Networking the tropics

In the same month that Pierre Gourou’s short article on the Ecole des Beaux-Art de Hanoi appeared in the 1949 France Illustration special issue we have studied (see Chapter 2), he published an altogether different – sweeping and ambitious – essay, entitled “Qu’est-ce que le monde tropical?” (What is the tropical world?), in France’s leading history journal, Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations. Gourou had been elected to a Chaire d’Étude du monde tropical at the Collège de France in 1947, and this was the published version of his inaugural lecture. He proceeded in broad strokes and with a different kind of survey than the one that led to his regional monograph on the peasants of the Tonkin Delta. The study of the tropics, he noted, was based on an understanding of both the uniqueness of the tropical world compared to the temperate world, and the many differences between the pays chauds et pluvieux (hot and wet lands) that characterised the zone tropicale. ¹ “Here, in total, is a singularly different nature from our own” he proclaimed. ² The tropical world “is generally unfavourable” to human existence and “mostly inhabited by peoples with arrested civilisations and sometimes ones in regression,” he continued on the first point and in the matter-of-fact way that was his calling card; and if tropical lands were to have a bright future, it would not come from trying to turn them into temperate ones. It was also important to think about “inter-tropical contrast,” and particularly about the marked differences in niveaux de vie (living standards) between the “highly civilised cultures” and “densely populated lands” of tropical Asia, and the “retarded” (attardé) state of other parts of the tropics, which, on the whole, were sparsely populated, and where a combination of an enervating climate, fragile soils, detrimental agricultural practices, and debilitating disease “weighed heavily” on living standards and were not easily solved by the applications of modern science. ³