Political Essay on the Island of Cuba

The editors, translators, and publishers of this new book have done the world an enormous favor. They have given Latin Americanist historians, geographers, and political scientists, as well as many other scholars, a newly translated version of a very important work, making it available in a better form than offered in previous editions, especially in English. Alexander von Humboldt's classic Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (1826) was such a monumentally insightful study when it was first published and has remained so for these many generations since. In it we learn so many things about early nineteenth-century colonial Cuba, including the island's biogeography, agriculture, and society, as well as, of course, Humboldt's unabashed contempt for slavery. This welcome new edition will hopefully enable many future scholars to gain Humboldt's insights directly from his own words, and it can now be added to other important works on him by such historians as Aaron Sachs (The Humboldt Current, 2006) and Laura Dassow Walls (The Passage to Cosmos, 2009) — excellent studies that began to fill an inexplicable historiographical lacuna, at least in the last 50 years, on the impact of the brilliant geographer, explorer, and savant and that have been especially useful in the field of environmental history.Editors Vera Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette, literary scholars and experts on Humboldt's life and writings, made this volume even more useful and important by adding some notable extra features, such as their explanatory notes throughout, a remarkably thorough annotations section (which includes a helpful glossary of weights and measures that Humboldt used), a list of works that we know were in Humboldt's personal library, and a time line chronology of Humboldt's life (although it quite oddly leaves out mention and date of publication of this very work, Political Essay on the Island of Cuba). Other welcome features include reproductions of Humboldt's foldout maps of the island that became the standard maps of Cuba for many years to come (excluded in other translations), an “editorial note” near the end of the book discussing the history of earlier translations, and the editors' excellent introduction, entitled “Inventories and Inventions: Alexander von Humboldt's Cuban Landscapes.” Here, Kutzinski and Ette explain Humboldt's lifework as having a “comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science” (p. vii), a point even illustrated with a subheading of “Thinking Globally: Weltbewusstsein” (p. x) — fitting descriptions, indeed. Their introductory analysis would be required reading for students to gain the requisite historical contextualization of Humboldt's writings (including Political Essay on the Island of Cuba), to understand the development of his more enlightened, democratic principles that were so critical of colonialism, and to grasp the world of scientific inquiry in the early nineteenth century, especially for the nascent study of the tropics.Hence, in this vital introduction readers will gain insights on Humboldt's travels to the Americas, his “revolutionizing discourses” (p. xiii), and his “moving parts” as a geographer (p. xv), or explanations of how Humboldt wrote and how he mapped Cuba. This is where this edition of Political Essay on the Island of Cuba differs greatly from earlier translations and versions: Kutzinski and Ette have left as much as possible in Humboldt's “original structure of this intensely nonlinear text” (p. xxv), including his omission of a table of contents (although there is one for this version, outlining the various parts of the book). They also use translations into English as close as possible to Humboldt's original German and French and maintain his “capricious use of capitalization and italics” and lowercase (p. xxvi), adding many explanatory notes to help guide readers through this style. I most certainly applaud all these efforts, especially how the editors stress that “it is time to read what Alexander von Humboldt really wrote” (p. xxiii).In terms of Humboldt's book itself, Political Essay on the Island of Cuba is not exactly an easy bedtime read. Many sections are so detailed and tedious that one easily starts to skim and turn pages. Humboldt's discussion of how he made the map of Cuba, for example, would be of utmost interest to those in the field of historical cartography but seems overly technical and tedious to most of the rest of us. Many of Humboldt's calculations and formulas for studying agricultural production today would be winnowed down into better prose, but it is interesting to see just how detailed the geographer was and how he did not want to omit any pertinent information. Perhaps one of the more useful purposes of this book, however, is to understand the degree of insights Humboldt had on political economy, republicanism, and the rights of people. We can take his conclusion to heart when he wrote that “a republic's growing wealth is not an offense to monarchies when those are governed with wisdom and with respect for the laws and for the public liberties” (p. 307)

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