Climate’s people

Columbus’s confidence that those in torrid zones were bound to possess a more childish or monstrous nature shaped how he viewed his project in the Americas. In The Tropics of Empire, Nicolás Wey Gómez makes a case for the intellectual architecture of conquest: Philosophical ideas from Plato and Aristotle linked the temperature of a place to the temperament and habits of a people – and transformed Columbus from explorer to colonizer. At the same time, this knowledge system’s ponderous weight quieted doubts about the morality of conquest.