Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (review)

Cañizares-Esguerra’s collection of essays is not only, as its subtitle announces, a contribution to the history of science in the Iberian world but also to that of political and economic thought in both Spain and Spanish America. The collection covers a chronological span from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century and ranges across a number of different areas of early modern natural knowledge. Throughout, the author explores views and interpretations of nature from two perspectives—that of metropolitan, imperial priorities and that of protonational identity, or, to use his preferred term, patriotism among colonial, as well as metropolitan, elites and intelligentsia.

Calling attention to the role of Spanish sixteenth- and eighteenth-century imperial and commercial policies in gathering knowledge, searching for new natural resources, and developing technology, Cañizares-Esguerra argues strongly that the Iberian world deserves a more prominent place in the history of early modern science than it has usually received. In his view, the sources of this neglect lie in a modern historiography of science that long emphasized northern Europe and privileged the exact sciences, as well as in earlier hostile attitudes to Spanish society and religion among northern European writers, first under the influence of the Protestant Reformation and later under the influence of the Enlightenment. He points out that much still remains to be learned about the role of science and technology in the far-flung and long-lived Iberian colonial empires, notwithstanding the attention now paid to such disciplines as early modern botany and natural history.

Metropolitan concerns are treated most fully in the chapter “Eighteenth-Century Spanish Political Economy,” which shows that a series of patriotic authors argued vigorously about causes and remedies of perceived national decline, while reacting strongly against negative assessments coming from abroad. Other chapters trace the development of scientific interests, arguments, and institutions among intellectuals in the largely autonomous viceroyalties that comprised the Spanish empire. Thus, the chapter “New World, New Stars” shows that seventeenth-century Creole reaction to claims (deriving from ancient theories linking the stars, the climate, and the character of peoples) that astral influences peculiar to the New World enfeebled its inhabitants played a part in the development of theories about a racialized human body.

The chapter “How Derivative was Humboldt” provides a thoughtful re-assessment of the relationship of Alexander von Humboldt’s investigation of bio-distribution in the Andes to earlier accounts of An-dean climate and natural history, “a long-standing tradition of thinking about the American viceroyalties as Edenic microcosms” (128). The last chapter, “Landscapes and Identities,” extends the interdisciplinary range of the volume to the history of art in an exploration of the interaction of patriotism, historical narrative, and nature study in the work of Mexican landscape painters during the second half of the nineteenth century.

All of the essays in this book except one were previously published in earlier versions, but as revised and united in this volume they constitute a coherent whole. Therein, Cañizares-Esguerra contributes valuable insights and some incisive historiographical critiques.