In Reassembling the Strange, Thomas Anderson examines how Westerners studied and classified the flora and fauna of Madagascar during the nineteenth century. Through their efforts, naturalists and missionaries transformed the island from a place of strangeness and wonder to a welcoming landscape. By examining the words and illustrations left by those who visited the island, Anderson provides novel insights into how Westerners, particularly the British, endeavored to civilize foreign environments. Despite its strengths, however, the book is rather narrowly focused and neglects to examine the context in which these research projects were taking place.

Madagascar, with its high degree of endemic flora and fauna, was immediately viewed as distinctive by European visitors. French and British travelers developed an image of the island as home to dark landscapes and unusual creatures such as the aye-aye, an animal so far removed from Western sensibilities that nineteenth-century attempts to capture its likeness bore little resemblance to one another. European naturalists relied upon islander assistants to act as bearers for their belongings and selves, as well as gatherers of specimens. Researchers initially drew upon island folklore to justify their searches for the bizarre: the so-called man-eating tree of Madagascar and the songomby, a large ox-like creature said to eat children. As scientific discussions of evolution and geography developed, however, Westerners increasingly sought to delegitimize islander understandings of the environment. Anderson reveals how discussions of the Aepyornis (elephant bird) of Madagascar were instead influenced by imperial networks that enabled knowledge-sharing. Discoveries of the bones of moa (large flightless birds) in New Zealand during the 1830s were followed by those of the Aepyornis in Madagascar several decades later. These findings of megafauna in both locations would eventually normalize Madagascar's past for Western visitors, who could now view the island in light of new theories of biogeography.

Anderson argues that, thanks to global scientific debates about continental drift and the evolution of species, the island was gradually seen as less strange and hostile to Europeans. Research completed by Western missionaries on the island, especially those from the London Missionary Society (LMS), assisted in the development of these scientific discoveries. Anderson describes the work performed by several LMS missionaries to collect and classify species on the island. The Antananarivo Annual, edited and published by missionaries between 1875 and 1900, became a forum for publishing information for Western audiences about the island's geography, geology, natural history, and more. Scientific publications were not limited to plant and animal life. The development of racial sciences in Europe led to attempts to locate communities on the island within racial hierarchies. Beliefs about descent were used to justify differing rates of religious conversion, education, and civilization. The development of these diverse bodies of knowledge about the people, landscape, and fauna of Madagascar enabled Europeans to conceive of the island as less hostile to their settlement. By the close of the century, Madagascar was seen to fit with Western ideals of tropical islands, and European beliefs about the Malagasy as failed stewards of their environment encouraged colonial schemes of land development.

Reassembling the Strange offers a unique focus on nineteenth-century imperial projects through an investigation of the Western obsession with scientific classification. The chapters covering debates about the Aepyornis and the scientific work done by missionaries are particularly worthy of note. The book, however, fails to situate these developments within the context of events in and around Madagascar. Anderson says very little about the dramatic political and economic developments that would draw more Westerners (not only British and French, but also Americans and other Europeans) to Madagascar. A focus on the perceived ‘strangeness’ of Madagascar is harder to understand when considered along with large communities of merchants of European (or mixed Euro-Malagasy) descent living on Madagascar during this same century. Nineteenth-century conflicts on the island between Westerners, including missionaries, and the leadership of the Merina kingdom are likewise entirely overlooked.

Most glaringly, there is almost no discussion of the islanders who assisted naturalists and missionaries with their projects. Anderson makes little effort to flesh them out as actors in this history. We fail to understand how these people, many of whom were undoubtedly literate and able to speak European languages, actively shaped Western understandings of Madagascar. What emerges is a natural history of Madagascar forged almost entirely by Europeans, with little consideration of the pressures that shaped missionary activities or their data collection. This emphasis serves to perpetuate a focus on the flora and fauna of Madagascar, at the expense of its human inhabitants.