Tropical geography

A variety of environmental determinism emerged from the sub-field as colonists and naturalists started representing temperate and tropical people with binaries like "progressive vs. backward," "civilised vs. primitive," "hard working vs. lazy" and "superior vs.

"[5] Race, an invented concept, was convenient and readily applied in attempts to "[link] climatic variation closely to the supposed division of the human species into different 'races'".

As criticized by Edward Said in his famous work Orientalism, the literature of tropical geography served the interests of European scholars who were living in the temperate world to create an exotic other which in turn helped define themselves.

[8] Until the mid 20th century, the imperialist, racist and Euro-centric version of tropical geography was still flourishing as influential works were still being published like Les Pays Tropicaux by geomorphologist Pierre Gourou.

[11] Though morphed into a different discipline, the ideological roots of tropical geography—superiority, progress, civilization and technological advancement of the West which originated and matured in the temperate zone—carry on and become the building blocks of mainstream economic development theories.