Climate, Race, and “Tropical Exceptionalism” in Early Colonial Peru

The emergence of tripartite visions of Peru’s natural world and climate in colonial geographical imaginations is very familiar to historians of the Andean regions and, to some extent, the model of a landscape neatly divided into arid coastal plains, high mountain ranges and hot, wet eastern lowlands continues to be influential. At the same time, colonial writers frequently idealized Peru’s climate and natural attributes on account of its tropical location. In some elite writings, these strands of thought intersected to produce what I term ‘tropical exceptionalism’ – namely, the idea that Peru’s tropicality was uniquely and advantageously inflected by its distinctive vertical geography in comparison to other areas of the New World. In focusing on sixteenth and seventeenth century writings by elite Spaniards and Spanish Americans such as José de Acosta and Antonio de la Calancha, this paper addresses the little-explored question of how ideas about race in the colonial world of the Andes, and in particular about Peru’s indigenous peoples, were shaped by these two strands of environmental thought and their intersection.