The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (review)

This ambitious and sweeping work proposes several interrelated corrections to, and recalibrations of, complicated historiographies related to the genesis and goals of Christopher Columbus’ “Enterprise of the Indies” and its relation to early modern European colonialism. According to Wey Gómez, Columbus believed that the Torrid Zone—the belt of the tropics—was inhabitable and passable. Having located the Indies and its riches there, he set out to reach this region by deliberately sailing south as well as west. In other words, “latitude was an integral and explicit organizing principle in the Indies enterprise” (47). Bartolomé de las Casas inherited Columbus’ “open geography,” but, as is well known, he passionately rejected the notion that the peoples of the newly discovered lands were bestial and therefore natural slaves, incapable of self-governance. These conceptions of an inhabited and fertile Torrid Zone and the conflicts regarding the moral and legal status of its inhabitants were fundamental to the “invention of the Tropics” that Wey Gómez views as the essential (and enduring) mark of early modern European colonialism.

Wey Gómez argues that the historical significance of the early modern shifts in this broadly construed conception of latitude must be understood as a “philosophical problem” articulated within the context of learned theoretical conceptions of the “nature of places” that stretch back to Greco-Roman antiquity. Accordingly, he elects not to focus on what might be called praxis—the techniques developed by Portuguese and Iberian navigators and cosmographers in the course of the fifteenth-century to determine latitude.

The thesis unfolds in a series of extended excursions through the history of ideas, organized into seven overlapping chapters. They review well-known sources and narratives, texts generally believed to be read and annotated by Columbus and Las Casas, the Diario of Columbus as copied and interpreted by Las Casas, the medieval fortuna of various ancient models of the terraqueous globe, and conceptions of the location of India and Cathay in pre-Columbian Europe. The goal is to reveal and emphasize the deep historical roots and implications of the “open” geographical system imagined by Columbus and Las Casas in which the equatorial zone, not northern Europe, was central. However, because these excursions are not always tightly or obviously tied to the larger themes of the book, the overall design of the argument is sometimes difficult to follow.

For example, in Chapters 1 and 4, Wey Gómez attaches particular importance to a text that has not traditionally occupied a place in the scholarly analysis of the genesis of the “Enterprise of the Indies”—Albertus Magnus’ De natura loci (c. 1250). In the first chapter, he argues that Albertus, Pierre d’Ailly, Columbus, and Las Casas “uniquely shape[d] the geographical history of the early Euro-Caribbean encounter” (64). It is well known that d’Ailly’s Imago mundi (1410), long recognized as an important source for Columbus, incorporated sections of Roger Bacon’s Opus maius (1266). Wey Gómez does not claim that Columbus himself knew De natura loci, though he occasionally seems tempted (98, 235), or that the De natura loci was a source for Imago mundi. Instead, his innovation is to propose that De natura loci “crucially informed Las Casas’s explanation of Columbus’s geography and its sources,” and that it provided Las Casas with a model for his own permutations regarding the notion of latitude (64).

In various notes, Wey Gómez provides citations from Las Casas’ Historia de las Indias (written between 1527 and 1561) that may indicate the influence of De natura loci, and he offers an extended discussion of Albert’s conception of place and some of its historical antecedents in Chapter 4. But a close textual analysis demonstrating the direct influence of De natura loci on the Historia de las Indias (or other of Las Casas’ writings) is missing. The possible influence of Bacon on Las Casas’ conception of latitude also...