Visual perspectives on environment and empire

Maintaining the health of forests and commercially productive land became a priority for colonial scientists, agriculturalists and administrators, but conservation remained a minor­ity concern confined to a technocratic elite whose perspective on the environment rarely intersected with the images that dominated high and popular culture in the Indies.¹⁷ Conventional environmental histories are therefore limited in their capacity to reveal how landscape figured in Dutch imperial thought and culture, or, in other words, in the colonial imagination.

In European culture more generally, the diverse geographic swathe that lies between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer has tended to be represented ‘as something to be seen—a view to be had or a vision to be experienced’.¹⁸ Over centuries of expansion and encoun­ter, ‘the tropics’ came to be perceived in Europe as a geographically distinct entity whose cultural and social forms were constrained and determined by a unique climate and topography. The package of ideas and images that developed out of this conceptual bracketing of the lands along the equator has been termed ‘tropicality’ by some scholars.¹⁹ Much like European discourses that developed around the classical Orient (the Middle East and North Africa), colonial notions of tropicality emerged out of an interplay between Western representations and experiences of the tropics.²⁰ And much like the Orient, the tropics came to be represented as essentially different from Europe in colonial art.²¹

Representations of landscape are thus as crucial to understanding European colonialism in the tropics as the actions that determined how environments were to be used, and by whom. Very different images of the tropics were evoked in colonial paintings and photographs of the Indies, and different historical contexts shaped the making of images in these formats. These images of the tropics can illuminate ‘how Europeans imagined themselves in the colonies’.²² Such an approach in turn reveals some of the modes in which the tropics were conceived as distinctive in Dutch colonial culture, and how images were linked to wider discourses of difference that determined colonial actions.