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

Safier's book follows the celebrated voyage of the Charles Marie de La Condamine (1701–1774) through South America and down the Amazon. The reason for his trip, which began in 1735, was to measure the length of the meridian at the equator to determine whose theory of the earth's shape was correct, Isaac Newton's or René Descartes'. The voyage marked the unfurling of scientific rationalism across the globe, with La Condamine—a member of the French Academy of Sciences, a friend of Voltaire, and a contributor to the Encyclopédie—as rationalism's intrepid flag bearer. Or did it? Safier has little interest in creating a triumphant account of the voyage (much of what we know comes from La Condamine's own account, published in 1751, six years after his return to Paris). His goal is to explore the ways in which information about the New World was constructed, collected, circulated, redacted, edited, published, discussed, absorbed, and rebutted by intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic during the age of the Enlightenment.

The work stands as a model of interdisciplinary scholarship. Safier is particularly astute at investigating the range of what might be called "signifying practices"—including and beyond words on the page—that carried meaning to an eighteenth-century public. Thus, he considers not only what La Condamine wrote about his own explorations but also how the physical traces left in his wake produced knowledge: ruined pyramids, drafts of maps, patterns of footnotes, and a pickled monkey (!).

The results are engaging and illuminating. For instance, Chapter 1 centers on the soon-to-be-ruined pyramids that La Condamine built in Ecuador to anchor ground measurements. Safier argues that the pyramids, along with other monuments bearing inscriptions, offered a kind of "credibility test" for European arbiters, who were half a world away and unable to witness or independently verify the measurements (39). Safier's attention to the role that images played in this chapter and others shows a deft commingling of concerns that are usually divided between historians and art historians.

Likewise, Chapter 4 draws from the methods of cartographical historians and textual scholars in its scrupulous examination of different editions of the "Carta de la Provincia de Quito" (1750), as well as annotated printer's proofs from the plates at different stages in the engraving process. Given the meticulous documentation that precedes it, Safier's conclusion, that "cartographic knowledge-in-the-making was as dependent upon social and material processes in the printing house as it was on on-site reconnaissance in the field," rests on scholarly bedrock (165).

Safier shows his attention to the lessons of literary scholarship (a faint whiff of deconstruction is perceptible) in his discussion of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's history of Inca rule as it was repackaged in eighteenth century France.¹ He examines what readers encountered on the page of a text that was "parse[d], deconstruct[ed] and reassemble[d]" by its editors, to argue that "a theory of natural historical progress was represented typographically within" (234, 232).

The book's sole flaw stems from Safler's essayistic impulse. His painstaking scrutiny of individual moments or objects coming out of La Condamine's voyage does not always penetrate to the epistemological conditions that made certain kinds of New World knowledge possible in the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, the book is indispensable reading for anyone interested in fresh interdisciplinary approaches to the science and intellectual history of this era.