The history of ‘Tropicality’ is a long one, with the first writings dating back to Hippocrates, the ‘father of medicine’. In his Airs, Waters, Places, he outlines the climatic differences in Asian and the supposedly corresponding racial characteristics. Just as Galenic theories on humours were to dominate medicine until well into the early modern period, these perceived links between climate and character were held as fact in Britain and Europe throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and used to justify colonial expansion and control.

These theories are naturally now considered untenable to the modern reader. This does not mean that reading them is not without worth, not least because of the massive contradictions that they contain, and more so that this appears to be completely disregarded within them.

To take one of the greatest examples, look to Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, specifically his ideas on the climate of Asia. His argument was that the ‘strength’ of Europe vs the ‘weakness’ of Asia could be entirely explained by Europe’s temperate climate compared to Asia’s lack of a temperate zone, whereby “the places situated in a very cold climate there are immediately adjacent to those that are in a very warm climate”, and so “the brave and active warrior peoples are immediately adjacent to effeminate, lazy and timid peoples; therefore, one must be the conquered and the other the conqueror.”¹ He explains his reasoning as the fact that Asia had been ‘subjugated’ 13 times compared to Europe’s 4, which he gives as Roman, Barbarian, Charlemagne, and Norman² He then gives the determining factor of Europe’s relative peace and stability as the broadness of the temperate zone, in that while there is a huge difference in temperature between the northern- and southernmost reaches of Europe, the climatic change is so gradual that “there is not a noticeable difference between them.”³. As such, “the strong face the strong”, and so one ‘race’ is unable to subjugate the other⁴.

This contradiction of temperature and racial characteristics can be further seen in later accounts of the Tropics, particularly with regards to India. In taking writers such as Hippocrates and Montesquieu as undoubted fact, the perception of Asia and India was that of a single and relatively unchanging climate. David Arnold then takes this further in his work Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800- 1856 by showing how the perception of the Tropics was then muddled even further through the growth of popular fiction. This led to the creation of what he terms “a single impression of colour, light, exuberance, and elegance.”⁵ Arnold shows that when faced with the reality of India and Asia’s hugely varied climate and areas of seemingly dull, barren plains instead of the rich, Edenic visions made popular through stories such as the Arabian Nights, travellers could find themselves becoming weary and despondent. In particular, he gives the example of Victor Jacquemont, a French naturalist who travelled to India to study botany. Arnold argues that Jacquemont’s previous visits to Haiti, where his brother was a businessman (and possible plantation owner), had given him an idealised view of the Tropics which he then expected to see replicated in India. He was then “bitterly disappointed” to find out that this was not the case.

Rather than admit his own shortcomings or attempt to view India with a more benevolent eye, Jacquemont followed in the same tradition as Hippocrates and Montesquieu. He concluded that “the fault is not in myself: it lies with the things themselves, with the country.”⁶ Whether this was any consolation to him seems doubtful, but in this at least he was following in the footsteps of his predecessors, and those that followed after him kept his words in mind themselves, just as many travellers no doubt do the same today.

1. Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone, (Cambridge, 1989), pg. 280 [↩]
2. ibid, pg. 281. [↩]
3. Ibid, pg. 280 [↩]
4. ibid. [↩]
5. David Arnold, Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800- 1856, (Washington, 2006), pg. 112. [↩]
6. ibid, pg. 132. [↩]