These superbly edited volumes constitute two-thirds of the Alexander von Humboldt in English project led by professors Kutsinki and Ette from late 2007 and now published by the University of Chicago Press. The final part of the project will be the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, which, like the two volumes under review, formed part of Humboldt's monumental Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1810–39) relating to his expedition of 1799–1804 to the Americas in the company of the botanist Aimé Bonpland. Equally, like the present books, the forthcoming title on Mexico will present to readers of English, in the form of a single volume, an unprecedented and fully annotated translation of an early edition which Kutzinski and Ette deem to be the most authentic and least expurgated of the sundry versions available from the first decades of the nineteenth century onwards. In the case of the highly controversial volume on Cuba, they take the two-volume revised and expanded French edition of 1826; the basis for the Views of the Cordilleras is the first two-volume Vues des Cordillères of 1813. Because of the scale of the enterprise and the perennial disputes over editions of Humboldt, it is worth noting here that the present volume on Cuba is translated by J. Bradford Anderson, Vera M. Kutzinski and Anja Becker, whilst Views is translated by J. Ryan Poynter. It is very hard to imagine that any scholarly edition will supersede these over the coming century or, indeed, the same span of time – 200 years – that now separates readers from the original translations by Helen Maria Williams (Humboldt was half-French, wrote his diary alternately in French and German, and only moved from Paris to his Berlin birthplace in 1827). By the same token, these titles are probably not the best starting place for the ‘general reader’ lacking prior knowledge of Humboldt, since most of the apparatus is highly specialised and, whilst admirably unponderous, the introductory settings here are quite succinct and serve almost as aides-mémoires rather than full adumbrations on author and texts. Those requiring fuller context would be best directed to Laura Dassow Walls’ The Passage to Cosmos (University of Chicago Press, 2009), or the special issue of Atlantic Studies edited by Vera Kutzinski in 2010.
Kutzinski and Ette are distinguished experts on Humboldt, and it is not perhaps such a surprise that both started their scholarly careers with research on Cuban and Caribbean literature (Ette wrote his doctorate on Martí; Kutzinski has translated Guillén). Both subsequently promoted ‘trans-area studies’ in their universities (the Center for the Americas at Vanderbilt and Potsdam International Network for TransArea Studies), and both plainly seek to uphold Humboldt's interleaving of science and sensibility, the local and the global-cosmic. There is, then, in the apparatus of these editions, both an attention to detail that should satisfy the most punctilious empirical specialist and a Weltbewusstein (world consciousness) that addresses the concerns of those who discern in Humboldt an intellectual figure bestriding the Enlightenment, post-Napoleonic Romanticism, and the age of Darwinian science. The editorial format is the same for both books: an introductory synoptic essay of some 20 pages; a note that explains the low level of visible editorial interruption of the main body of the text; the text itself (and illustrations); a list of annotations (roughly 100 pages for each book); a partial listing of the contents of Humboldt's library (at 50 pages this does not pretend to itemise the original holding of some 17,000 volumes, most of which were destroyed in the Sotheby's fire of 1865); a chronology; an editorial note explaining the publishing history of each book and outlining the protocols followed for referencing, selection of plates and tables, and so on; an index of names; a subject index; and a toponymic index. There the similarities end, however, for while this edition of Political Essay on the Island of Cuba contains two maps (those of 1820 and 1826), it has no further illustrative material. Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, by contrast, is built around 69 plates of engravings, which Humboldt discusses in essays that vary from a paragraph to 50 pages; this volume is printed on art paper and weighs almost twice as much as the entirely textual Cuban volume.
Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of the volume on Cuba for non-specialists is its restoration of a text that had been so violated – Humboldt referred to a ‘politically motivated’ cannibalisation – in John Thrasher's English edition of 1856, which entirely suppressed the original condemnation of slavery. Given that some salience still attaches in English-speaking academic circles to the notion of Humboldt as a pioneer of capitalist despoliation, the energy of his critique of slavery in existential and ethical terms is quite striking. Even in conversation with (the slaveholding) Thomas Jefferson in Washington at the very end of his continental visit Humboldt did little to veil his opinions in this regard, and that was before the abolition of the international slave trade. As a traveller in a pre-steamer age, Humboldt, a non-swimmer and obsessive mountain-climber, is recognised to have taken many serious physical risks never required of those merely navigating from office to lecture hall. His political risk-taking has been given less prominence, but it was not for nothing that the elderly statesman of the 1840s continued to wear the fashion of the 1790s, when as a young mineralogist he was so taken with the social ambitions of the French Revolution. At the same time, Humboldt never recognised any caesura between humanity and nature, being irrepressibly curious across fields of knowledge now territorialised by academic parochialism. In his two quite short trips to Cuba (December 1800 to March 1801; April to May 1804), he amassed sufficient data that his estimations of the population still hold up very well against complex calculations based on census and commercial statistics 200 years later (see Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of the Caribbean since the Napoleonic Wars, Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Of course, Cuba never attained independence during Humboldt's lifetime (1769–1865), but sections of both titles were drafted after the start of the independence movements in Spanish America, movements that Humboldt ardently supported. This is evident in many passages of prose, notwithstanding the fact that he and Bonpland travelled on passports exceptionally issued by the Bourbon monarchy, which soon had cause to regret letting such perceptive, map-making and publicity-conscious travellers into its colonies of the Indies. The Political Essay, then, truly justifies its title, although contemporary readers who are not geographers may find occasional longueurs amidst some of the descriptive material. Certainly, those who only ‘know’ Humboldt second-hand and through the prism of cultural studies will find in both books passages of arresting originality, insight and pertinence.
If there is one phase of the American journey that has received less attention, it is probably that between March 1801, the terminal point of the three-volume travelogue published in English as Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, and March 1803, when Humboldt and Bonpland (and their new companion Carlos Montúfar of Quito) landed in Mexico, which would be the subject of the Political Essay of New Spain and the object of much questioning from US political figures eager to learn of developments on their southern border. During this period the travellers moved through present-day Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, an experience which is quite modestly represented in Views, where the plates are not arranged in the chronological order in which they were taken, sketched by Humboldt, drawn (mostly by others) and engraved. Mexico and the Aztec empire dominate the volume, which has never before been published in its entirety in English – but in their introduction the editors line up the innocent reader for the greater shock of form that is to follow. They refer to an ‘Alternative Library’, since Humboldt is incessant in citing other authorities, and they describe ‘Humboldt's multilayered image-text’ as being as much a ‘collection’ composed of a variety of pieces, often at a remove from their cultural contexts – several holdings of museums are included (and appear here in photographic colour). The closest analogy is evidently the internet. Just when one thinks one is on top of things the plates come to an end with the Dragon Tree of La Orotava, Tenerife, quietly suggested to be older than all the preceding monuments, and then a reproduction of a (heavily referenced) letter from Mr Visconti commenting on all that has gone beforehand.
Radicalism in form is more than matched by the intellectual substance of a work that can be set not just in the eighteenth-century ‘dispute of the New World’, taking in De Pauw, Buffon et al., but also in the major nineteenth-century controversies over civilisation and barbarism. Here Kutzinski and Ette properly highlight Humboldt's bold refusal of the fiercely confident Eurocentric beliefs of the era as he challenged the notion that the ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds were of distinct geological ages. The social correspondence follows in what he called ‘a happy revolution’, the ‘beautiful and fruitful idea to consider all peoples of the earth as belonging to the same family’ (p. 341). That remains a highly contested concept in 2013; to have made the case 200 years earlier through sensibility as well as science, intersecting text and image is a breathtaking achievement. It may well be that individual readers cannot afford to have this foundational text of the modern era in their private collections, but all university libraries should certainly obtain it as a fundamental part of their holdings.
