called ‘ the moral economy of climate ’ surfaced in another

65 Sambon, op. cit. (1), 598; J. A. Baines, Discussion, Geographical Journal (1898), 12, 604.

66 I have discussed aspects of this in Livingstone, op. cit. (38), and ‘The moral discourse of climate : historical

considerations on race, place, and virtue ’, Journal of Historical Geography (1991), 17, 413–34.

67 Sambon, ‘Acclimatisation’, op. cit. (23), 66. Two years later remarkably similar language was used by

William Z. Ripley when he wrote : ‘One of the most subtle physiological effects of a tropical climate is a

surexcitation of the sexual organs, which in the presence of a native servile and morally underdeveloped

population often leads to excesses even at a tender age ’ (emphasis added). The Races of Europe: A Sociological

Study, London, 1900, 562. Robert Young takes this extract as emblematic of the sexual obsessions that

characterized colonial encounters. See Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire : Hybridity in Theory, Culture and

Race, London, 1995, 150f.

68 James Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions ; Being a Treatise on the

Principal Diseases to Europeans in the East and West Indies, Mediterranean, and Coast of Africa, London, 1821;

James Ranald Martin, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions, Including Practical

Observations on The Nature and Treatment of the Diseases of Europeans on their Return from Tropical

Climates, London, 1856. Even earlier, army doctors in India were urging that only troops over the age of twenty-

five should be stationed in India ‘since older troops were generally better disciplined and less likely to pick up

intemperate habits from old India hands ’. M. Harrison, ‘ ‘‘The tender frame of man’’ : disease, climate, and racial

difference in India and the West Indies, 1760–1860’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1996), 70, 74.

69 Henry M. Stanley, The Congo and the Founding of its Free State : A Story of Work and Exploration, 2 vols.,

London, 1885, ii, 294.

70 A. R. Wallace, op. cit. (55), 88.

Tropical climate and moral hygiene 105

guise too,(" one in which the lingering influence of Montesquieu and the neo-Hippocratics

is plainly discernible.(# Tropical climates, it was long believed, were reflected in the moral

character of their human occupants. Thus Felkin, a few years before the RGS symposium,

typified the people living in ‘flat, hot Bengal ’ as ‘ timid, servile, and superstitious ’ while

those on the high table land of Mysore he portrayed as ‘brave, courteous but passionate ’.($

Representations of this stripe had long been commonplace. Thirty years earlier, for

example, John Crawfurd told his hearers at the Ethnological Society of London that

Australia’s inauspicious climates had produced only ‘ the feeblest…hordes of black, ill-

formed, unseemly, naked savages ’, while in Africa, ‘ the races of man…correspond with

the disadvantages of its physical geography’.(% A few months later James Hunt could tell

the same audience that in the tropics ‘ there is a low state of morality, and…the inhabitants

of these regions are essentially sensual ’ ; by contrast the ‘ temperate regions ’, he insisted,

were characterized by ‘ increased activity of the brain’.(& Race and region, the ethological

and the ethnological, the moral and the material, were thus tightly, very tightly, tied

together. Again, the Edinburgh naturalist and explorer, Joseph Thomson, recounting his

African travels, reported in 1886 that ‘as the traveller passes up the river [Niger] and finds

a continually improving climate…he coincidentally observes a higher type of humanity –

better-ordered communities, more comfort, with more industry. That these pleasanter

conditions are due to the improved environment cannot be doubted. To the student with

Darwinian instincts most instructive lessons might be derived from a study of the relations

between man and nature in these regions.’(' Throughout, the intertwining of scientific and

71 More recently Harish Naraindas has referred to this species of endeavour as ‘moral meteorology’ and –

correctly in my view – observes : ‘ If the older theory of climate, based on a physiology of circulation, was a trope

for a rhetoric of native indolence, and the subsequent fear of being cast in his image, the reworked presumptions

make climate a trope for the native environment and the native body as the original and cardinal site of dangerous

pathogens.’ Harish Naraindas, ‘Poisons, putrescence and the weather : a genealogy of the advent of tropical

medicine ’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (1996), 30, 31.

72 See L. J. Jordanova, ‘Earth science and environmental medicine : the synthesis of the late Enlightenment ’,

in Images of the Earth (ed. L. J. Jordanova and Roy Porter), Chalfont St Giles, 1978, 119–46. Richard Grove has

also shown how the Hippocratic outlook, which connected climate, health and the human condition, likewise

permeated discussion about dessication theories that circulated at the RGS. See Richard H. Grove, Green

Imperialism: Colonial Expansionism, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860,

Cambridge, 1995, 478, and ‘Imperialism and the discourse of dessication: the case of global environmental

concerns and the role of the Royal Geographical Society, 1860–1880’, in Geography and Imperialism, 1820–1940

(ed. M. Bell, R. Butlin and M. Heffernan), Manchester, 1995, 36–52.

73 Felkin, ‘Tropical highlands ’, op. cit. (34), 162.

74 John Crawfurd, ‘On the connexion between ethnology and physical geography’, Transactions of the

Ethnological Society of London (1863), 2 (NS), 5, 6. Crawfurd had been peddling such judgements for over forty

years. In 1820, for instance, he told his readers that a ‘ luxurious climate ’ and soil fertility explained the peace-

loving character of the Javanese. See J. Crawfurd, History of the Indian Archipelago Containing an Account of

the Manners, Arts, Languages, Religions, Institutions, and Commerce of its Inhabitants, vols 1, 2, 3, Edinburgh,

1820. Opinions such as these prompted Savage to observe that Crawfurd ‘was a prisoner of Classical

environmental thought, cultural smugness, and western stereotyped conceptions of the East ’. V. R. Savage,

Western Impressions of Nature and Landscape in Southeast Asia, Singapore, 1984, 182.

75 James Hunt, ‘On ethno-climatology; or the acclimatization of man’, Transactions of the Ethnological

Society of London (1863), 2 (NS), 53. Hunt also presented the same material at the British Association. See Report

of the British Association (1862), 31, 129–50.

76 Joseph Thomson, ‘Niger and Central Sudan sketches ’, Scottish Geographical Magazine (1886), 2, 582, 584.

106 David N. Livingstone

sermonic modes of speech are clearly to be heard. And given these manoeuvres, it is

understandable that tropical climates and their assumed psychological correlates were

habitually depicted in fundamentally moral categories.

COMPOSING THE TROPICS

We are by now familiar with a profusion of writings dealing with the ways in which

various global realms have been imagined in the European psyche and constructed through

their colonial practices. Europe’s rendezvous with the New World a half millennium ago,

for example, evoked in European minds of the sixteenth century – through an envisaged

anthropology and an imagined ecology – a space at once exotic and repulsive, alluring and

threatening.(( Likewise, the Orient, to some degree at any rate, was the Enlightenment

product of a cultural as well as a military intrusion, a scientific as well as religious crusade

– a fact–fiction fusion that set off ‘the East ’ as ‘ the West’s ’ alter ego.() And much the same

was true of the construction of the South Pacific as a coherent geographical entity in the

eighteenth century and the designation ‘darkest Africa ’ during the Victorian era.(*

In similar vein, David Arnold has recently directed our attention to what he has called

the ‘ Invention of tropicality ’. To him the tropics need to be understood ‘as a conceptual,

and not just physical, space ’ because ‘calling a part of the globe ‘‘ the tropics ’’ (or by some

equivalent term, such as the ‘‘ torrid zone’’) was a Western way of defining something

culturally and politically alien, as well as environmentally distinctive, from Europe and

other parts of the temperate zone’. In large measure, Arnold’s depictions stress the

‘otherness ’ of the tropics as pertaining to health and disease, and not least to the ways in

which medical practitioners supplemented the reports of scientific experts by investing

their descriptions of the tropical world of nature with ‘a pathological potency that marked

them out from milder, more temperate lands’.)! Seen in this light tropicality was a medical

condition, and one that, as Arnold puts it elsewhere, ‘was an especially potent and

prevalent form of othering’.)"

Our perusal of the anatomy of the Victorian debate on tropical climate and its specific

manifestation in the deliberations at the RGS a century ago, suggests a number of related

factors that might well supplement this diagnosis. That the world of the tropics was subject

to a range of representations is undoubted. For some, ‘ tropical nature was Purgatory

shabbily disguised as Eden’ ;)# for others it was a Paradise accessible only to the

77 See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions : The Wonder of the New World, Chicago, 1991; Peter

Mason, Deconstructing America : Representations of the Other, London, 1990; and Anthony Pagden, European

Encounters with the New World, New Haven, 1993. Cartographic dimensions of this episode are the subject of

J. B. Harley, Maps and the Columbian Encounter, Milwaukee, 1990.

78 See Edward Said, Orientalism, London, 1978. For a critical perspective on the Orientalism ‘debate ’, see

John M. Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, Manchester, 1995.

79 MacLeod and Rehbock, op. cit. (50) ; P. Brantlinger, ‘Victorians and Africans : the genealogy of the myth

of the dark continent ’, Critical Inquiry (1985), 12, 166–203.

80 Arnold, op. cit. (25) 5, 6, 10. See also David Arnold, ‘ Inventing tropicality ’, The Problem of Nature :

Environment, Culture and European Expansion, Oxford, 1996, ch. 8.

81 David Arnold, ‘ India’s place in the tropical world, 1770–1930’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth

History (1998), 26, 2.

82 Anderson, op. cit. (44), 62.

Tropical climate and moral hygiene 107

scientifically enlightened and morally disciplined. Its climate was portrayed in the language

of virtue and vice, and its peoples construed ‘as a collection of hygienically degenerate

types, requiring constant surveillance, instruction, and sometimes isolation’.)$ In India, an

earlier respect for local medical knowledge – not least when cholera began to ravage

Europe in the 1830s – gave way to an unfavourable re-casting of the environment ‘as

intrinsically pathogenic and its indigenous inhabitants as reservoirs of dirt and disease ’.)%

Such apprehensive and contradictory constructions go a long way to explaining the

ambivalence of Europeans towards the tropics where they ‘came to regard themselves as

exotica in foreign soil : feelings of superiority and vulnerability were two sides of the same

imperial coin’.)&

Revisiting the RGS interchange, I suggest, gives us a clue to something of the

metaphorical shapes the tropics assumed in late Victorian Britain. They were, for example,

frequently presented as a theatre of microbial engagement and evolutionary operation. In

tropical colonization zones, Sambon insisted, ‘ the native [was] a fierce opponent but the

greatest, the longest struggle is always with the lowest forms of life ’.)' The tropics were

thus a laboratory in which racial constitutions were pitted against each other and against

the natural environment. And as tropical medicine increasingly established itself within the

medical division of labour, there emerged a further variant of the theme, what Worboys

calls ‘a metropolitan view of the tropics as a laboratory for experiments in disease

eradication’.)( Not surprisingly it has been suggested that the history of tropical medicine

is appropriately cast in ‘ the language of military and political conquest, the history of

conflict in biblical dimensions, between the heroic endeavours of human beings and the

vast microscopic armies and resources of the animal kingdom’.)) Nor is it surprising that

‘ the progress of tropical medicine and the conquest of tropical empire ’ were routinely

connected since, as Curtin reminds us, ‘ tropical medicine and military medicine were

nearly synonymous’ throughout the nineteenth century.)* So intense was this ceaseless

struggle that periodic escape to the hills, away from the medico-moral strife of the infested

lowlands, was strongly recommended in India and Africa. These hill stations – British

enclaves – became an important feature of imperial practice and represented ‘a racial and

spatial category that symbolized superiority and difference’.*! Indeed such resorts

83 Warwick Anderson, ‘ ‘‘Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile ’’ : laboratory medicine as colonial

discourse ’, Critical Inquiry (1992), 18, 526.

84 Mark Harrison, ‘Tropical medicine in nineteenth-century India ’, BJHS (1992), 25, 301.

85 Mark Harrison, op. cit. (68), 70.

86 Sambon, op. cit. (1), 593.

87 Michael Worboys, ‘Tropical diseases ’, in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine (ed. W. F.

Bynum and Roy Porter), London, 1997, 522.

88 Roy MacLeod, ‘ Introduction’, in MacLeod and Lewis, op. cit. (15), 6. See also G. Harrison, Mosquitoes,

Malaria and Man: A History of Hostilities since 1880, London, 1978.

89 Philip D. Curtin, ‘Disease and imperialism’, in Arnold, op. cit. (25), 99. Worboys points out that the ‘ title

of one of Ross’s books – Mosquito Brigades – nicely illustrates the military assumptions underlying his proposed

‘‘campaigns ’’ ’. Worboys, op. cit. (87), 524.

90 Judith T. Kenny, ‘Claiming the high ground: theories of imperial authority and the British hill stations in

India ’, Political Geography (1997), 16, 656. See also Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains : Hill Stations and The

British Raj, Berkeley, 1996; and Judith T. Kenny, ‘Climate, race and imperial authority : the symbolic landscape

of the British hill station in India ’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers (1995), 85, 694–714.

108 David N. Livingstone

themselves became experimental spaces in which the effects of changed air on convalescent

invalids were monitored.*" Besides, the carving out of such spaces can be seen as

symptomatic of a more general Victorian preoccupation with a bi-polar classifying of

places into the sickly and the salubrious.*# And it is in the context of this slicing up of space

into what Naraindas refers to as ‘pathologic and healthy regions ’ that the ‘sanitorium, the

hill station, the voyage, the grand tour, and the furlough’ emerge as a distinct suite of

therapeutic sites.*$

If the tropics were seen as a laboratory or crucible of natural selection, they were no less

portrayed by many as Europe’s demographic safety value. In the very era in which

Frederick Jackson Turner devised his famous ‘ frontier thesis ’, which depicted American

society as the product of its own repeated pioneering experience, and drew no less on

evolutionary analogies,*% the tropics were looked to as potential homelands for an

overcrowded Europe. But pioneering here was anything but straightforward, even for those

who believed the climate could be conquered. For at the same time the tropics were

habitually presented as a moral arena. It was a risky space where circumspection and

temperance were as essential to survival as acquired immunity and medication. Indeed it

was widely believed that what was at stake in the battle for the tropics was the cultural

heritage of the European people who were at persistent risk from inter-racial liaisons and

other morally corrupting associations.*& The tropical world had its own moral economy

which corresponded with the character of its people. It was a world in extremis, a place

where a heavy price would be paid for imprudence, venery and misdemeanour. It was a

place of abundance and excess. As Stepan, developing the idea of tropical nature as a way

of writing, observes : ‘ the heat and humidity of the tropics stimulated growth that was

luxurious but also rank and wanton’.*'

The anatomy of the late Victorian debate about the tropics was, in a very literal sense,

a debate about Victorian anatomy.*( It centred on the capacity of white bodies to adjust

to the climate – meteorological, medical, pathogenic and cultural – of the tropical world

with all the implications inherent therein for what would happen to the bodies of

indigenous labourers.*) Physical geography, microbial pathology and the Victorian body

91 Malaria, we should recall, literally meant ‘bad air ’.

92 See the discussion in Savage, op. cit. (74), 141–87.

93 Naraindas, op. cit. (71), 5.

94 See William Coleman, ‘Science and symbol in the Turner frontier hypothesis ’, American Historical Review

(1966), 72, 22–49; Ray Allen Billington, Genesis of the Frontier Thesis : A Study in Historical Creativity, San

Marino, CA, 1971.

95 This should not be taken to imply that inter-racial unions were universally prohibited. Local colonial

conditions – to do with the style of imperial rule, the availability of European women and patterns of trade,

among other things – doubtless influenced policies in particular places.

96 Nancy Leys Stepan, ‘Tropical nature as a way of writing’, in MundializacioU n y Cultura Nacional (ed. A.

Lafuente and A. Elena y M. L. Ortega), Madrid, 1993, 497.

97 Political dimensions of twentieth-century medical readings of the body are discussed in David Armstrong,

Political Anatomy of the Body: Medical Knowledge in Britain in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, 1983.

98 Labour capacity, of course, was not the only way in which tropical bodies were constructed by Europeans.

For a Foucauldean reading of a range of ways in which the African body was historically composed by

practitioners of European medicine, see Alexander Butchart, The Anatomy of Power: European Constructions

of the African Body, London, 1998.

Tropical climate and moral hygiene 109

were thus presented as contending powers in a struggle for tropical dominance. But it was

also a debate about what we might call the anatomy of morality, about a body of opinion,

a corpus of literature which centred on the appropriate way to speak of the tropics and,

just as important, how to live there. That anatomy embraced medical science, imperial

politics, evolutionary theory and moral principle. To survive in the tropics, the physical

body needed to observe a rigid routine of hygienic habit, including the wearing of such

special tropical apparel as the flannel binder, the solar topi and the ‘solaro’.** At the same

time, a no less rigorous regimen of moral hygiene had to be followed if degeneration was

to be avoided. Taken together these helped produce in the minds of the Victorian public

an imagined region – the tropics – which was, at once, a place of parasite and pathology,

a space inviting colonial occupation and management, a laboratory for natural selection

and racial struggle and a site of moral jeopardy and trial.

By the same token the Victorian debate about tropicality was a debate. To say that the

tropics were constructed through a range of discourses is not to imply that their

composition was monochrome."!! Indeed there is evidence to show that what might be

called the anticipative geography of the tropics – namely, the expectations that travellers

brought with them from Europe – was not infrequently profoundly at odds with actual

experience and resulted in a subverting of the presumed consensual uniformity of the

tropical world."!" None the less, essentialist impressions have too frequently been given by

students with post-colonialist sympathies who have directed our attention to the imagined

geographies of global regions."!# The RGS debate, in contrast, displays disagreement and

dispute, contestation and conflict. Thus Sambon, for example, departed from conventional

wisdom when he so vigorously promoted European acclimatization to the tropics, and

insisted on the geographical variation subsumed within the zone. Others adopted varying

stances on each of the issues that surfaced on the floor of the RGS. On a wider front, some

believed tropical acclimatization could rapidly be secured; others considered it an

impossibility. And yet, crucially, the debate revolved around a number of distinct focal

points. The disputants operated with a shared vocabulary. Indeed it was the very existence

of that language that facilitated the debate in the first place and that provided the

framework of reference within which interlocutors could engage in conversation and

contention with each other. As Naraindas tellingly observes, the ‘preoccupation with

climate should not be construed…as something exclusive to the tropics…it is part of a

99 The solaro was a fabric woven of white and coloured thread paradoxically developed by Sambon to

protect the body from actinic rays. See Kennedy, op. cit. (28), 122, who points out that in designing this fabric

and in embracing the actinic ray theory, Sambon seems to have departed materially from his earlier ‘declarations

about the microbic origins of tropical ills ’. Manson-Bahr, op. cit. (3), 135, calls it the ‘solario’.

100 Savage has provided a valuable catalogue of the different ways in which tropical climate and its influence

were construed. See Savage, op. cit. (74), 141–87. For a survey of those critical of British colonial policy see B.

Porter, Critics of Empire : British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa, 1895–1914, London, 1968.

101 See Arnold’s remarks on this subject with respect to what he terms the ‘representation of India’s emotional

and plant geography’, in Arnold, op. cit. (81), 13–14.

102 The monolithizing tendencies in the work of some key post-colonial writers has been challenged by D.

Kennedy, ‘ Imperial history and post-colonial theory ’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (1996),

24, 345–63. See also Alan Lester, ‘ ‘‘Otherness ’’ and the frontiers of empire : the Eastern Cape Colony,

1806–c.1850’, Journal of Historical Geography (1998), 24, 2–19.

110 David N. Livingstone

larger pathologisation of space’."!$ The discursive rhetoric bounded by medical science,

colonial ambition, evolutionary biology and moral principle provided the common

conditions of possibility for the tropical world to be composed in a variety of contrasting,

yet cognate, ways.

103 Naraindas, op. cit. (71), 17.