In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Hispanic American Historical Review 80.1 (2000) 170-171



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

La fisica de la monarquía:
ciencia y política en el pensamiento de Alejandro Malaspina (
1754-1810)

Colonial Period

La fisica de la monarquía: ciencia y política en el pensamiento de Alejandro Malaspina (1754-1810). By Juan Pimentel. Theatrum Naturae o Colección de Historia Natural. Madrid: Doce Calles and Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1998. Illustrations. Maps. Bibliography. Index. 437 pp. Cloth.

Alejandro Malaspina's expedition to Spain's colonial possessions around the world (1789-94) has recently been the focus of sustained scholarly attention, and rightly so, for this expedition compared favorably in scope and sheer intellectual ambition to those undertaken by the British under the leadership of Captain Cook. Most of the studies and rich documentation assembled by the members of the mission were never made public as the expedition upon return became a casualty of the vagaries of political instability and courtly intrigue that characterized Spain at the turn of the century. Our knowledge of Malaspina the man and of the expedition he led has recently been greatly [End Page 170] expanded by the publication in several beautifully edited volumes of hundreds of documents housed in the archives of the Museo Naval and Real Jardín Botánico in Madrid. Scholars owe this edition largely to the labors of María Dolores Higueras Rodríguez, curator of the Malaspina papers at the Museo Naval, but also to those of Juan Pimentel, a young historian who has already established a reputation as one of the most important authorities in the field. The book under review is his third on Malaspina. Building on the rich cache of primary sources he himself helped to edit (and even discover), Pimentel offers this time an exhaustive intellectual biography of Malaspina.

La fisica de la monarquía describes Malaspina's earliest education in Italy, his ascent through the ranks of the Spanish navy after whirlwind campaigns in the Mediterranean (fighting Muslim corsairs) and Asia (in the service of the Compañia de Filipinas), his participation in the transformation of the navy in the 1780s into a corporate body of "scientific officers," and his ambitious study of ways to tap into the untold commercial resources of the far-flung colonial possessions of the Spanish empire. The close look at the ideas and the life of Malaspina proves richly rewarding. The reader learns of the fluid cultural exchanges between Italy and Spain and of changes undergone and activities undertaken by the Spanish navy in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, including the navy's de facto administration of the Indies as the post of secretary of the Indies fell under its purview. The reader is also treated to punctilious portrayals of the local intellectual milieus that Malaspina encountered in places like Mexico and Lima.

Pimentel's overall thesis is that Malaspina partook of the mental structures of the European Enlightenment and became a student of human societies in general and of the Spanish empire in particular, using the idioms and methodological insights of the new physics of Newton. According to Pimentel, Malaspina followed Newton's hypothetical-deductive method in which axioms had to be tested by experience and experimentation. To prove this point, Pimentel shows that before Malaspina set foot in the colonies, he first drafted a treatise titled Axiomas políticos sobre la América (which Manuel Lucena Giraldo and Pimentel discovered in the national archives of Colombia and edited in 1991). The axioms informed the dozens of more mundane and empirically rich "political" writings that Malaspina penned during the circumnavigating expedition. These writings sought to falsify the axioms. Pimentel's painstaking and long-winded analyses of each and every one of Malaspina's mundane (and often muddled) political essays, however, sometimes get in the way of the argument. Overly concerned with placing Malaspina within a purported Newtonian methodological tradition, Pimentel misses the opportunity to explore further the new discursive structure of colonial power (of gender...

pdf

Share