Recovering Imperial Space in Juan Bautista Muñoz's Historia del Nuevo-Mundo (1793)

Recovering Imperial Space in Juan Bautista Muñoz’s Historia del Nuevo-Mundo (1793) santa arias florida state university  Geography during the Enlightenment comprised more than scientific knowledge : in the political realm, it justified empire, and in philosophical terms, it shed light on crucial questions such as rationality and the understanding of the human condition as located and constructed in space.1 Occupying a special place in the history of modernity, eighteenth-century cartography experienced profound methodological and conceptual changes and, consequently, geographical knowledge refocused its interest with a positivist perspective on the unknown territories (i.e., the colonies in the Americas, Asia, and Africa). Largescale and state-funded expeditionary voyages by European explorers and cartographers demonstrate not only the influence of the scientific revolution in the charting and mapping of the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans but also how imperial power was projected across the ocean into distant unexplored lands.2 James Cook (1769–1780), Louis Antoine de Bougainville (1766–1769), the Count of La Pérouse (1785–1788), and Alejandro Malaspina (1789–1794) led some of the most important expeditions of the period. As David Livingstone has underscored , geographical knowledge had close ties with navigation, exploration, and imperial expansion (The Geographical Tradition 103). Thus, the cultural and intellectual history of the European Enlightenment must be studied in conjunction with the perceptual representation of territories, the history of imperialism and the development of capitalism in Spanish America’s late colonial history. As is often recognized, these events were marked by the Bourbon economic reforms and the foundation of new colonial institutions to tighten control over the Spanish territories. Late-eighteenth-century Spanish cartography is a fundamental locus for the analysis of the interplay between space, the inner workings of the transatlantic political economy, cultural and intellectual history. Here I explore these interrelations to deepen our understanding of how mapping was at the core of the I would like to thank David Slade for his kind bibliographical suggestions on Muñoz while I developed the idea for this essay. 1 My interest on historical geography during the Enlightenment has been inspired by the important work of David N. Livingston and Matthew H. Edney. 2 For a study on the history and representations of the ocean from 1450 to the present, see Steinberg’s The Social Construction of the Ocean. 126  Revista Hispánica Moderna 60.2 (2007) Spanish Enlightenment’s political discourses. First, I focus on Juan Bautista Mun ̃oz’s Historia del Nuevo-Mundo to see how geography, or what Ó Tuathail has called ‘‘geo-graphing,’’ was situated amidst political, religious, and cultural practices .3 These were ideological discourses that shaped Muñoz’s historical writing as he aimed to interpret the world by making sense of its past as represented by original documents found in Iberian archives. Second, this project underscores the importance of Bartolomé de las Casas’s Historia de las Indias and his massive Apologética historia sumaria by focusing on his influence on Muñoz.4 I am interested in how this representation of geographical knowledge benefits from the intellectual work of Las Casas, legendary in the promotion of the Spanish Black Legend, and how his Apologética was intertwined in eighteenth-century discourses that defined Spanish political modernity and, paradoxically, defended Spanish imperial power. Muñoz, Humanism and Geographical Knowledge in EighteenthCentury Spain During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cartography served to inscribe empires, and maps were considered bearers of truth (Edney 165). Furthermore, as Mary Louise Pratt has suggested, eighteenth-century natural histories and maps were instruments of imperialism an ‘‘attempt to ‘naturalize’ the myth of European superiority’’ (32).5 Representing unknown spaces was a form of appropriating them. While flags, coats of arms, crosses, place-names or even portraits of discoverers formed part of the visual record that demarcated new domains, letters, accounts or histories of discovery and exploration included maps or charts. Besides the work of mapmakers such as Alberto Contarino, Martin Waldseemu ̈ller, and Battista Agnesse—who by the mid-sixteenth century placed the Americas in world maps and atlases—some less-studied maps appeared in historical accounts and letters crucial to...