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Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution
The key theme in this short but scintillating book is the role of the Atlantic world in fostering the modern practice of empirical observation, a tradition that broke with the medieval dependence on textual interpretations. Things -be they natural or man-made--needed to be seen “in situ,” recorded in drawings, measured, counted, collected (if possible), classified, and assessed as to their potential economic value and socio-cultural significance. And the arena par excellence for such a transformation of scientific methodology was the Spanish American empire. Though Spain initially was searching for the riches of the East Indies, the accidental discovery of the New World required the establishment of institutions, methodologies, and techniques for not only claiming physical territory, but also to fit this new world’s peoples, places, plants, animals--the myriad phenomena--into the knowledge space of the Old World.
The author demonstrates how, from the initial explorations and colonization practices, the Spanish invented practices or copied indigenous practices (encomienda and tribute), then institutionalized them via legal regulations. As the process moved from oceanic navigation through exploration, settlement, commerce, administrative, political and religious control, the information base increased dramatically. These themes are introduced in a chapter on “Searching the Land for Commodities,” using the discovery and recovery of a new kind of balsam (for long a classical medicine) in Santo Domingo in 1528 as a case study. But it was only the first of thousands of discoveries--plants, herbs, fruits, crops, and minerals--the commodities that Spain and, later, Western Europe received. Spain also exported its own commodities to the new continent, studying carefully how they adapted (or not) to the new varied environments. Experimentation became significant: Where could Old World cereals such as wheat grow best? Could cattle prosper in the tropics? Would vines thrive enough to produce wine?
Chapter Two discusses the role of the Casa de la Contratación in Seville as the center for the collection, regulation, analysis, and diffusion of information from the reports on all these new wonders of the natural world. From 1503, ship pilots could find training courses there, be tested, and acquire the new instruments of navigation; what had originally been thought of as a warehouse for commodities coming from and going to the New World (much like the Portuguese Casa da India model on which it was probably based), now the Casa became an information node where natural scientists, traders, and anybody with new facts and ideas could share their knowledge.
But the collection of information on the complexity of peoples, places, events, and processes of the empire required a more formal methodology, and Chapter Five [End Page 172] deals with one of the most significant instruments, the relaciones geográficas--reports prepared based on detailed questionnaires completed by colonial authorities or local residents who had the required facts. Now maps and detailed statistics became more common in reporting. For geographers and historians alike these reports provide some of the most detailed information available. The Council of the Indies steadily began to dedicate time to ensure that the chief administrators in the colonies completed their duties regarding information collection; empiricism and imperialism became a single collective goal.
From the middle of the sixteenth century, a more professionalized systematic information collection system produced enough material that natural history scholars could begin to theorize and frame the discoveries in multi-volume treatises. Chapter Five provides us with details of the case of José de Acosta and his Historia natural y moral de la Indias. Based on the accumulated information, Acosta was asking questions about natural causes and principles governing distributions and processes.
Private initiatives and state sponsorship had set in motion a process of expanding the empirical knowledge that was to reverberate through, and gather speed in, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Spain and Portugal alike were to lose their empires, but their gifts to science were the most far-reaching in modern history: they triggered an information revolution. We should compliment Antonio Barrera-Osorio for providing such a succinct and elegant introduction to a subject that can only grow in importance in the future. This is a book that all Latin Americanists will need in their collections.
Syracuse University