Iberian colonial science

ISIS

Volumn 96, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 64-70

  Cañizares Esguerra, Jorge ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HISTORY; HUMAN; POLITICAL SYSTEM; PORTUGAL; SPAIN;

COLONIALISM; HISTORY, 16TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 17TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 18TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HUMANS; NATURAL HISTORY; PORTUGAL; SPAIN;

EID: 26944457766     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/430679     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. On nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish colonial science in Africa, see Antonio González Bueno and Alberto Gomis Blanco, Los naturalistas españoles en el Africa Hispana (1860-1936) (Madrid: Organismo Autónome Parques Nacionales, 2002).
2. For representative syntheses of the history of science in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, see José María López Piñero, Ciencia y técnica en la sociedad española de los siglos XVI y XVII (Barcelona: Labor Univ., 1979);
3. Enrique Martĩnez Ruiz, ed., Felipe II, la ciencia y la técnica (Madrid: Actas Editorial, 1999);
4. David C. Goodman, Power and Penury: Government, Technology, and Science in Philip II's Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988);
5. and Manuel Sellés, José Luis Peset, and Antonio Lafuente, eds., Carlos III y la ciencia de la ilustración (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1988).
6. For a survey of eighteenth-century colonial science, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, "Spanish America: From Baroque to Modern Colonial Science," in The Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter, vol. 4 of The Cambridge History of Science, ed. David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 718-738.
7. Most studies tend to focus on the Spanish scientific expedition to South America of 1862-1866; see Leoncio López-Ocón and Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, "Los condicionamientos políticos de la Comisión Científica del Pacífico: Nacionalismo e hispanoamericanismo en la España bajoisabelina (1854-1868)," Revista de Indias, 1987, 47:667-682;
8. Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, Crónica de una expedición romántica al Nuevo Mundo: La Comisión Cientifica del Pacifico (1862-1866) (Madrid: CSIC, 1988);
9. Robert R. Miller, For Science and National Glory: The Spanish Scientific Expedition to America, 1862-1866 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1968);
10. and Leoncio López-Ocón and Carmen María Pérez-Montes Salmerón, eds., Marcos Jiménez de la Espana (1831-1898): Tras la senda de un explorador (Madrid: CSIC, 2000).
11. Pedro M. Pruna has studied the development of a Creole Cuban scientific tradition in nineteenth-century Cuba in "National Science in a Colonial Context: The Royal Academy of Sciences in Havana, 1861-1898," Isis, 1994, 85:412-126.
12. For a study of the science behind nineteenth-century sugar production in Cuba and Puerto Rico under both Spanish and U.S. imperial rule, see Stuart McCook, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2002).
13. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1999).
14. See the recent compilation in English that gathers contributions by the leading scholars on Hernández: Simon Varey, Rafael Chabrán, and Dora B. Weiner, eds., Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernández (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000).
15. Donald Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959);
16. and Serge Gruzinski, L'Amérique de la conquête: Peinte par les Indiens du Mexique (Paris: UNESCO/Flammarion, 1991).
17. Martín De la Cruz and Juan Badiano, The Badianus Manuscript, Codex Barberini, Latin 241, Vatican Library: An Aztec Herbal of 1552, trans. Emily Walcott Emmart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ., 1940).
18. On this topic, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, "Renaissance Mess(tizaje): What Mexican Indians Did to Titian and Ovid," New Centennial Review, 2002, 2:267-276.
19. On this topic, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, "New Worlds, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600-1650," American Historical Review, 1999, 104:33-68;
20. and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, idem, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001).
21. Richard L. Kagan, "Clio and the Crown: Writing Histories in Habsburg Spain," in Spain, Europe, and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, ed. Richard L. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 73-100.
22. On this, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 1-60.
23. Paula De Vos, "An Herbal El Dorado: The Quest for Botanical Wealth in the Spanish Empire," Endeavour, 2003, 27:117-121;
24. and Paula De Vos, idem, "The Art of Pharmacy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Mexico" (PhD diss., Univ. of California, Berkeley, 2001).
25. Antonio Barrera, "Local Herbs, Global Medicines: Commerce, Knowledge, and Commodities in Spanish America," in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 163-181.
26. José María López Piñero and María Luz López Terrada, La influencia española en la introducción en Europa de las plantas americanas: 1493-1623 (Valencia: Instituto de Estudios Documentales e Históricos sobre la Ciencia de la Univ. de Valencia, 1997).
27. Raquel Alvarez Peláez, La conquista de la naturaleza americana (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1993);
28. and Barbara Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1996).
29. On these traditions, see Alison Sandman, "Mirroring the World: Sea Charts, Navigation, and Territorial Claims in Sixteenth-Century Spain," in Smith and Findlen, Merchants and Marvels (cit. n. 13), pp. 83-108;
30. José Sala Catalá, Ciencia y técnica en la metropolización de América (Madrid: Edición Doce Calles, 1994);
31. Ursula Lamb, Cosmographers and Pilots of the Spanish Maritime Empire (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995);
32. and Modesto Bargalló, La minería y la metalurgía en la America española durante la época colonial (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955).
33. Some of these images can be found in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, "Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer?" Perspectives on Science, 2004, 12:86-125.
34. Lawrence Kemys, A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana (London: Thomas Dawson, 1596).
35. On the thoroughly multinational and multiethnic character of the loosely held Catholic monarchy on the eve of the Bourbon reforms, see Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
36. Cañizares-Esguerra, "New Worlds, New Stars" (cit. n. 9), pp. 33-68.
37. This idea has been explored in greater detail in Cañizares- Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World (cit. n. 9), pp. 155-160. I claim that the dozens of natural history colonial expeditions financed by the Spanish crown were not solely efforts to extract riches from the peripheries. There was an important nationalist component to these efforts, including giving Spanish names to the new plants.
38. Antonio Lafuente and Antonio Mazuecos, Los caballeros del punto fijo: Ciencia, política y aventura en la expedición geodésica hispanofrancesa al virreinato del Perú en el siglo XVIII (Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 1987);
39. Arthur R. Steele, Flowers for the King: The Expeditions of Ruiz and Pavón and thé Flora of Peru (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1964);
40. Antonio González Bueno, ed., Expedición botánica al Virreinato del Peru (1777-1788) (Barcelona: Lunwerg Editores, 1988):
41. Francisco Javier Puerto Sarmiento, La ilusión quebrada: Botánica, sanidad y política cientifica en la España ilustrada (Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 1988):
42. Xavier Lozoya, Plantas y luces en México: La real expedición científica a Nueva España (1787-1803) (Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 1984);
43. Iris H. W. Engstrand, Spanish Scientists in the New World: The Eighteenth-Century Expeditions (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1981);
44. Juan Pimentel, La física de la monarquía: Ciencia y política en el pensamiento colonial de Alejandro Malaspina (1754-1810) (Madrid: Doce Calles, 1998);
45. and Marcelo Frías Núñez, Tras El Dorado vegetal: José Celestino Mutis y la Real Expedición Botánica del Nuevo Reino de Granada (1783-1808) (Seville: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1994).
46. " . . . doce naturalistas con otros tantos chymicos o mineralogistas esparcidos por sus estados, producirán por medios de sus peregrinaciones una utilidad incomparablemente mayor, que cien mil hombres combatiendo por añadir al Imperio Español algunas provincias": Francisco Javier Puerto Sarmiento, Ciencia de cámara: Casimiro Gómez Ortega (1741-1818): El científico cortesano (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1992), pp. 155-156.
47. I have developed the story in greater detail in "How Derivative Was Humboldt? Microcosmic Nature Narratives in Early Modern Spanish America and the (Other) Origins of Humboldt's Ecological Ideas," in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
48. Mauricio Nieto Olarte, Remedios para el imperio: Historia natural y la apropriación del Nuevo Mundo (Bogota: Institute Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2000).