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

Historians seldom consider plants when thinking about technology and culture. Stuart McCook's States of Nature, which traces the rise and evolution of the plant sciences in Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, illustrates the value of integrating both plants and plant scientists into the histories of commodity production and state formation in the Spanish Caribbean. State building and export economies are perennial themes in Latin American historiography, but few scholars have focused on the plant resources that sustained national export economies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book successfully integrates perspectives from the history of science, environmental history, and economic history in order to explore the intersections of nature, economy, and nation.

McCook introduces the term "creole science" to describe the ideologies and practices developed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists working in the Spanish Caribbean. In so doing, he argues that plant scientists in the region drew upon transnational professional networks to achieve goals shaped by local conditions. In other words, Latin Americans did not merely import U.S. and European approaches to scientific research. Even in Cuba and Puerto Rico, where the U.S. presence was felt on a daily basis, an international cadre of scientists selectively borrowed from U.S. institutional models in the course of fashioning a "hybrid" approach to science. In the first two chapters of States of Nature, McCook illustrates the concept of creole science by describing state-sponsored projects to catalog flora in Costa Rica and Venezuela. In both cases, nation-building elites paradoxically called on a foreign expert (Swiss botanist Henri Pittier) in order to "nationalize" nature. This is an important theme, one that arguably merits both a greater depth of treatment and a wider range of perspectives than McCook provides in relatively short chapters based largely on Pittier's published and unpublished writings.

McCook then shifts to the sugar-cane-growing Spanish Caribbean, and here the book offers its most compelling insights about the intersections of science, environment, and export agriculture. Unlike existing studies on sugar production, which tend to emphasize the historical importance of technological innovations in sugar mills, McCook focuses on plant disease epidemics that significantly altered cane production in early-twentieth-century Cuba and Puerto Rico. He argues that the epidemics, including mosaic disease, resulted largely from the expansion of monoculture (that is, planting fields with a single variety of cane) stimulated by the growth of railroads and ocean steamer transport networks. Faced with dwindling yields, planters enlisted the support of scientists to find a means of controlling the disease. The problem was mitigated by introducing new varieties of cane, including hybrids developed in Java and elsewhere in Asia. McCook's analysis reveals the complicated social, economic, and ecological factors that determined the success (or failure) of new cane varieties. He further demonstrates how responses to plant diseases altered not only production processes but also the terms under which cane growers sold their harvests to mill owners.

In the final chapters, McCook links his discussion of cane cultivation to nation-building processes through the figure of Carlos Chardón, a Puerto Rican plant pathologist who played a leading role in bringing mosaic disease under control. Chardón subsequently used his heightened stature in Puerto Rico to promote the formation of agricultural schools as part of his "technocratic" vision of Latin American agriculture. But there were many problems that Chardón's approach to agricultural economies could not resolve. His attempts to transfer his model of scientific agriculture to Columbia largely failed due to disagreements with coffee growers over the importance of basic research. Not surprisingly, the planters who would finance scientific institutions desired research agendas aimed at improving the economic efficiency of coffee growing over the short term. Furthermore, maintaining transnational institutional scientific networks became increasingly...