Assembling the Tropics
Science and Medicine in Portugal's Empire, 1450–1700

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.

Awards

• Winner, 2019 Leo Gershoy Award, American Historical Association

Reviews & endorsements

'Assembling the Tropics is a powerful, passionate, and beautifully realized piece of scholarship. It 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

Customer reviews

Product details

• Date Published: December 2019
• format: Paperback
• isbn: 9781316647424
• length: 384 pages

• dimensions: 230 x 150 x 25 mm
• weight: 0.5kg
• contains: 22 b/w illus. 3 maps
• availability: Available