States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940 (review)

Stuart McCook has produced a closely argued monograph. Responding to pioneering work by the late Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand (1995), he draws on constructs from historical political economy, environmental history, and the history of science to offer new insights into the much-studied issue of state-building during the post-Independence period; he also sheds light on institutional modernization during the phase of export-led growth. In States of Nature McCook confirms that the interaction between eco-system and economy was dynamic and destructive, both explaining the nature of power in agrarian societies and serving as the mechanism of growth and crisis. He is especially convincing when analyzing the approach of late nineteenth-century positivist elites to the natural world and their use of science to harness plants and landscape to the task of nation-formation. "Rationalizing" nature was to economics what "scientific administration" was to politics: the ordering of the unruly. Progress required making the wild, natural world predictable, just as good citizens needed discipline. Plants and people were to be made "useful." Without commodities, there would be no nation; without exports, there would be no progress.

The geographical focus of the book is on Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. The commodities studied include coffee, sugar, and (to a lesser extent) domestic food staples. McCook bases his research on an innovative use of contemporary plant guides, scientific publications, and botanical records held in archives and museums in the region and overseas. Special attention is given to the institutionalization of botanical research: the substitution for amateur plant collectors of experts based at national research centers, efforts to identify and control endemic and epidemic plant diseases, the dissemination of "best practice" through officially funded experimental farms and extension colleges (emulating those of the United States), and the transferability of models of rural science-based knowledge from one country to another.

McCook dates the institutional development of scientific and technical research from the Bourbon reforms of the late colonial period. Several botanical expeditions were dispatched to the region, and planter interest in the science of tropical agriculture increased, a growth observable in the work of "improvement societies" (sociedades económicas). Independence interrupted the consolidation and diffusion of new production techniques, but the conflation of commodity and national interest and the "liberal" discourse about progress and development rekindled planter and state interest in botany, plant geography, and agricultural chemistry well before 1900. Subsequently, classifying flora reflected prevailing positivist ideas about nature and the state: first, the nation was taken as the unit of analysis; second, "labeling" plants resulted in a national nomenclature that displaced the welter of foreign, vernacular, and indigenous names that had prevailed; third, classification repatriated ("nationalized") foreign research on the nation's flora. The resulting publications and newly founded botanical centers quantified national commercial potential and constituted a contribution to national culture, as well as symbolized state outreach.

National agricultural research also facilitated the development of a ciencia criolla that might rival "imperial" science associated with U.S.-based plantation corporations operating in the region or transmitted by U.S. scientific missions. Commodity modernization, signaled by the importation of new crops or varieties, had an impact on the domestic ecology and the pathology of plant diseases, notably in monoproducing plantation economies. Until the mid-nineteenth century, most diseases had been local. It was not easy to transfer pathogens from one region to another. Imported varieties often contained pathogens that, although relatively harmless in native environments, became virulent in their new homes. Commodity specialization intensified the social and economic costs of crop failure and the reliance on scientific experiment to provide a solution. Economics, politics, and biology were inseparable in tropical commodity-exporting economies.

States of Nature connects with several established...