Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution

Conclusions: the politics of knowledge

Conclusions the politics of knowledge Spain’s encounter with the New World launched Europe into the first imperial age of the modern world. By the sixteenth century, ships, charts, guns, Genesis, and the New Testament had intertwined in a Christian ideology of domination. Yet technology and God were not enough to establish an empire: an empire was and is, above all, the product of communication and information. Knowledge forms the lifeblood of any empire. The activities of artisans, merchants, royal officials , and entrepreneurs in America constituted the early Scientific Revolution . This means, first, that the Spaniards validated personal experience as a source of knowledge. As opposed to the textually based scholastic and humanist traditions, in the empirical tradition emerging in America personal experience provided information about particular events, curiosities , and commodities that became the basis for knowledge about nature . Second, these activities provided information that contradicted the authority of the classical tradition and its limitations for sixteenth-century Europeans living in America, for instance. Pliny did not have information about avocados or tomatoes. Most classical authorities were mistaken about the Torrid Zone and the antipodes. The information collected in the New World helped not only to criticize classical tradition but to undermine it. It is not a surprise to have a fully new science by the mid-seventeenth century dismissing classical authorities and articulating personal experience in reports about nature. The early phase of this process began with the activities of artisans, entrepreneurs , royal officials, and merchants (and their interrelations) in the Conclusions: The Politics of Knowledge 129 New World and in the institutionalization of these practices at the Casa de la Contratación and Council of Indies. Empirical practices found their place in institutions at the service of the state—perhaps the main difference from Portugal, which also developed an empirical culture in its books but did not institutionalize empirical practices to collect information, as did the Spaniards in the Casa. These institutions developed a set of rules for gathering information, schools for professionals, and books and reports. Spaniards in the New World eagerly sought information about routes and rivers necessary for establishing and improving communications; information about medicines, water supplies, and woods, indispensable for surviving and living in the New World; information about mines, mining techniques, and commodities , crucial for developing the economy of the Atlantic World; and information about people, their culture, social organization, religion, and military capabilities, which was essential for controlling them. Knowledge about navigation, ethnography, natural history, cosmography, and medicine became indispensable for establishing the Spanish empire, Spanish American communities, and networks of trade and communication between Spain and the New World. These empirical and collective practices emerged from the relationship between private initiative and royal support. In most cases, the crown appropriated private initiatives and later launched them as state initiatives. Royal support was a condition for institutionalizing empirical practices. Without royal support, these institutions could not emerge or expand. The Casa de la Contratación, originally founded for the regulation of trade with the Atlantic islands, expanded its functions to include a veritable chamber of knowledge regarding navigation, cosmography, and geography . At the Casa, the crown institutionalized practices for gathering and organizing information, educational activities for the dissemination of new information, and certification mechanisms for verifying the quality of expert personnel. All of these activities relied on empirical practices and collective procedures. These empirical and collective practices created a community of experts relevant to the empire. Thus, sixteenth-century political and economic interests redefined the aims of and tools for knowledge production. In the face of the New World, classical texts offered little useful information about the New World’s nature . Certainly, classical texts and authors framed Spanish understandings of nature; yet in the process of collecting information the Spanish bureaucracy and imperial agents were not concerned with natural philosophy. Their epistemological attitude was practical and was guided by an interest 130 experiencing nature in searching nature for commodities, curiosities, and information. This attitude is one of the key elements in the establishment of epistemological practices of this period. The process of moving outside classical frameworks of knowledge into modern ones was fostered greatly by the conquest , settlement, and incorporation of the New World into the European sphere of influence. The New World helped to create a community of experts with the experience to describe the New World. These experts established networks of communication...