Acknowledgments

This book has its origins in a research project concerned with the ways in which European travelers apprehended tropical nature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Focusing principally on the visual archive of tropical travel, this project explored the relationship between the visuali- zation of tropical landscape and the process of circulation through the tropics. In the course of the research, we became increasingly interested in the complex historical geographies of tropicality and the extent to which the tropical imaginary was shaped by particular regional formations within the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific. Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire significantly expands the ge- ographical range and historical scope of the original project, embracing a variety of sites across, and beyond, the tropical world. The book brings to- gether authors form a variety of disciplines, including literature, cultural geography, art history, and the history of science in order to address the visualization of the “tropical” within a range of aesthetic, scientific, and political projects. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board for the original project. We would also like to take this opportunity to record our thanks to some of the many in- dividuals with whom we have discussed various aspects of the ideas ex- plored in these pages, in particular, David Arnold, Tim Barringer, Dipti Bhagat, Gavin Bowd, Michael Bravo, Dan Clayton, Denis Cosgrove, Phil Crang, Stephen Daniels, Paulo Geyer, Michael Heffernan, Peter Hulme, Tariq Jazeel, Bernhard Klein, David Lambert, Nigel Leask, David Lehmann, David Livingstone, David Lowenthal, Gesa Mackenthun, xii • acknowledgments Nancy Naro, Miles Ogborn, Rebecca Preston, Geoff Quilley, Hugh Raffles, Kapil Raj, Nigel Rigby, James Sidaway, Charles Withers, and Brenda Yeoh. Initial versions of most of the essays were presented at a two-day con- ference at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, convened jointly with Nigel Rigby and Margarette Lincoln. We are very grateful to the staff of the museum for supporting the conference so magnificently and, in particular, to Janet Norton for her work on our behalf. We would also like to thank other contributors to the conference, including Harriet Guest, Dian Kriz, Nancy Stepan, Nicholas Thomas, and Beth Tobin, and the large number of participants whose contributions have been invaluable in the process of preparing this book for publication. The success of the con- ference also depended on the support of the British Academy, the Histor- ical Geography Research Group, the National Maritime Museum, and the Royal Geographical Society, which we gratefully acknowledge here. In producing and revising this book for publication, we have enjoyed the benefit of detailed comments on the entire manuscript from the read- ers for the University of Chicago Press. We thank the contributors for their patience and good humor in the process of seeing the book through to publication. We are particularly grateful to Denis Cosgrove for agree- ing to write the afterword and doing so in such style, and to Starr Dou- glas for compiling the index. Finally, we would like to record our heart- felt thanks to Christie Henry, Jennifer Howard, and Yvonne Zipter for their editorial advice and assistance at every stage of the project.