Assembling the Tropics by Hugh Cagle

Regular price
Checking stock...
Regular price
Checking stock...
Summary

This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.

The feel-good place to buy books
  • Free delivery in Australia
  • Supporting authors with AuthorSHARE
  • 100% recyclable packaging
  • Proud to be a B Corp – A Business for good

Assembling the Tropics by Hugh Cagle

From popular fiction to modern biomedicine, the tropics are defined by two essential features: prodigious nature and debilitating illness. That was not always so. In this engaging and imaginative study, Hugh Cagle shows how such a vision was created. Along the way, he challenges conventional accounts of the Scientific Revolution. The history of 'the tropics' is the story of science in Europe's first global empire. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Portugal established colonies from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia and South America, enabling the earliest comparisons of nature and disease across the tropical world. Assembling the Tropics shows how the proliferation of colonial approaches to medicine and natural history led to the assemblage of 'the tropics' as a single, coherent, and internally consistent global region. This is a story about how places acquire medical meaning, about how nature and disease become objects of scientific inquiry, and about what is at stake when that happens.
'Assembling the Tropics is a powerful, passionate, and beautifully realized piece of scholarshipIt makes an exceptionally important intervention by at long last placing Portugal and the Lusophone world where they belong - right at the heart of early modern global science and medicine.' James Delbourgo, Rutgers University, New Jersey
'Assembling the Tropics provides a richly empirical and compellingly dynamic perspective on medicine and natural history across the early modern Portuguese empire. Mobilizing case studies from Africa, India, and Brazil, Cagle shows how diverse cultures of natural inquiry in metropolitan Lisbon and its colonies fitfully converged on a coherent vision of the tropics.' Florence C. Hsia, University of Wisconsin, Madison
'… wide-ranging, richly researched and closely reasoned … Assembling the Tropics builds upon the extensive secondary literature that has grown up around the early Portuguese empire in recent decades…' David Arnold, Social History of Medicine
Cagle, Hugh: - Hugh Cagle is Assistant Professor of the History of Science at the University of Utah, where he is also Director of the International Studies program.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781316647424
ISBN 10 1316647420
Title Assembling the Tropics
Author Hugh Cagle
Series Studies In Comparative World History
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Year published 2019-12-19
Number of pages 384
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.