Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (review)

A fair amount has been written about the Franco-Spanish scientific mission to the Andes in the mid-eighteenth century, but Neil Safier’s very fine first book manages to refashion the exploits and publications of these scientific travelers in highly original ways. Safier examines “experimental science in a colonial context” with the eye of an ethnographer studying science as “social and material processes” (p. 8). In particular, the book cleverly recovers many of the individuals who helped generate knowledge for the expedition, and how European naturalists (especially the much celebrated Charles-Marie de La Condamine) transformed and translated this knowledge into the language of the European Enlightenment. One of the great contributions of Safier’s book is to show how many of the local voices in the Andes and the Amazon are written out of the final versions of the European accounts (especially the classic Encyclopédie). In Safier’s words, “Only by reconstituting the material practices, the social relationships of the actors involved, and the successive stages of textual elaboration and production can we understand the broad contours and unintended consequences of science and its representations during this period” (p. 9).

Measuring the New World intersects with several of the most dynamic historiographical fields in the last few years: Atlantic world history, the social and cultural history of science, critical studies of travel accounts, and an emerging new cultural and intellectual history of colonial Latin America. Safier’s command of multiple Western European languages, his knowledge of the European (especially French) Enlightenment, and his command of the historiography of colonial Latin America (Spanish and Portuguese) help him forge an outstanding contribution to both the intellectual history of Europe and the Americas.

After an introduction setting the stage for his analysis, Safier’s first chapter examines the efforts of La Condamine and the scientific expedition to construct small pyramids as monuments to their efforts to measure the shape of the earth at the Equator near Quito. A fascinating look at the ways these naturalists “inscribed” science using the pyramids as texts, this chapter also demonstrates the fragility of those texts. Chapter 2 provides a brilliant analysis of the ways La Condamine constructs a narrative through his publications and maps incorporating information from many sources while consciously erasing those same sources and making the knowledge appear to be his own empirical truth. In Chapter 3, Safier demonstrates his mastery of the writers on both sides of the Atlantic and their debates about the “nature” of the New World. Notably, he argues effectively against reading these writers as representatives of “national” or “imperial” perspectives. This point is demonstrated in Chapter 4 through a careful and astute reading of the construction of maps of the Province of Quito through the work of “many voices”—in particular, Pedro Vicente Maldonado, La Condamine, his editors, and publisher. The debates among intellectuals over the nature of the New World form the core of Chapter 5, while Chapter 6 focuses on the transatlantic discussion over the nature of the Incas, in particular, through a close analysis of the work of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Chapter 7 reiterates Safier’s argument about the “cross-fertilization of knowledge” and how this knowledge moves and morphs across imperial territories “outside the aegis of a specific political regime” (p. 262).

Measuring the New World beautifully dissects the “social and material practices that comprise” what Safier calls “transatlantic scientific commemorations” (p. 12). We are fortunate that the University of Chicago Press has produced a book with some 20 color plates and nearly 60 figures that wonderfully illustrate and illuminate Safier’s sophisticated arguments. We are indebted to Safier for helping enlighten scholars of both Europe and the Americas on the role of the New World in the construction of modern science and the European Enlightenment.