Tropical Nature as Global Patrimoine: Imperialism and International Nature Protection in the Early Twentieth Century

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the swelling appetite for heritage increasingly expanded beyond the realm of human artefact to regard the land, its flora and fauna as important legacies in need of preservation. In industrializing Europe and North America, the relentless rationalization of the countryside nourished a growing sense of the need to safeguard historic landscapes, ‘wildernesses’, and endangered species, whether as natural resources or as treasures of unusual beauty. The fact that these shifting sensibilities coincided with the largest land-grab in human history meant that encounters with the colonial landscapes of Europe’s burgeoning empires were bound to impinge on ideas about nature and its preservation more broadly. In recent years scholars have explored various facets of this relationship, from the colonial roots of environmental thought to the misapprehensions engendered by European land management models in unfamiliar tropical environments. 1 We have also acquired a better appreciation of how the spread of conservationist ideas and practices involved complex exchanges between metropoles and colonies, as well as between and across colonial boundaries themselves. 2 If the ‘scramble’ for overseas territory was driven by intense national rivalries, imperialism was also a powerful globalizing force that furnished new spaces for cross-border interaction.