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  • Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution
  • Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. By Antonio Barrera-Osorio (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2006) 211 pp. $45.00

Kuhn and Koyré once characterized the "scientific revolution" as a tectonic shift in worldviews. According to their influential interpretations, seventeenth-century mathematicians, cosmographers, and natural philosophers suddenly embraced heliocentrism and mechanical philosophy and threw Aristotelian physics and geocentric theologies into the dust bin of history.1 Kuhn's and Koyré's accounts bolstered the status of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton as cultural heroes, the ushers of modernity. Later, however, sociologists of science like Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer upset this heroic, revolutionary narrative by linking the history of seventeenth-century English mechanical philosophy firmly to the welter of partisan interests unleashed by the Civil War, Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution. Shapin and Schaffer also added artisans and instrument makers to the list of modernity's founding fathers. Shapin and Schaffer's narrative, however, remained wedded to the history of physics and cosmography. Historians of science have more recently begun to question this emphasis on momentous philosophical and cosmographical transformations and pay more attention to the mundane and the obvious; the [End Page 159] Scientific Revolution took place amid a commercial revolution triggered by Europe's imperial expansion to the New World, Africa, and Asia.

This new emphasis on commerce and empire has suddenly prompted historians of science to study the history of collecting, curiosities, and botanical gardens. Yet the role of Spain and Portugal, the two most important early modern European empires, has received little attention. This silence should surprise no one, for the history of these two countries has long been associated with a narrative of backwardness not progress, obscurantism not enlightenment, ignorance not science. The Black Legend has long blinded historians to the fact that the roots of European scientific modernity lie in fifteenth-century Portugal and sixteenth-century Spain, not seventeenth-century Amsterdam or London.

Barrera-Osorio's book is a fine first step to render the obvious and long-ignored visible. His book is solely concerned with demonstrating that both empire and New World novelty forced Spanish merchants, bureaucrats, and intellectuals to dispense with classical, humanist epistemologies and fully to embrace "experience" (eyewitnessing and experimentation) rather than the authority of texts. This simple yet radical conclusion flies in the face of a well-established historiography that maintains that, despite all its novelties, the New World had a blunted impact on Europe and that European scholars easily incorporated the flurry of new data coming from the Indies into classically based textual narratives.

But Barrera-Osorio cracks the proverbial nut differently. Rather than dealing with scholars, his focus is to study merchants, settlers, and bureaucrats. Free from the hindrance of textual authority, merchants, artisans, entrepreneurs, and royal officials time and again settled disputes about the commercial value of new commodities and technologies by appealing to "experience." Entrepreneurs sought to establish monopolies over new botanical resources by demonstrating the therapeutic value of plants through clinical trials. The Crown, in turn, handed out patents and licenses only after proving those claims valid. Empire and commerce quickly led to the creation of institutions with the sole purpose of apportioning credit to competing claims.

The Casa de Contratación emerged to settle disputes and regulate trade. It also worked as a clearing house of knowledge about the New World, where cosmographers debriefed pilots to create ever more accurate charts and maps, where pilots were trained to calculate longitude and latitude in the open sea and thus to avoid costly sea wrecks, and where cosmographers developed new instruments of navigation. These two cultures of the textual and the experiential were often at loggerheads at the Casa; cosmographers and pilots more often than not failed to agree.

Barrera-Osorio also describes a culture of technological innovation triggered by empire and commerce, offering a sixteenth-century Spain teeming with artisans and entrepreneurs, not painters and bards. [End Page 160] Whether concerning innovative devices to pump water out of ships, metallurgical processes to extract metals from ores...

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