유럽의 열대 자연에 대한 식물지리학적 발견

Abstract

My article has three research objectives. First, it investigates how Iberian countries and the Nethelands developed cartography and natural history by way of circumnaviagtion and exploration, and European societies identified with the Christianity had tried to re-create the 'Garden of Eden' through the discovery of tropical flora. Second, I illuminate how the eighteenth-century Europe had found and enhanced its economic interests in the process of classifying and organizing the world God created. Last, my paper analyzes how European countries constructed botanico-geographical maps of tropical regions. I argue that Europe's botanical knowledge of the tropics was deeply related with its geographical exploration into Asian and American tropical regions. That means the European botanico-geographical construction of the tropics had been translated into visions of empire from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. In conclusion, botanical geography became the prime method by which Europe discovered tropical nature in the late eighteenth century.