Thomas J. Anderson's Reassembling the Strange tells the story of how the once exotic and unknown world of Madagascar, its unique flora and fauna, and its peoples, were made familiar and manageable for European colonial purposes. With a focus on networks of missionaries and naturalists in the decades preceding French colonization of the island in 1896, Anderson offers readers new perspectives on how scientific conceptualization and exploration demystified a local environment by placing its unique features within a global context. The research and scientific contribution of these explorers transformed the image of Madagascar from a dangerous tropical environment that impeded scientific progress to a domesticated cash-crop colony.

Anderson argues that an exploration of Madagascar prior to its colonization offers ‘a way to analyze how a unique local environment was understood in relation to the wider world’ at a time when it was free of ‘overt imperial state concerns and directives’ (p. 10). As Anderson says, this global perspective demonstrates how the island's novelty became a significant factor in the most important scientific debates of the nineteenth century, ‘from race theory and human origins to biogeography’. In doing so, Anderson contributes to our understanding of not only how networks of explorers and wider global scientific debates incorporated knowledge from local findings to explain the wider world, but also how these global perspectives shaped the perception of local findings on Madagascar.

European exploration of Madagascar's interior during the first half of the nineteenth century produced a range of novel and unique endemic species that puzzled and enticed the scientific community. But while the island might have promised to be an ‘idyllic wonderland that required exploration’ (p. 25), as Anderson shows in his second chapter, European naturalists were ill-equipped to manage the dense tropical forests alone. These early explorers were heavily dependent on the aid of Madagascar's local population, the Malagasy, as guides who not only carried their supplies (and often the Europeans themselves) through the forests, but also offered tantalizing examples of potentially discoverable species through their folklore. This led to tensions between the realities of exploring Madagascar on the one hand, and the reputation and scientific standing of the naturalists and missionaries on the other. Anderson argues that nineteenth-century explorers had to present their enthusiasm for the island's mysteries within an acceptable scientific framework to appear professional and objective. This was partially achieved by presenting their own work as rigorously empirical and rational, in contrast to the Malagasy, who were dismissed as inherently superstitious and unscientific. This remained the case even when European explorers eagerly searched for mythical creatures presented in Malagasy folklore; here tales of mysterious creatures were regarded as evidence of potential new and hitherto undiscovered species rather than myths.

In his third chapter, Anderson turns his attention to how Madagascar was fitted into increasingly organized global scientific theories, especially those related to biogeography. The problem with Madagascar, he argues, was that ‘while geographically close to Africa, it had species from both Africa and Asia, lacked many others, and had still more that seemed to fit in nowhere’ (p. 60). The question for nineteenth-century naturalists was, how to make sense of this? Rather than focusing on the peculiar, Anderson claims, naturalists ‘normalized their findings’ through illustrations, descriptions and global comparisons. In doing so, the interpretation of local findings was heavily influenced by global ideas. To demonstrate this, Anderson examines contemporary debates over the fossils of Aepyornis, a giant flightless bird similar to the moa of New Zealand; the mysterious aye-aye, which was depicted in increasingly ‘kindly’ ways that made it familiar to European viewers; and the potential lost continent of Lemuria, a hypothesized land where Madagascar's diverse species of lemurs may have originated.

In the fourth chapter, Anderson examines the role Protestant missionaries played in creating the first scientific community of Madagascar, which contributes to a growing interest among scholars in the relationship between these historical actors and science in overseas territories. Anderson argues that, because many historians have tended to focus on the period of French occupation, the work of these British missionaries has been overlooked. Rather than emphasizing religion or politics in their publications, the missionaries focused on Madagascar's natural history, its geology and ecology, to transform it into a known land for European aims. Anderson demonstrates that the contributions of these self-styled naturalists were well respected back in Britain, while the itinerant nature of missionary work allowed them to form networks across the world that exchanged ideas and validated their claims to scientific authority.

The Protestant missionaries were not just interested in cataloguing and understanding Madagascar's natural world; they were also keen to define the origins of the Malagasy themselves. In the fifth chapter, Anderson shows how the missionaries, especially the London Missionary Society (LMS), used philology as a ‘scientific tool’ that ultimately bifurcated the Malagasy into two distinct peoples of either Asian or African ancestry. Despite the Malagasy speaking a single language (thought to be of Malayo-Polynesian origins), Anderson shows how contemporary assumptions about climates and racial types, and an African slave trade, allowed them to make this distinction. Moreover, these assumptions were confirmed, in the missionaries' minds at least, by their wider experiences of the types of peoples who had been successfully converted to Christianity in the past. Interestingly, Anderson demonstrates how the missionaries’ illustrations and photographs of the different Malagasy peoples reflected these beliefs, as some were depicted in European clothes while others were shown in their traditional Malagasy garb.

Chapter 6 explores how Europeans used their knowledge of the island to reshape perceptions of its environment. Through the process of studying Madagascar's mysterious features, it was transformed from a ‘chaotic tropical land’ to a ‘temperate and friendly’ island for European needs (p. 151). To do so, Europeans wrested control of the environment from the Malagasy by discrediting their knowledge and management of the land, which legitimized the need for colonial control. The subject of the eventual colonial occupation of Madagascar is covered in the final chapter. Here the narrative moves to the early twentieth century and shows how French colonial rule saw the island treated as a ‘known’ environment which quickly turned into the aesthetic ideal that had been described in previous chapters. This saw the creation of a railway, the construction of telegraphs and canals and the island's promotion as a tourist site. The French also quickly established national forest reserves in order to control the colony's resources from what they believed were the destructive practices of the Malagasy. By the twentieth century, the island's forests were no longer sites of mystery, but were now firmly familiar territories requiring European management.

Although it may lack an in-depth assessment of its relation to wider historiography, the book may be useful for undergraduate readers as its arguments are generally accessible (if not a little repetitive) and easy to follow. Anderson has made use of a rich range of sources to build his analysis and, for the most part, his claims are convincing. One feature that is missing from the work, however, is the perspective and reactions of the Malagasy themselves regarding the changing interpretations of their land and ecosystem. As such, readers interested in the role non-European populations played in the scientific exploration of colonial territories will have to look elsewhere for this content. Nevertheless, Reassembling the Strange has some valuable insights to offer those interested in the history of colonial science and the contribution of missionaries to nineteenth-century exploration and colonization more generally.