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as “the Brazilian von Humboldt,” unlike that icon, he had no theoretical or truly “philo-
sophical” or Enlightenment agenda for his travels and elaborated none. His job was im-
sat in Lisbon; then, during the Napoleonic Wars, they were taken to Paris as war booty
for their usefulness as “intelligence” and were studied carefully (and even plagiarized)
by French naturalist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
Wallace, Bates, and Spruce, explorers of modest means, traveled with the blessings
of the Royal Gardens at Kew, while the Britain's Royal Geographical Society sponsored
Chandless, Fawcett, and the brothers Schomburgk, among many others, and ran a train-
a more prominent feature of Amazonia travelogue writers compared to the main African
“headliners” like Mungo Park, Stanley, and Livingstone, who were overt agents of im-
perial enterprise and charter companies. Scientists like Spruce, Bates, and Wallace were
not formally staking claims, although they were providing information (and germplasm)
science, and imperialism were profoundly melded in these nineteenth-century tropical
travels, a point that is hardly profound at this point in colonial scholarship but is often
overlooked in Amazonia, because the republics and colonies under review by imperial
Some explorers like von Humboldt and von Martius generated concepts that fueled the
colonial development imaginaries, like the von Humboldt tropics “flooded by civiliz-
ation” and von Martius's ideas of specialized racial roles in Brazilian development,
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notions echoed by other travelers. Unlike the African adventures of Park, Stanley, and
colonial projects but rather forged new relations between imperial institutions, bureau-
cracies in emerging circuits of capital, commodities, and knowledge.
“Great and constant laws”
Tropical scientists like von Humboldt, Bates, Wallace, and Spruce made lasting contri-
butions to modern science and in their rewriting the “nature” of nature moved natural
philosophy beyond the earlier encyclopedic traditions of description and collection and
into the realms of inquiry that generated “great and constant laws” and provided eviden-
ce for new theories. It was a different form of science—based in biogeography, ecology,
and evolution. Von Humboldt embodied approaches that were positivist, both in ideas
about the directionality of history and in upholding “objective” methods. This “scient-
ization”—rigorous measurement and the search for systems of laws—was a key step in
the professionalization of the natural sciences but also interacted with totalizing histor-
ical theories. Simple collecting, after all, was more or less an amateur's game, even if it
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