Imperio e información: funciones del saber en el dominio colonial español by Arndt Brendecke (review)

The subject of this book is the vast amount of information collected by the Spanish Crown about its overseas possessions during the first two hundred years after the discovery of America. It joins a number of works that have appeared over the last ten years that explore ways in which this information was solicited, generated, compiled, and used by different constituencies within the Spanish Empire, principally the royal Habsburg court, the Casa de Contratación and the Council of the Indies. But whereas previous books approached this subject from the perspective of the history of science or literature, Brendecke’s objective in this Spanish translation of his 2009 book is to study the relationship between the use of information about Spain’s overseas empire and colonial domination (9). His goal is to find and highlight the politics the author presupposes was embedded in this (mostly geographical and descriptive) information. To achieve this he promises to take no facet of the knowledge-generating endeavor at face value, and indeed, he leaves few stones unturned in this nuanced and well-written exploration of the subject.

The book’s methodological approach aligns with those of the history of ideas, and employs mostly the tools of discourse analysis, an important component of which, the author explains, is to set aside from his consideration of the decision-making process of imperial governance any “functionalism” this information might have had and the rationalism it implies (33). The political dimension is systematically sought out for each case, whether this dimension was expressed in words or only evidenced by actions. To make sense of these, the author adapts to history the concepts of communicative settings and epistemic settings developed for linguistics. By thinking of discourses as taking place in these settings, it is possible to generate “un alto grado de atención con respecto a la variabilidad de los contextos, de las condiciones situacionales y performativas, pero a la vez también sigue siendo posible generalizar, es decir elaborar distintos settings como modelos” (28–29). The epistemic setting delimits the conditions under which something can be known by a given person or group, while the communicative setting lays out the communicative systems in operation. At this stage, readers would have benefited from more finely drawn contours between “information” and “knowledge,” which are often used interchangeably or problematically equated with “news” and “science.”

In the first two chapters—the most innovative, in my opinion—the objective is to outline the traditions that explain the relationship between knowledge and decision-making in an early modern monarchy, and which Brendecke finds embedded in the concepts of a monarch’s panoptic vision and in the value-laden phrase entera noticia. It was essential for an early modern monarch to be (or seem to be) completely informed, since the smooth working of the economy of rewards hinged on an all-seeing monarch, who by this virtue could be perceived as just. A “blind” or uninformed monarch could appear uninterested or ineffective, so it was essential for the structures of governance to support effective communicative settings. The author argues that the processes for extracting information developed by the Inquisition, once ensconced in the courtly setting, became a way of instantiating a juridico-political culture of observation and reporting devoted to providing the monarch with the entera noticia.

Brendecke devotes the second chapter to a semantic analysis of the phrase. Here we find, not surprisingly, that the noticia could never be entera, and that the resulting ambiguity could be used for political purposes. Should the monarch need to reverse a decision, he could argue that he had not been fully informed or even that he had been mal informado, but...