Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (review)

This book is a welcome addition to three fields that have seen considerable expansion during the past generation—Iberian history, colonial history, and the history of science. It is a novel project that only scratches the surface of a topic that will hopefully engage scholars for years to come—the history of Iberian science. Indeed, as its editors claim (and several of the contributors repeat), Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires is the first collection of essays about it ever published in English. Given all of the attention lavished on the Iberian empires by Anglo-American scholars throughout the past two centuries, the long delay in the appearance of this kind of work is surprising, regardless of whether it was caused by the predilection of historians of science for the pioneers from Northern Europe (with the notable exception of Galileo) or, more insidiously, by the Black Legend—a prejudice that denied early modern Spaniards and Portuguese the capacity for rational thought. Not only do the articles in this volume dismiss any shadow of doubt that might still hang over the scientific dimensions of the Iberian expansion; they also demonstrate that Iberian science was global in scope decades (if not centuries) before the horizons of Northern Europeans expanded to the same degree.

These points should be well known to those who study the history of science, but they are not. The strangeness perhaps comes from the unfamiliar names of the protagonists in this volume, as well as the exotic locales in which they worked—Madrid, Seville, Lisbon, Goa, Mexico City, and Manila. But the areas examined in the chapters are canonical for the history of science, at least as it has been recast during the past few decades, from forms of intellectual history into examinations of sociability between scholars, the circulation of knowledge, and the practices of philosophical inquiry. Spaniards and Portuguese engaged in technological innovation, in the exact sciences of astronomy and mathematics, and in such descriptive endeavors as botanical illustration and cartography all in the service of empire. Yet the definition of "imperial science" is fluid, easily comprising royally sponsored expeditions, bureaucratic practices aimed at managing and exploiting new territories and their populations, and observations made by private individuals or members of religious orders. As such, the chapters of this volume have a thematic, rather than chronological, organization.

Seeking to produce a useful volume, as well as to provide a forum for new research in the field, the editors include surveys of the literature relating to the developments in the Spanish and Portuguese history of science throughout the twentieth century. These overviews set the stage for the specific analyses that follow, none of which seem to overlap greatly with the other chapters. The contributions fall largely into three categories: the technology of the early sixteenth-century discoveries; the mental and bureaucratic organization of the empires from the late sixteenth until the late seventeenth centuries; and the projects for imperial consolidation at the end of the eighteenth century, largely borne out of rivalries with other European empires, and between Iberians and Creoles.

The articles that fall into the first category reveal the novel character of navigational techniques and its repercussions on mathematics and cosmography, as well as the social and political configurations that influenced Spanish and Portuguese maritime activities. Those in the second category examine how Iberian imperial projects were realized with the help of individuals trained in empirical observation, yet open to different forms of knowledge offered by indigenous peoples, especially medical techniques and remedies. These chapters also explore the concept of the "baroque" as it relates to the specific visions of nature articulated by Spanish observers, drawing parallels between Iberian naturalists and their peers elsewhere in Catholic Europe. The articles in the third category, which focus on Enlightenment-era developments, show that Iberians had a keen desire to keep abreast of the changes occurring in French intellectual...