Offers a new interpretation of the history of colonial India and a critical contribution to the understanding of environmental history and the tropical world. Arnold considers the ways in which India’s material environment became increasingly subject to the colonial understanding of landscape and nature, and to the scientific scrutiny of itinerant naturalists.

"A rich study of changing British perceptions of India… it will provide scholars of science and nature in colonial India many new insights about an overlooked period and subject. Arnold's arguments about how scientific travelers of the early nineteenth century reimagined India as a place of death and tropicality are nuanced and powerful. His contentions about the their connection to growing British power…are also important."

"A fascinating cast of travelers, scientists, and others populate Arnold's account…it addresses important conceptual issues and provides an entertaining account full of specific insights and fascinating characters. Anyone interested in the cultural dimensions of the constructions of power and knowledge in colonial settings will find the book worthwhile."

"In The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze, David Arnold deftly untangles and analyses the nature of the connections between literary representations of the land, the development of botanical knowledge, and the consolidation of colonial power."

"David Arnold's absorbing study will reward anyone interested in botany and biogeography, scientific travel, colonial science, and the impact of Romanticism on nineteenth-century science."

"The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze is a valuable book for historians and anthropologists..Despite the vast literature on all the themes presented in the book, none connects these various topics as elegantly as the current volume. Arnold's writing style is graceful, his arguments are persuasive, and his creative use of non-governmental sources allow for an original approach to a history of the land."

"The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze deserves a wide audience. Any historian of biology interested in British imperialism, Romanticism, scientific networks (particularly those linking metropolitan and colonial naturalists) and imperial environmental history will find it an enjoyable, informative, and intellectually stimulating read."

"An eminently readable book, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze unravels the mysteries of the tropics in India as constructed by nineteenth-century Europeans. . . . A richly documented and important book which will be useful to students from a range of interdisciplinary fields."