The rise of tropical imperialism

The jungle had not always been a necessary piece of children’s books.  Prior to the 1860s, alphabet books tended to use such dull, domestic animals as jackdaws, quails, and ewes (Xs and Zs were often left blank, although one ‘Farmyard’ ABC made a brave attempt with ‘X’ stands for ten and ‘Z’ is for zodiac signs).[1]  But after the jungle invasion, there were suddenly jaguars, quaggas, elephants, and zebras to solve the frustrations of children’s illustrators and authors.  But, other than the dearth of English animals beginning with ‘J,’ what explains the sudden popularity of tropical subjects?  I argue that the jungle appeared as an important trope due to the collusion of two intersecting strands of cultural history: the expansion of Britain’s tropical empire, and the mounting interest in children’s education and publishing.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the affairs of the British Empire became ever more deeply entangled in the tropical world.  Prior to the eighteenth century, the European relationship with the tropics was little more than a hazy series of ideas about Edenic climates in faraway places, as in Agostino Brunias's depictions of the Caribbean (left).  Such Romantic imaginings flourished during the Age of Exploration, when tropical islands and coasts seemed to present the opportunity to “locate Gardens of Eden, Arcadias, Elysian Fields and Golden Ages in a geographical reality.”[2]  But the imperial expansion and entrepreneurial exploration of the next two centuries repositioned the tropics at the heart of the imperial struggle.  The tropical climate—epitomized by the verdant, dangerous, and uncivilized jungle—became the staging ground for the empire’s greatest triumphs, fears, and fantasies.

The first era of imperial experience in the tropics was primarily commercial and often informal.[3]  The West Indies were colonized on the fringes of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in an effort to participate in the increasingly profitable Atlantic trade.  By the mid-eighteenth century, these island colonies had been developed into extremely successful sugar plantations, and European markets proved quite receptive to this new good.  The West Indies therefore grew in population, production, and financial potential, and English sugar consumption increased a hundredfold from 1650-1750.[4]  Trading colonies on the West African coast provided the slave labor that fueled West Indian production, introducing another tropical region to the British eye.  The early decades of the nineteenth century saw this system of slavery and production rise to national attention as the issue of abolition gripped the British public.  Travel narratives and planter stories from the West Indies became quite popular, which served to acquaint the reading public with the tropical environment for the first time.[5]

The political and economic investment in India overlapped with the events of the West Indies.  The English East India Company, founded in 1600, had begun as humble merchant-supplicants along the coasts of India and ended with fiscal and political control of vast tracts of land by the final quarter of the eighteenth century.[6] The 1764 Battle of Plassey signaled a new era, in which the Company directly ruled most of eastern India.  Until 1857, The East India Company steadily expanded its economic and political control, and the British public became increasingly familiar with India’s tropical landscape.  In 1857, large portions of the Indian colonial army and countryside rebelled violently and startlingly.  Although unsuccessful, the Rebellion initiated a new imperialist discourse in the metropole and ultimately resulted in the British government formally ruling India until 1947.  This can be seen as a turning point in tropical imperialism, which became ever more unapologetically expansionist during the second half of the nineteenth century.  It was at this point that the jungle seems to have first emerged as a consistent theme for children, partly fueled by the educational and publishing developments discussed on the next page.

The spirit of imperial expansionism was focused in Africa.  Fueled by corporate ambitions and inter-imperial competition, by 1887 Britain had occupied Egypt and Sudan and established strings of colonies along the East and West coasts.  By 1914, their African territory had expanded dramatically to include Uganda, Nyasaland, Nigeria, and Rhodesia, among other areas.[7]  In the metropole, this time period has often been identified as the height of imperial fervor, based both of the growth in territory and perceived threats to the Empire like economic recession and the demoralizing Boer Wars.  The period between 1880 and WWI certainly saw the largest concentration of children’s jungle-mania, although it did not ever fully disappear.

While the West Indies diminished in importance, it is undeniable that Africa and India remained at the forefront of the imperial consciousness until at least WWII.  During this era, the idea of empire was therefore necessarily a tropical one. 

Notes