States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760–1940

Abstract

Scientists played a critical role in the reorganization of plantation agriculture in the Caribbean after slavery. They provided agroexporters with the knowledge, techniques, and attitudes to adapt to a series of ecological threats to their existence. In the process, scientists enabled them to subjugate vast stretches of the Caribbean to a handful of new crop varieties. This created new ecological problems to solve that perpetuated the need for expertise. Stuart McCook has produced a concise, incisive, yet far-ranging defense of this interpretation of the environmental histories of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, and the United States.McCook’s long chapter on the “Eco-Rationalization of the Caribbean Sugar Industry” is the heart and strength of this book. He highlights the heroic success achieved by Puerto Rican agronomist Carlos Chardón during the 1920s in combating mosaic disease, a virus that devastated fields of high-yielding cane hybrids. Through a series of elegant experiments, Chardón identified the insect vector involved and developed techniques to prevent its spread. As McCook points out in earlier chapters, these results were possible because of long-standing efforts to build “creole” scientific institutions and research agendas that served local needs. Latin American enthusiasm for science was not merely premised on ideology; it was based on tangible results.Of course, ideology was also important to these endeavors. In a chapter focused on Swiss botanist Henri Pittier, McCook underscores the importance of nationalist thinking in organizing support for inventories of native plants in Costa Rica and Venezuela. In order to properly serve these young nations, plants required a “civil status.” McCook actually underestimates the stakes involved in acquiring this knowledge: he neglects to note the economic devastation that occurred in South America after foreign scientists transplanted Cinchona and Hevea trees from their native range to form quinine and rubber plantations in tropical Asia. On the other hand, McCook overstates the centrality of liberalism to these projects. Conservatives also embraced them, often with the hope that scientific institutions would produce an “aristocracy of knowledge” to rule Latin America. This fact is implicit in McCook’s later chapters tracing the rising influence of technocratic ideology just before the Great Depression.Regional specialists should give special attention to McCook’s method. He did not allow political boundaries (or the chance acquisitions of specific archives) to delimit his investigation. Instead, he traced the movements of specific experts, plant varieties, and pathogens across national and ecological frontiers using sources scattered between Venezuela, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, and the United States. This approach enabled McCook to answer fresh new questions about environmental change and to provide new perspectives on the old debate over “national science.”Despite its broad scope, there are limitations to McCook’s regional focus. He only provides occasional indications of the reciprocal influence of Spanish American crop science on plantation agriculture elsewhere in the world (see p. 81 regarding Java’s embrace of Alvaro Reynoso’s 1862 treatise on Cuban cane agriculture). In this vein, readers might like to know about an additional case McCook overlooked: During the 1920s, Puerto Rican agronomists successfully controlled the depredations of white grub on sugar cane by introducing the cane toad (Bufo marinus) from Barbados (pp. 72–74, unfortunately referred to by McCook as the “Surinam toad,” rather than by its scientific name). Mark Lewis tells the rest of this story in the hilarious film Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1987). Australian agronomists unintentionally unleashed a plague of biblical proportions when they tried to replicate Puerto Rico’s success. This raises an important question: Where should we draw the boundaries of “creole” science and Caribbean agroecosystems? McCook has provided us with a valuable base from which to launch such an investigation.