“This path-breaking book explores the intersection between scientific enterprise, the evolution of Victorian learned societies, and finance. That imperial states used science and science ideologies to advance territorial claims—this is well known. That finance used ethnographic and geographic ‘truths’ debated in the fledgling anthropological and geographical societies for the crucial creation of ‘value’ to monetize largely tropical speculative ventures has been a hidden history. The human sciences and the institutions that developed around them were key elements not just in the globalization of knowledge but also that of finance capital and speculation. This remarkable history captures the depth of the interlinkages among protagonists whose identities and practices regularly blurred their economic and scientific roles. In this engagingly written volume, the rivalries, collusions, and corruptions that shaped tropical scrambles, tropical science, as well as money markets, come vividly to life.”