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

This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born.

Hugh Cagle (Author)

9781316647424, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 December 2019

384 pages, 22 b/w illus. 3 maps
23 x 15 x 2.5 cm, 0.5 kg

'… 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

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.

1. Reading between the lines: a prologue
Part I. The Coast of Africa, 1450–1550: 2. Dead reckonings
Part II. The Indian Ocean World, 1500–1600: 3. Itineraries and inventories
4. Drug traffic
5. Facts and fictions
Part III. The Portuguese Atlantic, 1550–1700: 6. Moral hazards
7. Split decisions
8. Fault lines
9. Epilogue: South-South exchanges.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], General & world history [HBG]