Harry on Muthukumaran, ‘The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean’

Sureshkumar Muthukumaran. The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean. University of California Press, 2023. xix + 294 pp. $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-39084-3; $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-39083-6.

Reviewed by Chelsea Harry (Southern Connecticut State University)
Published on H-Environment (February, 2025)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)

Sureshkumar Muthukumaran’s book, The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, is a scholarly tour de force that will be of interest to researchers in a variety of fields, including environmental history, botany, archaeology, classical studies, and philosophy. It surveys information about crop exchanges gleaned from diverse ancient artifacts, accounts given in later texts, and other recent research to tell a story about the relationships that existed among ancient peoples and societies in South Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean extending back to the Bronze Age (circa 3300-1200 BCE). While the book’s focus is limited to the exchange of a selection of economic plants originating in South Asia and then cultivated in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, it is made clear that cultivars and spices were also sent in the opposite direction along the same routes of trade and transmission, although this exchange was poorly documented. Even without the equally detailed treatment of these West-East exchanges, Muthukumaran illustrates the enduring environmental impact of early crop exchanges. Similarly, even though cultural exchange is outside the scope of the book, examples of intercultural exchange in both directions during the Bronze Age, including additional allusions to religious and scientific exchanges, help to round out the author’s claims of “long-standing connectivity between South Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean” (p. 15). As a result, readers will take from the book an expanded idea about the timeline, history, and extent of anthropogenic global exchange and its impact on culture and art, economics, food, land use, and natural resource depletion.

Muthukumaran chose seven tropical economic plants about which to provide further detail and analysis, writing a chapter about each of them: cotton, Asiatic rice, citrus, eastern cucurbits, Indian lotus, taro, and sissoo. Each chapter begins with a discussion and elucidation of terms used across ancient languages to describe these crops in ancient texts, including issues with etymology, misinterpretation, and mistranslation. Sources from seven different ancient languages are examined (Sumerian, Akkadian, Alamite, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Praktis), hinting at the degree to which identifying references to plants in texts across cultures and languages is itself a feat of archaeology, classical linguistics, and critical reasoning. Examples from each chapter include discussions of the possible relationship between the Akkadian kidinnu and the Arabic root of most modern European terms for cotton, terms for rice in Akkadian and Elamite, citrus terminology in Greek and Latin, mistranslations of terms across various ancient languages pertaining to all sorts of melons as “cucumbers” and further confusion between ancient Old World and New World cucurbits, several terms for the Indian lotus in Indic languages and the lack of terminology for the plant in Herodotus, the disputed terminology for taro across ancient languages, and sissoo terminology in the ancient Middle East. These introductory examinations of terminology ground the reader in Muthukumaran’s study, helping provide a background for his subsequent accounts of routes and dispersal, cultivation across civilizations, archaeological records, timeline of cultivation outside South Asia, visual data, and accounts of the limitations of cultivation in certain areas.

The book concludes with a chapter on the four stages of crop cultivation identified in the crops examined: familiarization, experimentation, routinization, and indigenization. Muthukumaran titles this chapter “How to Turn Tropical.” The first stage discusses the modes by which a plant ends up moving across geographic locations to be cultivated outside where it is endemic. Here the author returns to themes from the introduction of the book, repeating that merchants were largely responsible for this stage but now adding details. For instance, an exchange could happen as the result of an unplanned barter, at a market, through non-market processes, and by non-merchants moving throughout South Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, including slaves, deportees, refugees, soldiers, messengers, diplomats, porters, cooks, scribes, and others. The motivations for and limitations of the cultivation, or “experimentation,” range from a farmer trying to sustain caloric needs to politicians “transplanting exotica flora as a means of displaying their political clout and their territorial and diplomatic reach” (pp. 210, 215). Routinization describes routine and sustainable cultivation. The final stage, however, is marked by the crop’s widened availability outside urban centers and its significance to its adopted culture. In this final chapter, Muthukumaran deftly ties environmental factors back to the cultural, showing the inextricable relation between the two and thus the role globalization, whether economic or not, plays in changing all of us, both human and nonhuman.

Muthukumaran begins his book with a sensorial claim: “The past is perhaps most foreign in the sensory experience of quotidian life. Half a millennium ago, the world not only looked different but also smelled and tasted different” (p. 1). His epilogue ends with a similar appeal to the senses: “the gradual tropicalization of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean agricultural landscapes from the Iron Age on meant that their visual, olfactory, and gustatory worlds were increasingly closer to our globalized world than to the earliest agricultural societies” (p. 233). What are we to make of these two claims? While there is much more to say on the history of globalization in the ancient world, evidence from economic crop cultivation and synthetic argumentation offered in this book propose that while our world looks, smells, and tastes different than it did in ancient civilizations across South Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, there will never be a greater difference among civilizations as there was prior to the global exchange of ideas, spices, stones, crops, artifacts, religion, foods, etc. While we may never know exactly when that exchange started, studies such as this one bring parts of the overall story to light, allowing us all, regardless of our disciplinary lenses, to better understand the history and dynamism of cross-cultural exchange at the heart of our ever-increasing globalized world.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at:
https://networks.h-net.org/h-environment.

Citation:
Chelsea Harry. Review of Muthukumaran, Sureshkumar, The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean.
H-Environment, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2025.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60648