Description:
In Botanical Monroe Doctrine and American Empire, Darryl E. Brock examines how a US-led natural history survey of Puerto Rico advanced American Empire through botany, geology, and anthropology. The study reveals how scientific research shaped modernization, cultural nationalism, and enduring hierarchies of knowledge in the Caribbean.
Review Quotes:
"Focusing on an underexamined region, Botanical Monroe Doctrine and American Empire offers a well-researched, original history of Puerto Rico as seen through the prism of a massive survey, drawing together diverse disciplines, institutions, individuals, and science of an American empire at a crucial time in US history. Brock's work highlights how Puerto Rico's modern political and cultural history is woven with the history of science." --Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, author of Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology
"Botanical Monroe Doctrine and American Empire is a substantial and significant work of scholarship elucidating people, institutions, and themes of major importance for the history of science in the Americas, US colonialism, and modern Caribbean history." --Gregory T. Cushman, author of Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History
"Nathaniel Britton wanted American science to claim the Caribbean--its species catalogued for Gotham's museums, its knowledge extracted on American terms. Botanical Monroe Doctrine is the story of that imperial ambition and of the Puerto Ricans who quietly made the science their own." --Daniel Lewis, author of Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future