Everyday Forms of Empire - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 338

ic tropics seem less “foreign” than they otherwise might have. The Iberian history on
the West African coast had also created a colonial class of tropical “hands” who would
not and did not find the tropics overarchingly strange, due to their substantial familiarity
with tropical ecosystems based on the fifteenth-century experience of enslaving Bantus
in West Africa, organizing sugar production, the significant African presence in Iberian
(and more generally Mediterranean) capitals, and the tropical botany of many crops and
ornamentals. 15 Some authors, such as historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood,
suggest that early Capuchin Catholic evangelism in Bantu areas, and Islamic cultures in
the “Mina” zones, created a kind of Luso-African institutional familiarity (both Islamic
and Christian) within the triangle of Brazil, West Africa, and Portugal. 16 This approach
was formed from Mediterranean engagement with the entire Southern Atlantic, one that
emphasized “fullness” and human populations (necessary to deliver global trade goods)
and thus was at variance with Northern European constructions of tropical “emptiness”
and its potential for colonial territorial appropriation.
The nineteenth-century naturalists' purchase on the public imagination through their
writings, their lectures, and their positions within or relations to modern scientific
and imperial institutions, their ideas and enthusiasms—“the improving of the
world”—became widely known even as the Iberian sources from which they drew their
itineraries faded from public view, and as they traveled from missions to Iberian forts
and settlements. The Northern discourse of tropicality—primitivism, emptiness, prim-
al harmony, space for great experiments—paradoxically used the circuits and spaces of
“Mediterranean”tropicality(withitspeople,boats,andfarms),toconstructanew“wild”
tropicality.
“We have met the 'other' and they are us”
ManyofthewritersandscientistswhohadintroducedthemarvelsofAmazoniatopopu-
laraudiences,suchasAgassiz,Herndon,Bates,Wallace,andMaury,aswellascountless
less distinguished commercial travelers—yearned to see the place, in von Humboldt's
words, “flooded with Civilization” rather than continuing in the “lassitude” of its situ-
ation as they perceived it. They saw the place as empty, marvelous, but with inhabitants
who, though the charming in many ways, lacked the qualities of enterprise; this was at-
tributed to climatic environmental determinism and racial deficiencies.
The three pillars of scientific racism (environmentalism, scientific anthropology, and
social Darwinism) had justified slavery in Brazil and supported the racial inequality that
prevailedafterabolition.ThisbodyoftheoryalsopositionedBrazil'smiscegenatedgene
pool as an essential obstacle to national development and a problem for national identity
at the international level. The solution for this racial quandary for development, for da
Cunha, was a socioenvironmental analysis with roots in Darwin, as well as the Brazilian