Everyday Forms of Empire - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 337

The ideas of tropicality developed in the North evolved from a different cultural matrix
from that of the Iberian world—the Mediterranean—where cultural familiarity with
tropical peoples and products was far deeper and of greater antiquity, stretching back
to the cultural links of Roman and Islamic empires with North and sub-Saharan Africa
and the tropical realms of the East. Portugal was a creolized culture even before it took
to the seas. Later, fifteenth-century slave and evangelical efforts on the West African
coast were pioneered by the Portuguese and African Atlantic creoles along with sugar
production, as they cast their nets of “Empire on the Ocean Sea” along the coasts of
Asia, Africa, and Brazil. 11 As a mercantile empire Portugal was, on the whole, relat-
ively indifferent to how its subject or trading societies delivered goods into commerce;
its interests always focused on how local populations could be integrated into the sup-
plychainthroughtradingentrepôts,'economiesofaffection,”andwarbooty,ratherthan
rigorousadministrationofland. 12 ImperialinterestforthePortuguesecenteredonthein-
habited world—the labor and ecclesiastic conversions that justified their ventures. Since
sugar and slaves were key commodities, the inhabited tropics rather than the “empty
equator” held the central allure. The interests of the Portuguese were mercantilist, and
for them the terms of trade, rather than the deep structures that delivered the commodit-
ies, were of most, and usually monopolist, interest.
Wastelands and Habitus
Nineteenth-century Northern European imperialisms reflected the rise and development
of a different colonial model, one more engaged with the pressures of industrialization
and mass consumption, more concerned about the organization of production, bureau-
cracies, and the development of new markets than with the traditional mercantile cir-
cuits of preciosities, the spices, sugar, silks, parrots, and porcelains that had traveled on
the airy top decks of Portuguese slave crafts. For Northern tropicalists, it was “waste-
land”—terrains not cultivated in the European manner—that allowed dispossession, re-
organization, and integration into global economies under new regimes of labor man-
agement and sovereignty. 13 This invisibility to outsiders of the human hand in tropical
landscapes—whetherthroughignoranceofsuccessionalagricultures,domesticatedland-
scapes, or a legacy of disease—framed a terrain of imperial opportunity.
“Mediterranean” versions of tropicality were rooted in the imperial aims of the Span-
ish, Portuguese, and ecclesiastics and in the experience of the inhabited tropics, places
of complex cultures, vassals, and dark races. Portuguese interactions with West African
states from the 1400s to the 1800s certainly involved engagement with empires, long-
distance trade, lively cultures, and plentiful populations, even if the slave trade eventu-
ally profoundly destabilized them. 14 The centuries of cultural and economic ties to the
tropics (south and east) as a consequence of Islamic conquest made the South Atlant-