Potatoes and the Hispanic Enlightenment

Among the new publications tempting Spanish readers in 1785, alongside a comedy about jealous women, a how-to manual on forensic surgery, and a 600-page translation of the rulings of the Council of Trent, was a modest pamphlet about potatoes. Its author was an expatriate Irishman, Henry (or Enrique) Doyle. Doyle had for some decades resided in Spain, pursuing an undistinguished career in textile manufacturing. He had also drafted several essays on religious themes, with no impact whatsoever on the Spanish reading public. His writings on potatoes, however, were a phenomenal success. The 1785 pamphlet was followed in 1797 by a longer treatise issued with royal approbation at the behest of several important ministers, which was into its fourth edition by 1804. Newspapers and journals hailed Doyle as a patriotic and enlightened contributor to public happiness and seconded his ambition of extending potato cultivation across the length and breadth of Spain.¹

According to Doyle, the potato was a virtual wonder-food. Drawing on his familiarity with Ireland, he informed Iberian readers that the tuber was "healthy and nourishing," and in northern countries adorned the tables of the rich while also sustaining the poor, "who eat scarcely any other food, and with this diet stay healthy and robust." It was immensely versatile, as it could be consumed in so many different ways:

… boiled, roasted, fried, in salads, in stews or mixed with other vegetables. Peeled and dressed with salt, garlic, oil and water it is a good, very cheap food for the poor. Eaten with butter they are nourishing and enjoyable. Cooked, peeled, and mixed with sugar, lard and eggs they can be used to make tarts, puddings and other delicate pastries; dissolved in broth or milk, it is a healthy and nourishing food for nursing infants and children.²

Doyle expatiated on the potato's many merits, which included not only its culinary qualities, but also its potential as an animal feed, the ease of cultivating it, and its medical ability to correct acrid humours.

Doyle's treatise on the propagation, cultivation, and use of potatoes was not an anomaly. His passionate and verbose celebration of the potato—the 1804 edition ran to some 250 pages—was one of hundreds of works dedicated to the tuber that were published across late eighteenth-century Europe. Agronomists, gentlemen farmers, botanists, priests, philosophers, and other patriotic individuals penned treatises, conducted experiments, sponsored agricultural competitions, disseminated seed potatoes, and in general mounted a sustained pan-European effort to encourage the cultivation and consumption of potatoes. Although many other edible plants, from Siberian buckwheat to wild rice, also attracted interest, the volume, geographic spread, and messianic tone of these potato-texts is remarkable.³ What explains such pervasive interest in the new-world potato?

This article examines potato promotion in the eighteenth-century Hispanic world. Spain's potato-celebration extended beyond Europe, uniting enlightened communities across its empire. The potato's advocates in Spain and its colonies considered the vegetable from the perspective of new ideas about the relationship between food, healthy populations, benevolent governance, and the wealth and grandeur of nations. On both sides of the Atlantic, for men such as Doyle, potatoes formed part of a larger complex of enlightened improvements that would lead, ultimately, to a stronger and more wealthy state. These new ideas about the centrality of nourishing food to the practice of governance crisscrossed the empire, helping to establish the potato as a symbol of enlightenment. Such transatlantic conversations were a characteristic feature of the Enlightenment. Indeed, as scholars increasingly argue, the Enlightenment cannot be understood separately from these global conversations, which in many ways were the Enlightenment.

The potato's eighteenth-century Hispanic career also reveals the varied local articulations of enlightened ideas. Although the potato was a popular object of investigation in many parts of Europe and its colonial hinterlands, savants in Spain and the Indies had a unique relationship with the tuber. As they often noted, it was Spaniards who first introduced potatoes to Europe, and who therefore deserved credit for the increase in human well-being that they insisted it would...