Tropical geography

Tropical geography refers to the study of places and people in the tropics. When it first emerged as a discipline, tropical geography was closely associated with imperialism and colonial expansion of the European empires as contributing scholars tended to portray the tropical places as "primitive" and people "uncivilised" and "inferior". A wide range of subjects has been discussed within the sub-field during late 18th to early 20th century including zoology, climatology, geomorphology, economics and cultural studies.

The discipline is now more commonly known as development geography as colonization had been replaced by economic development as the main ideological driver of international and global interactions since the 1950s. Today, many scholars continue to use the term tropical geography to contest the determinism embedded in the term and de-exoticise the tropical countries and their inhabitants.

The origins of tropical geography can be traced back to as early as the fifteenth century when Columbus first discovered the Caribbean islands in tropical America. Subsequent writings of European explorers, merchants, naturalists, colonists and settlers who traveled to and lived in the tropics were the main sources of the study.

Alexander von Humboldt, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace are some of the significant contributors. It is argued that it is due to their academic reputation and scientific approaches tropical geography was consolidated into an academic discipline widely studied in Europe in spite of the region's vast differences in vegetation, wild lives, climate, geology and culture.

The discourse on the tropics and their inhabitants have evolved over time in response to changing patterns of Europe's engagements in the tropics.

A variety of environmental determinism emerged from the sub-field as colonists and naturalists started representing temperate and tropical people with binaries like "progressive vs. backward," "civilised vs. primitive," "hard working vs. lazy" and "superior vs. inferior."Race, an invented concept, was convenient and readily applied in attempts to "[link] climatic variation closely to the supposed division of the human species into different 'races'".

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