Science and Empire in the Iberian Atlantic

Introduction

Traditionally, narratives of the development of modern science have excluded the history of scientific activity in the Spanish and Portuguese empires. In particular, colonial Latin America has been doubly cursed by traditional assumptions about colonies as peripheral places and historical assertions of Iberian backwardness. Beginning as early as the Enlightenment, and continuing into the 20th century, scholars have defined the rules of scientific modernity by its permutations north of the Pyrenees and, later, in the United States. The Spanish and Portuguese empires and their inhabitants, however, applied scientific thinking to many aspects of life in the Americas. As early explorers and settlers of the New World, they had a famously privileged role in observing and developing theoretical strategies to explain its natural wonders to fellow Europeans, but, more generally, science was the pragmatic motive force of these two globe-encompassing empires. As a result, the social, practical, and political organization of scientific investigation in the Iberian empires rarely resembled the gentlemanly culture and experimental interests of the scholarly academies of France and England whose study had previously guided historians’ assumptions regarding modern science. Within a decade of Columbus’s return from his first voyage, the Spanish monarchy had already established the Casa de Contratación de Indias, partially modeled on the Portuguese Casa da Índia, to organize the wealth of data returning from the Americas. Continuing in the 16th century, the Habsburg monarchs, particularly Philip II, promoted the study at their courts of mathematics, engineering, cartography, and other sciences with practical applications for a growing empire. The Bourbon monarchs of the late 18th century oversaw a resurgence in officially directed scientific activity, particularly in the form of botanical expeditions in the Americas and the Pacific. So far, these centrally organized responses to the 16th-century encounter with the New World and their late Bourbon resurgence have dominated historians’ chronologies. However, scholars increasingly recognize the great diversity of actors, pursuits, and motivations for scientific practices and knowledge-making in colonial Latin America, a diversity that suggests the limitations of this chronology. It is only in the last three decades that this broadly defined range of scientific endeavor has attracted historiographical attention, first in Spanish, and much more recently in English. The bibliography for this topic, particularly as the English-language literature catches up, promises to change swiftly with the current generation of scholarship.

General Overviews

The geographic, disciplinary, and chronological breadth encompassed by the category of “colonial science” in Latin America has precluded any comprehensive survey of the topic. There are, however, common historiographical questions and paradigms that have defined the field over recent decades. It is convenient to mark this shift into the contemporary era of histories of science in the Iberian empires with the work of the Spanish historian José María López Piñero, who in the late 1970s challenged assumptions regarding early modern Spain’s supposed scientific backwardness (López Piñero 1979). Following this example, and in preparation for the quincentenary of Columbus’s first transatlantic voyage, the Spanish government sponsored a wide array of studies of scientific discovery in the Spanish Empire, frequently in the form of collections such as Lafuente and Sala Catala 1992. These sometimes nationalistically motivated projects provided the breadth of scientific activity in the Spanish Empire with its first sustained and wide-ranging attention. Collectively, their unifying theme was to engage with López Piñero’s “polemic of Spanish science,” primarily seeking to establish the existence of scientific activity in the Spanish empire or to establish Spain’s modernity by affirming its participation in the Scientific Revolution, as in Trabulse 1994. During the 1990s, this research was still primarily pursued by Spanish historians, but, as the list of contributors to Navarro Brotóns and Eamon 2007 attests, a growing minority of scholars working in English began to participate in the field. Emblematic of this transition are Cañizares-Esguerra 2006 and Bleichmar, et al. 2009, whose authors collectively represent the growing scholarly community and the progression of the field into new areas of interest for historians of science in general. Deans-Smith 2006 provides an effective introduction to the common questions of this flowering of new research on both sides of the Atlantic, and in both English and Spanish, since 2000.

Bleichmar, Daniela, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan. Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
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Fifteen collected essays covering the Iberian empires across three centuries, along with an introduction and afterword that effectively summarize current trends in the history of early modern Iberian science. Arranges essays loosely in four thematic sections: historiographical overviews, the disruptive role of the New World, the local and the global in geographies of knowledge production, and the circulation of natural commodities and scientific knowledge.
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Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
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This collection of seven essays (six previously available as journal articles) spans areas of current interest to historians of science in early modern Spain and Spanish America. Common threads include the revision of history of science narratives that privilege the “hard sciences” over natural and mechanical sciences, and the intellectual independence of Creole scientific circles.
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Deans-Smith, Susan. “Nature and Scientific Knowledge in the Spanish Empire: Introduction.” Colonial Latin American Review 15.1 (2006): 29–38.
DOI: 10.1080/10609160600607416Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A succinct, clear, and informative introduction to current trends in the historiography of science in Spanish America, including increasingly inclusive understandings of scientific contributors, the unbalancing of notions of core and periphery, and challenges to stereotypical representations of Spain’s obscurantism.
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Lafuente, Antonio, and Jose Sala Catala, eds. Ciencia colonial en América. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992.
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Collected essays cover a well-distributed variety of subject matter, organized around the thesis that the institutionalization of science is of central interest to studies of “colonial science.” The editors argue that this approach protects scholars against ahistorical splits between the traditional and modern or the core and periphery. Organized in sections under the labels “Metropolitan Science,” “Viceregal Science,” “Creole Science,” and “National Science.”
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López Piñero, José María. Ciencia y técnica en la sociedad española de los siglos XVI y XVII. Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1979.
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Foundational work that begins with an introduction on the historical evolution of the stereotype of Spain’s scientific backwardness, while the book’s core outlines the community of scientific practitioners in 16th-century Spain and its members’ participation in a variety of disciplines. Ends by crediting socioeconomic changes and intellectual repression in the Counter-Reformation for a 17th-century decline in Spanish science.
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Navarro Brotóns, Víctor, and William Eamon, eds. Más allá de la leyenda negra: España y la Revolución Científica. Valencia, Spain: Universitat de Valéncia, 2007.
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Amassed from papers presented at a conference held in 2005, this collection presents an overview of contemporary scholarship of early modern Spanish science in regard to the Scientific Revolution. Not explicitly oriented to colonial science, it is still a helpful overview of topics of contemporary historiographical interest.
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Trabulse, Elías. Ciencia y tecnologia en el Nuevo Mundo. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994.
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A concise but thorough overview of the physical and mathematical sciences in the New World. Written with a now dated interest in the diffusion of the Scientific Revolution in the New World, it nonetheless provides an introduction to fields of scientific enquiry beyond Natural History and other life sciences to which scholars have begun to turn their interests.
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Primary Sources

Unfortunately, there are very few English translations of primary sources having to do with scientific practice in the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas, and those that are available are almost exclusively editions of elite, scholarly texts that were published or otherwise collected and reproduced at their time of creation. Acosta 2002 and Myers 2007 provide translations of two such published, and essential, works by Spanish natural historians, and Medina 1972 translates a cosmographical manuscript by an author of similar scholarly notoriety. Fewer still are the translations of the journals of exploratory expeditions of the 18th century, although Ferreira 1972 provides insight into the operation and goals of these projects. These volumes are, of course, useful for an introduction to the character of scientific activity in the Iberian Americas, but sources of this kind represent only part of the diverse character of scientific practice in the early modern period. For the time being, volumes such as Clayton 2009 and Sahagún 1950–1982 represent steps in the right direction in this regard, with translations of early codices of the natural and the medical by indigenous experts in a variety of practices, but they are nonetheless organized by elite or scholarly authors, just as the aforementioned sources are. The History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean, an online database, also provides a collection of documents of a wider variety of authorship and disciplinary interest, but its current scope recommends it as introductory material. The scarcity of English translations of any sort reflects the traditional lack of interest among English-speaking scholars in Iberian science, while the predominance of scholarly texts, particularly those with non-Iberian audiences, reflects historical biases toward elite scientists as they have traditionally been defined. Hopefully, given the growing interest among English-speaking historians of science in the Iberian world and the active expansion of thematic interests in the field since the early 2000s, the quantity and variety of translated primary materials will soon reflect the changing nature of the field.

Acosta, José de. Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Edited by Jane E. Mangan, with an introduction and commentary by Walter D. Mignolo. Translated by Frances López-Morillas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
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First modern English translation of this foundational work, originally published in 1590. Includes Edmundo O’Gorman’s notes explicating Acosta’s citations in classical texts, while also introducing new ones that alert readers to the indigenous cultural context Acosta frequently elides. Mignolo’s contributions comment on this silence of indigenous voices and the role of the work in constructing colonial difference.
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Clayton, Martin, ed. Flora: The Aztec Herbal. London: The Royal Collection, 2009.
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Collected contents of a manuscript copy held by the British Royal Library of the Codex Cruz-Badianus, a Latin translation from Nahuatl of an herbal composed at the Colegio de Santa Cruz e Tlatelolco in 1552. This edition prints the Latin translation and a new English translation side by side. Published in association with Harvey Mill Publishers.
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Ferreira, Alexandre Rodrigues. Viagem filosófica pelas Capitanias do Grão Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso e Cuiabá. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Conselho Federal de Cultura, 1972.
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Collects surviving journals and illustrations (including color plates) of the Portuguese-educated Brazilian Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira’s nine-year expedition in Brazil on behalf of the royal botanical garden at the Ajuda Palace in Lisbon. Ferreira’s transatlantic career and ethnography of and thorough interest in the political situation of indigenous peoples help illuminate the political and imperial stakes of naturalist expeditions.
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History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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An online database that provides over two hundred primary source documents, including texts and images, collected into topics with introductory essays. Not restricted to the colonial period. Useful resource for student readings.
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Medina, Pedro de. A Navigator’s Universe: The Libro de cosmographía of 1538. Translated by Ursula Lamb. Chicago: Newberry Library/University of Chicago Press, 1972.
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Theoretical treatise on cosmography rather than a practical instructional manual (like author’s famous 1545 work Arte de navegar). Arranged as a dialog between cosmographer and pilot students, which is emblematic of the guiding 16th-century Spanish concern for applying scientific knowledge to practical pursuits. Includes the original manuscript in facsimile, as well as an English translation and essays on Medina by Ursula Lamb.
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Myers, Kathleen Ann. Fernández de Oviedo’s Chronicle of America: A New History for a New World. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.
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Though only a small selection of the fifty-book original (titled Historia general y natural de las Indias), this volume is the only contemporary English-language translation of this essential work. The first half includes short essays on topics such as Oviedo’s historical method and his ethnographic interests. The second half collects translated chapters along with over eighty pages of facsimile reproductions of illustrations and pages from Oviedo’s original manuscript.
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Sahagún, Bernardino de. General History of the Things of New Spain. Edited and translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1950–1982.
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Complete English translation of Nahuatl texts and Sahagún’s introduction and interpolations, with black-and-white reproductions of the painted illustrations. Provides students with insight into Nahua culture and Spanish impressions of it. As a missionary and an innovative ethnographer, Sahagún demonstrates the inadequacy of setting men of God and men of science in conflict when writing the history of science in the Spanish Empire.
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Indigenous Cosmologies and Practices

Increasingly, historians of science in the Iberian empires recognize the importance of understanding the contributions of indigenous experts and collaborators in expanding scientific knowledge in the Americas. Research into the nature of Amerindian cultures’ technologies and practices for advances in cosmological and natural knowledge before the arrival of Europeans by historians, however, has been slight. Primarily, a lack of nonmediated indigenous sources can explain this absence, although scholars have used native-language codices from the first generation after the conquest. One such is example is León-Portilla 1963, which attempts to reconstruct pre-Columbian Nahuatl cosmologies from sources such as those compiled by Bernardino de Sahagún (see Sahagún 1950–1982, cited under Primary Sources). Those works that do eschew Spanish-mediated sources tend to rely on an impressive marshaling of interdisciplinary data from archaeologists, anthropologists, and scientists, such as the collaboration of archaeologist and astrophysicist in Bauer and Dearborn 1995. Traditionally, these studies have primarily concerned themselves with technical recreations of, for example, indigenous astronomical knowledge in order to place them relative to a Western-defined trajectory of modern scientific development. More recently, however, scholars have turned their attentions to questions of culture in order to understand indigenous cosmologies and practices of knowledge-making on their own terms. Gary Urton’s argument for the analysis of khipus to expand beyond direct decoding and translation (Urton 2003) and Anthony Aveni’s revision of his own classic study of Mesoamerican astronomers clearly signal this trend (Aveni 2001). Although this transition brings the field closer to contemporary questions in the history of science in terms of approach, the disciplines these scholars address differ from those historians of science in the Spanish and Portuguese empires study with regard to indigenous knowledge. Pre-Columbian scholars have tended to favor studies of astronomy and mathematics, while postconquest scholars have been more interested in indigenous natural and medicinal knowledge. Parrish 2006 provides an instructive example from the British North American case of ways scholars can integrate the knowledge traditions of Native Americans and Africans in the hybrid scientific collaborations of the Americas.

Aveni, Anthony F. Skywatchers. Rev. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.
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This interdisciplinary study of Mesoamerican astronomy draws from anthropology, cultural history, the history of science, and astronomy to introduce both the practice of astronomy in Mesoamerica and its cultural significance. Updates the original (Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico), published in 1980, in the spirit of recent disciplinary developments by reorienting the text toward a cultural interpretation.
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Bauer, Brian S., and David S. P. Dearborn. Astronomy and Empire in the Ancient Andes: The Cultural Origins of Inca Sky Watching. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.
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This joint study by an archaeologist and an astrophysicist analyzes the integration of astronomical knowledge and observation into Inca governance in order to understand the social organization of the Inca Empire. Works from archaeological data and 16th- and 17th-century Spanish sources, situating practical reconstructions of Inca astronomy in an historical context.
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León Portilla, Miguel. Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963.
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An update to and translation of the Spanish-language La Filosofía Nahuatl. Involves a close reading of Nahua poetry and oral traditions recorded in early postconquest codices to unravel Nahua cosmologies. Operates within the framework of the history of ideas in order to identify what León Portilla presents as the fundamental questions of philosophy.
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Parrish, Susan Scott. American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
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Cultural history of British Empire natural sciences from the 1660s to the Revolutionary period. Peripheries of British North America had a key role as source for natural specimens; however, these collaborators, including Native Americans and Africans, reflected their own cosmologies in their observations. Instructive example of a more modern and complex indigenous role in scientific knowledge-making for studies of the Spanish Americas.
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Urton, Gary. Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
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Provides an overview of existing scholarship on these artifacts, in which Inca encoded information with knotted, colored strings, and proposes new analytical approaches not only to translate these as yet untranslated documents, but to argue for a far greater density of information encoded in them than previous scholars have allowed.
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The New World

Perhaps the fundamental motivator of scientific endeavor and discourse in the Iberian Americas was the existence itself of the “New World.” Moving beyond hagiographies of European discovery, the most common approach to studying the effect of the New World on European scientific knowledge has been to study the disruptive effect of its existence on the disciplines of cosmography and cartography, as in the works collected in Lafuente and Ortega 1993, and Natural History, as in Gerbi 1985. Scholars in this vein have argued that for Europeans these discoveries came into sharp contrast with accepted wisdom from ancient texts, causing a crisis in intellectual authority. In this telling, ancient textual authorities on geography or natural historical taxonomies were discredited by their inability to accommodate the empirical evidence of previously unknown landmasses, flora, and fauna coming from the Americas. Similarly, Greenblatt 1991 defines the “representational practices” employed by early European travelers, who described the New World in terms of “wonder,” or a fundamental break with and abandonment of inherited rational explanations. More recently, the variety of uses to which historians have found early modern scholars put classical texts has refined this telling to allow for more continuity and, as Grafton 1992 demonstrates, to end in more subtle crises of authority. The problem of the New World has not only proved fruitful for historians of the 16th century, however. The debate over the epistemological consequences of the New World’s existence evolved, reaching a peak, perhaps, in the 18th century, when foreign, Spanish, and Creole scholars argued regarding the supposed degeneracy of the New World and its inhabitants. Gerbi 1973 explores the full historical trajectory of this debate, which has roots in the earliest postconquest observations, and which has had political and intellectual consequences that extend to the present. Its most significant consequences, however, can be seen in the creation of self-aware, patriotic Creole historiographies and self-interested arguments for Creole intellectual authority regarding matters in the New World, as Cañizares-Esguerra 2001 shows.

Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.
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Studies inherent challenges in explaining the New World, particularly its pre-Columbian past, within the intellectual framework of the Enlightenment. Focuses on the influence of geographic and patriotic considerations on epistemologies of Spanish and Creole intellectuals with regard to the historiographical authority of indigenous, Spanish, and Creole authors and their superiority to northern European scholars.
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Carrillo Castillo, Jesús María. Naturaleza e Imperio: La representación del mundo natural en la Historia general y natural de las Indas de Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Madrid: Doce Calles y Fundación Carolina, 2004.
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Offers a detailed reading of Oviedo’s massive natural history as a work that, although modeled on Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, broke new ground. Imperial pragmatism and novel empiricism characterized Oviedo’s modernity. Shows that from its very inception the new science of empirical description was subordinated to empire.
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Gerbi, Antonello. The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900. Translated by Jeremy Moyle. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973.
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Analyzes the polemic of the New World—the debate regarding whether its “newness” resulted in its inferiority and its inhabitant’s degeneracy—primarily at its peak during the debates of scholars such as Buffon and de Pauw in the 18th and 19th centuries, but including historical antecedents and consequences spanning from Aristotle to the 20th century.
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Gerbi, Antonello. Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985.
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A seminal work on the reactions of 16th-century Europeans to the natural environment of the New World. The opening section outlines the diversity of individual perspectives on nature among early commentors, including Columbus, Cortés, and Verrazano. The bulk of the volume involves a detailed reading of Oviedo’s early Natural History of the Americas within the context of the Italian Renaissance.
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Grafton, Anthony. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1992.
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Accompanying the New York Public Library’s quincentenary exhibition on the New World’s impact on European intellectual culture, Grafton’s work provides a broad-ranging overview of relevant history and historiography. Also, however, the work explores Grafton’s subtle update of the New World’s presumed disruptive effects—that ancient scholarship’s malleability and resultant internal contradictions led to its discrediting, not its rigid inability to explain the discovery.
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Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
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This founding work in New Historicism provides tools for historians of the early Spanish experience of the New World. Explores the “representational practices” of early Spanish travelers and conquerors and determines their response to the Americas to be based on “wonder,” rather than rational assessment. Develops the “go-between,” a useful concept in addressing communication between indigenous and European cosmologies and natural knowledge.
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Lafuente, Antonio, and Maria Luisa Ortega, eds. Mundialización de la ciencia y cultura nacional: Actas del Congreso Internacional “Ciencia, Descubrimiento y Mundo Colonial.” Madrid: Doce Calles, 1993.
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The complete volume treats the globalization of science into the 20th century, but the first part’s sixteen essays in English and Spanish address the disruptive cosmographical consequences of Spanish discoveries in the New World. Of particular interest is Spanish scholarship on the Ottoman Empire and other parts of the Muslim world not frequently addressed in the English historiography on Spanish contributions to early modern scientific knowledge.
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Understanding and Defining Space

Collectively, the Portuguese and Spanish empires quickly expanded east and west, respectively, from the Iberian Peninsula to encompass the globe. Of all of the Iberian scientific and technological achievements of the early modern period, their innovations in long-range, scientific navigation have received the most attention from historians—a historiographical moment well-represented in Cortesão 1969–1971. However, earlier scholars tended to focus only on technological achievement and nationalistic celebrations of discovery, without addressing the epistemological consequences of these voyages. They also narrowly defined their chronological perspective with this “Age of Discovery,” neither exploring continuities from earlier periods nor following transitions into later ones. Wey-Gómez 2008 demonstrates the innovative interpretations made possible by analyzing the geographical and cartographical assumptions of early explorers according to deep historical antecedents. Cuesta Domingo 1999 exemplifies the concerns of Spanish scholars during the years surrounding the Columbian quincentenary, exploring Spanish astronomical and cartographical achievement in the early modern period. Most of this work, however, resembles Lafuente and Mazuecos 1987 in seeking to establish Spanish contributions to, and claim primacy for Spanish innovation in, a narrative of modern scientific development defined by later French and English achievements. Simon 1983 presents an interesting alternative for later periods, when policy decisions might have as much effect on changing spatial orientations as technological innovation. More recent scholarship has seen a flowering of studies of cartography, geodesy, and other constructions and representations of space that explore techniques more particular to the Spanish Empire, such as the hybrid New World mapping practices explained in Mundy 2000, the legal and institutional influences on the mapping of early discoveries discussed in Sandman 2002, the correlation of spatial observations and epistemologies of space in Contente Domingues 2007, and the literary cartography developed in Padrón 2004.

Contente Domingues, Francisco. “Science and Technology in Portuguese Navigation: The Idea of Experience in the Sixteenth Century.” In Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800. Edited by Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto. Translated by Neil Safier, 460–479. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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A succinct analysis of the complicated role appeals to “experience” played in the context of the geographical revolution resulting from Portuguese explorations in West Africa. Identifies the transformative effects that the practical requirements of navigation had over representations of space and the authority of empirical observers.
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Cortesão, Armando. History of Portuguese Cartography. Lisbon, Portugal: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1969–1971.
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English translation of the definitive work on Portuguese innovations in cartography in the period of their global expansion. Along with Luís de Albuquerque, Cortesão is responsible for leading the growth of interest in Portuguese and Spanish contributions to the early modern nautical sciences, including cartography, a field previously restricted to the later English, French, and Dutch age of sail.
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Cuesta Domingo, Mariano, ed. Descubrimiento y cartografía en la época de Felipe II. Valladolid, Spain: Universidad de Valladolid, 1999.
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Collection of essays developed through Universidad de Valladolid’s Seminario Iberoamericano de Descubrimientos y Cartografía, exploring the importance of nautical cartography, exploration, and discovery for the expansion of the Spanish Empire of Felipe II. Most essays share an interest in the problem of constructing and defining space in the context of navigation.
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Lafuente, Antonio, and Antonio Mazuecos. Los caballeros del punto fijo: Ciencia, política y aventura en la expedición geodésica hispanofrancesca al virreinato del Perú en el siglo XVIII. Barcelona: Serbal CSIC, 1987.
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In-depth study of the French and Spanish geodesic expedition to Quito of 1735 that focuses on Jorge and Juan Antonio Ulloa, highlighting Spanish contributions to a field typically associated with French and English scientists. Includes discussion of the expedition’s communication with Creole scientists and the stakes for national prestige and personal patronage.
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Mundy, Barbara E. The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
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Analysis of the maps from the Relaciones Geográficas, Juan López de Velasco’s comprehensive geographical project begun in 1577, including an extensive, instructive collection of full-color reproductions. Establishes distinct European and indigenous vocabularies of spatial representation while exploring the influence of different groups—an indigenous mapmaking artisanry or feuding Spanish landowners, for example—in blurring these distinctions.
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Padrón, Ricardo. The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
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Explores the role of 16th-century “cartographic literature”—historical narratives, itineraries, and other textual representations of space—in constructing America in the Spanish imagination. Of particular consequence is Padrón’s use of Spanish mapping to complicate the transition from linear representations of space associated with the medieval period to the planar abstractions associated with the Renaissance.
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Sandman, Alison. “Mirroring the World: Sea Charts, Navigations, and Territorial Claims in Sixteenth-Century Spain.” In Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, 83–108. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Follows debates between pilots and cosmographers regarding their priorities for constructing navigational charts. These practical, institutional disputes took on global importance in calculating the obverse of the Papal Line of Demarcation in order to define Spanish and Portuguese claims to the Spice Islands. Provides insight into the way practical considerations influenced conceptions of global space.
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Simon, William Joel. Scientific Expeditions in the Portuguese Overseas Territories (1783–1808): And the Role of Lisbon in the Intellectual-Scientific Community of the Late Eighteenth Century. Centro de Estudos de Cartografía Antiga, Série Memórias No. 22. Lisbon, Portugal: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1983.
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Investigates the colonial appointments and naturalist expeditions (of divergent success) of four Luso-Brazilian University of Coimbra graduates sent to Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, and Cabo Verde. Provides helpful insight into the quotidian operations of such postings, but also traces the growing Portuguese focus on Brazil, at the expense of African and Indian Ocean possessions, upon scientific investigation of its commercial and strategic potential.
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Wey-Gómez, Nicolás. The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
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Original interpretation of well-known materials, proposing an ideological, rather than technical, explanation for the southing element of Columbus’s course to the Indies. Argues that epistemological traditions regarding the Tropics’ productive capacity and the subject nature of their human inhabitants determined Columbus’s intended destination. An important explication of the north-south dimension of early modern Spanish, and European, empire.
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Natural History

In the contemporary historiography on science in the Iberian American empires, natural history has received more attention than any other discipline. As a result, it proves useful as a lens on the evolving concerns of historians of Iberian science as a whole. Traditionally, scholars have focused primarily on the royal expeditions of the late 18th century, which gathered botanical samples for illustration or collection in botanical gardens and to a lesser degree on the 16th-century efforts to discover and classify the wealth of previously unknown species of flora and fauna in the New World. The earliest studies, in English and exemplified by Steele 1964 and Engstrand 1981, prove mostly descriptive, primarily serving the defensive purpose of establishing the existence of scientific enquiry in the Spanish Empire. In the 1980s and increasingly in the 1990s, scholars, primarily writing in Spanish and Portuguese, began to focus on the economic and strategic impact of these discoveries for the Iberian empires, such as developing unique natural resources such as cinchona for a global market in commodities. This period of scholarship is well represented by the portrait of José Celestino Mutis in Frías Núñez 1994, and helpfully synthesized in Nieto Olarte 2000. For the Brazilian case, Beltrão Marques 1999 provides the most thorough study with regards to medical practice and materia medica, but with only limited concern for the global movement of those goods. More recently, the literature in English on natural history in the Americas has expanded, and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have increasingly turned their attentions toward previously unheralded contributions from indigenous and African knowledges, as well as members of nonscholarly occupational groups, such as merchants, healers, engineers, and pearl divers. Pardo Tomás 2002, for example, provides an important example of this approach, analyzing the work of three notable 16th-century natural history scholars against the social context in which it was created. Bleichmar 2012, by contrast, highlights the distinct visual botanical academic traditions developed in Spanish America that self-consciously sought to draw difference with those in Europe. In fact, Gonçalves Varela 2006 demonstrates the role José Bonifácio’s naturalist education and pursuits played in his participation in and leadership of the movement for Brazilian independence. The 17th and early 18th centuries remain the least-developed chronological period, but recent scholarship in colonial natural histories, such as Ewalt 2008, has begun to address this deficiency as well.

Beltrão Marques, Vera Regina. Natureza em Boiões: Medicinas e boticários no Brasil setecentista. Campinas, Brazil: Editora da Unicamp, 1999.
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Overview of medical knowledge and practice in colonial Brazil. Focuses on the role of apothecaries and other medical practitioners in creating a social space around curing and a hierarchy of medical authority in the hybrid, competitive colonial environment for curative solutions. Also covers the production of scholarly texts on materia medica in Brazil and Portuguese. Identifies indigenous Brazilians and Africans as sources, but without exploring their contributions.
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Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
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Zeroes in on the enormous visual output of three late-18th-century Spanish botanical expeditions to Mexico, Nueva Granada, and Peru, which created a combined output of thirteen thousand images. To “know” was to render the “essential” taxonomic characteristics of a plant into an image, so as to identify and name new species for the glory of the naturalist and the nation. The Mutis expedition in Nueva Granada self-consciously took apart the European botanical visual grammar and created a much more sophisticated new one.
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Engstrand, Iris H. W. Spanish Scientists in the New World: The Eighteenth-Century Expeditions. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981.
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Detailed examination of late-18th-century Malaspina expedition in the Pacific and Royal Scientific Expedition to New Spain. Does not engage with historiographical questions of contemporary interest, but is a rare contribution in the English language for its time and provides a thorough understanding of the daily operation of the 18th-century expeditions.
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Ewalt, Margaret R. Peripheral Wonders: Nature, Knowledge, and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Orinoco. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008.
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Based primarily on a close reading of El Orinoco ilustrado by the early 18th-century Jesuit Joseph Gumilla, this work expands our understanding of the Enlightenment in Spain and Spanish America by analyzing both spiritual and scientific theories of knowledge. Provides an interesting chronological contrast to scholars’ usual focus on late-18th-century expeditions.
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Frías Núñez, Marcelo. Tras El Dorado vegetal: José Celestino Mutis y la Real Expedición Botanica del Nuevo Reino de Granada (1783–1808). Seville, Spain: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1994.
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Challenging hagiographic treatments of José Celestino Mutis, this study examines the botanical expeditions he led in New Granada, his cultivation of “especerías” such as quinine and cinnamon, and his publication efforts (along with their famous illustrations). Lacks foundation in previous centuries of natural learning in the Americas, but provides insight into an exemplary instance of the 18th-century scientific expeditions.
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Gonçalves Varela, Alex. “Juro-lhe pela honra de bom vassalo e bom português”: Análise das memórias científicas de José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva (1780–1819). São Paulo, Brazil: Annablume, 2006.
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Thorough investigation of José Bonifácio as a naturalist, this work adds important intellectual context to this Brazilian independence figure and demonstrates the importance of Brazilian contributions to scientific development in the Lusophone world. Varela argues that Bonifácio’s political persona is inseparable from his studies in geology and mineralogy and his participation in the Pombaline program of scientific management of natural resources.
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Nieto Olarte, Mauricio. Remedios para el imperio: Historia natural y la apropiación del Nuevo Mundo. Bogota, Colombia: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2000.
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Helpful overview of the 18th-century royal botanical expeditions to the Americas. Synthesizes conclusions from the immense Spanish-language literature, produced in both Spain and Latin America, focusing on the practical requirements of field botany, their consequences for the construction of scientific knowledge, and the role of commercial interests in the movement of botanical samples and materia medica.
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Pardo Tomás, José. El tesoro natural de América: Oviedo, Monardes, Hernández; Colonialismo y ciencia en el siglo XVI. Madrid: Nivola, 2002.
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Explores the process of creating knowledge of natural history in the 16th century through an analysis of the work of these three high-profile scholars. Contrasts their geographical, political, and professional situations in highlighting the effects of practical concerns and of collaborators from different cultural, social, and technical backgrounds on the inclusive and multifaceted nature of 16th-century natural history.
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Steele, Arthur Robert. Flowers for the King: The Expedition of Ruiz and Pavon and the Flora of Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1964.
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Seminal study of the 18th-century Spanish botanical expeditions in the English-language literature, focusing on the Ruíz and Pavón expedition in Peru. Thoroughly researched, with detailed narrative of interpersonal rivalries and communication between scientists—including the dispute with Mutis regarding cinchona, institutional obstacles, and the publication process.
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Pragmatism

There are many reasons that interest in the history of science in the Spanish and Portuguese empires was late to develop, but perhaps the most decisive was scholars’ equation of science with the gentlemanly culture and experimental practice of modern scientific academies in places like England and France. In the Iberian empires, however, in the two centuries before these cultural expectations developed north of the Pyrenees, there developed an active, well-organized, and nearly globally dispersed community of people in a variety of occupations applying scientific knowledge, technology, and empirical observation to the furtherance of empire and commerce. Traditionally, in the Spanish-language literature, studies such as those collected in Vicente Maroto and Piñeiro 2006 have focused on the way that the Habsburg monarchs encouraged a pragmatic approach to scientific activity through their focus on applying research in mathematics to military and navigation problems. In the 16th century, however, a wide array of dispersed collaborators, including Portuguese navigators, indigenous miners, Italian military engineers, Spanish merchants, African pearl divers, and many others, pursued a variety of empire-building and commercial projects that were facilitated by and encouraged these programs, which were typically credited exclusively to the court, as shown in Barrera-Osorio 2006 and Martínez Ruíz 1999. These trends continued, as studies into the personnel who contributed to the 18th-century expeditions, such as Domingues 1991, have demonstrated. Following the publication of Barrera-Osorio 2006 and Portuondo 2009, a group of scholars in the English-language literature has coalesced around this notion of pragmatism as a particularly Spanish approach to scientific knowledge-making in the early modern period; however, this lens may be applied to Spanish scholarship on applied science in the empire, such as Bargalló 1955 on mining, that dates back to at least the mid-20th century.

Bargalló, Modesto. La minería y metalurgía en la América española durante la época colonial. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955.
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A multipart survey of mining and metallurgy in Spanish America. Early sections address pre-Columbian mining practice, the Spanish foundation in European mining and metallurgical knowledge, and their combined influence on innovations in silver amalgamation. Later sections follow the evolution of mining policy and practice throughout the colonial period. Continues to be the most detailed treatment of this important area of applied science and technology.
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Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.
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Addresses the artisanal, entrepreneurial, and bureaucratic encounter with the New World in the Spanish Empire, through which American novelties transformed the natural sciences. Instrument makers, pearl fishers, and miners relied on empiricism and experience to explain what textual authorities could not, influencing scholarly treatments of the New World as well.
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Domingues, Ângela. Viagens de exploração geográfica na Amazónia em finais do século XVIII: Política, ciência e aventura. Série Atântica 2. Lisbon, Portugal: Instituto de Historia de Além-Mar, 1991.
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Analyzes the late-18th-century naturalist expeditions in Brazil, notably treating the broad scope of participants rather than focusing on the most elite leaders of the expedition. Presents the expeditions as a combination of Enlightenment intellectual curiosity and strategic interests, emphasizing the contributions of members with applied technological and engineering skills to the expedition in, among other things, their careful charting of the Amazon.
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Martínez Ruíz, Enrique, ed. Felipe II, la ciencia y la técnica. Madrid: Actas Editorial, 1999.
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A collection of essays treating science in the Spanish Empire of Felipe II from the perspective of applied science and technology and quotidian practice. Subjects include navigation, cartography, military and civil engineering, instrument making, medicine, and communications. Includes contributions from a good cross-section of (mostly) Spanish historians of Spanish Empire science of the most recent generation.
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Portuondo, María M. Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
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Develops the evolution of Spanish cosmographical practice during the 16th and early 17th centuries through an analysis of Crown policies and institutions. The unprecedented scale of the empire introduced administrative pressures that transformed cosmography into a primarily empirical pursuit, while this knowledge transformed from imperial secrets to public emblems of the Crown’s prestige.
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Vicente Maroto, María Isabel, and Mariano Esteban Piñeiro. Aspectos de la ciencia aplicada en la España del siglo de Oro. 2d ed. Valladolid, Spain: Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería de Cultura y Turismo, 2006.
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Thoroughly researched and detailed treatment of the centrality of mathematics, particularly geometry, to the court of Felipe II, originally published in 1991. Outlines the vast amount of institutional support Felipe II devoted to the development of instruments and methodologies in navigation, civil and military engineering, and other “applied sciences” in the 16th century.
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Knowledge Networks

The movement of people and objects back and forth across the Atlantic, throughout the Americas, and around the world has long been a core interest of historians of the early modern European empires. With regard to the history of science, however, these physical movements were only part of the web of connections across geographical, cultural, social, and disciplinary boundaries that the scientific environment of the early modern Iberian Atlantic encompassed. One of the oldest interests of historians of science in this regard concerns the transmission of American biota (given exhaustive treatment on the botanical side in Pardo Tomás and López Terrada 1993) and, a bit later, related Amerindian cultural practices to Europe, particularly in healing and medicinal practices, as in Fresquet Febrer and López Piñero 1995. More recently, scholars have redirected their focus into other facets of knowledge networks, including Bauer 2003 on the role of place, Safier 2008 on the identities of participants and their social relationships, and Bleichmar 2007 and Furtado 2008 on the movement of representations of objects in addition to the objects themselves. Information and people did not only move between colony and metropole, either. Carney and Rosomoff 2010 and Walker 2009 show just some of the ways people and objects from the rest of the globe—in this case Africa and the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean—influenced the Iberian Americas. These topics signal the possibilities of scholars to achieve manageable global projects in the history of science for this period. Finally, a special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies containing essays under the title “Science in Translation: The Commerce of Facts and Artifacts in the Transatlantic Spanish World” signals future directions of research as scholars continue to explore how networks of spatial and social relationships affect artifacts, specimens, and ideas.

Bauer, Ralph. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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Explores the role of place in the political, epistemological, and literal geographies of knowledge production in the early modern Spanish and British empires in the Americas. Looks to the construction of natural and general histories from travel narratives and empirical observations to explore divergent expectations of scientific authority on either side of the Atlantic.
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Bleichmar, Daniela. “Exploration in Print: Books and Botanical Travel from Spain to the Americas in the Late Eighteenth Century.” Huntington Library Quarterly 70.1 (March 2007): 129–151.
DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2007.70.1.129Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Illuminates the material and intellectual influence of books on travel and firsthand natural historical observation. Books were vectors for established scientific authority that moved with the traveling natural historian and allowed the observer to contextualize his experience in establishing the uniqueness of his discoveries, but also to demonstrate his acknowledgment of a global scientific community.
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Carney, Judith A., and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
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Situates Africa-originated food crops in the Americas within the historical, geographical, and cultural context of the African slave trade, and traces their propagation via African slaves and slave ships. Relies on interdisciplinary bodies of evidence to construct a synthetic overview of the important contributions of Africans to New World foodways and botanical culture.
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Fresquet Febrer, J. L., and J. M. López Piñero, eds. El mestizaje cultural y la medicina novohispana del siglo XVI. Valencia, Spain: Instituto de Estudios Documentals e Históricos sobre la Ciencia, Universitat de València, CSIC, 1995.
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A collection of six essays by leading scholars of healing practices, medical knowledge, and materia medica in 16th-century New Spain. Most of the essays address medical collaboration between indigenous and European practitioners, including the transmission of the resulting practices throughout the Spanish Atlantic and Europe.
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Furtado, Júnia Ferreira. “Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial Brazil.” In Science and Empire in the Atlantic World. Edited by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, 127–152. New York: Routledge, 2008.
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Treats the development of natural histories of Brazil, particularly in terms of materia medica, from the more traditionally scholarly productions of the Dutch period to the publications of 18th-century barber-surgeons. Identifies the common threads of the incorporation of local knowledge, direct observation, global movement of people and books, and Luso-Brazilian participation in a European community of scholars.
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Pardo Tomás, José, and María Luz López Terrada. Las primeras noticias sobre plantas americanas en las relaciones de viajes y crónicas de Indias, 1493–1553. Valencia, Spain: Instituto de Estudios Documentales e Históricos sobre la Ciencia, Universitat de València, CSIC, 1993.
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In reading the early literature of discovery and exploration closely, this study attempts to reconstruct the process and timeline of the diffusion of knowledge in Europe regarding specific American plant species from a social historical perspective. Includes an extensive appendix of plant species cross-referenced to their appearances in the print sources under analysis.
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Safier, Neil. Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
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A study of the French and Spanish geodesic expedition to Quito led by Charles-Marie de la Condamine, and of the scientific discourse regarding its findings. Engages with sociological and anthropological theories of science in episodic chapters intended to examine the geographies and networks of scientific knowledge production and to identify the unheralded nonelite, local contributors to the expedition.
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Miruna Achum. ed. Special Issue: Science in Translation: The Commerce of Facts and Artifacts in the Transatlantic Spanish World. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 8.2 (2007).
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Special issue collecting seven essays examining the construction of scientific knowledge as specimens, people, and ideas cross geographical, cultural, professional, and social boundaries. In addition to 18th-century natural history, the collection notably includes some underrepresented areas: Alonso de Barba’s 1640 Arte de los metales in terms of metaphysical assumptions regarding matter, and late 18th century Bourbon archaeological work in both the Mediterranean and the Americas, for example.
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Walker, Timothy. “Acquisition and Circulation of Medical Knowledge within the Early Modern Portuguese Colonial Empire.” In Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800. Edited by Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan, 247–270. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
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Analysis of the central role medicinal plants and knowledge from Africa, Asia, and the Americas played in the Portuguese empires. Explores the collaborative relationship between indigenous healers and European physicians while tracing the influences of these interactions not just from the colony to the metropole, but between colonial zones as well.
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Science and Institutions

Recent scholarship has amply demonstrated the fundamental role that science played in furthering imperial aims for the Spanish and Portuguese. The Iberian empires were notable among early modern European empires for developing centralized bureaucracies for the purpose of administering activities—such as exploration, the development of astronomical instruments, or classification of botanical specimens, among others—as early as the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Álvarez Peláez 1993 provides a detailed overview of one such project, the distribution of geographic and demographic questionnaires throughout the Americas, and their collected responses, known as the Relaciones Geográficas. Slade 2011 provides a more theoretical essay of a similar bureaucratic project in its analysis of the creation of the Archivo General de Indias. At the same time that these bureaucracies provided support for scientific investigation and innovation, they introduced their own political and financial interests into the equation, frequently obstructing or redirecting the efforts they were created to facilitate. Goodman 1988 laid the groundwork for many of these analyses of institutional politics and their effects on scientific activities and priorities in its study of Philip II’s financial frustrations in pursuing his scientific ambitions. Chambouleyron 2010 provides an example of how policies and strategic institutional interests that did not specifically concern themselves with scientific practice may have had a similar effect to those studied in Goodman 1988. Lamb 1995 collects essays from throughout Ursula Lamb’s career that share an institutional focus in exploring the different aspects of the practice of cosmography and navigation in early modern Spain. More recently, scholars have continued to explore these practically oriented questions, but have also moved on to explore the various ways that institutional interests affected the aims of scientific investigation, as in Pimentel 2000, which connects scientific questions to the maintenance of universal monarchy, and the theoretical assumptions of practitioners such as the cosmographers, cartographers, and navigators who frame their work in terms of imperial secrecy, as in Sandman 2008.

Álvarez Peláez, Raquel. La conquista de la naturaleza americana. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1993.
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Detailed description of the Relaciones Geográficas, the collected responses to a 1577 questionnaire on an array of natural subjects sent throughout the Spanish Americas. This synthetic overview explains the kinds of data provided by and the concerns apparent in these documents, which represent the large-scale institutional apparatus for the collection of empirical data regarding the natural world in 16th-century Spain.
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Chambouleyron, Rafael. Povoamento, ocupação e agricultura na Amazônia colonial (1640–1706). Belém, Brazil: Editora Açaí, 2010.
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Provides insight into the role of developmental interests for patterns of colonization in Amazonia before the Pombaline government of the late 18th century and for the 17th-century expansion of knowledge regarding natural commodities to be taken from the rainforest environment. Primarily of interest to historians of science for its thorough work with archival sources from Brazil and Portugal in the natural products of Amazonia.
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Goodman, David C. Power and Penury: Government, Technology, and Science in Philip II’s Spain. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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Important early work in the English-language literature, establishing many themes upon which the following generation of scholarship would expand. Consists of five mostly detached studies of scientific and technological disciplines during Philip II’s reign. Demonstrates the fruitfulness of employing a broad definition of science in its application to innovations in the Spanish Empire.
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Lamb, Ursula. Cosmographers and Pilots of the Spanish Maritime Empire. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Variorum, 1995.
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Collection of fourteen essays from throughout Lamb’s career on the offices of Cosmographer and Pilot Major in the Casa de Contratación and their individual and collaborative contributions to cosmographical knowledge in the 16th-century Spanish Empire. In particular, Lamb provides insight into the effect of institutional rivalries on imperial scientific priorities.
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Pimentel, Juan. “The Iberian Vision: Science and Empire in the Framework of a Universal Monarchy, 1500–1800.” Osiris, 2d ser., 15 (2000): 17–30.
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Synthetic essay framing the institutional organization of scientific activity in the Iberian empires in terms of their divergent political trajectories and political strategies over the early modern colonial period. Concerned with space and locality as they affect the functions of empire and the construction of scientific knowledge.
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Sandman, Alison. “Controlling Knowledge: Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic.” In Science and Empire in the Atlantic World. Edited by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, 31–52. New York: Routledge, 2008.
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Follows the development of scientific navigational practice in terms of imperial imperatives. Traditional knowledge in the practice of wayfinding had to remain secret to impede rivals, but accurate charts had to be published in order to manifest territorial claims. Improves understanding of Spanish secrecy and the effect of pragmatic compromises in imperial policy on scientific practice.
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Slade, David F. “An Imperial Knowledge Space for Bourbon Spain: Juan Bautista Muñoz and the Founding of the Archivo General de Indias.” Colonial Latin American Review 20.2 (2011): 195–212.
DOI: 10.1080/10609164.2011.587264Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Applies David Turnbull’s concept of a “knowledge space” to the compilation of the Archivo General de Indias as a window on the Spanish Enlightenment historiographical project in defense against foreign critics. This approach provides insight into the effects of institutional obstacles on the development of the historical memory and historiography of empire.
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Theories of Science and Empire

That the powerful may employ science in the service of empire has become a truism among historians of science. Grove 1996 serves as a useful introduction in its grand narrative, in several different imperial contexts, of the development of environmental conservationism as a means of maximizing the investment in imperial expansion. Drayton 2000 provides a nuanced demonstration of this perspective in following the history of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew and the British use of gardening metaphors to justify their imperial rule through scientifically progressive stewardship, while Raminelli 2008 expands on similar themes for the Portuguese Empire in analyzing the implications of scientific patronage for control over the space of the Brazilian frontier. In the most recent generation of scholarship, historians of science and empire have branched out from questions of the justification and maintenance of power through science. The collected essays in Delbourgo and Dew 2008, a good introduction to this expanding focus, present a useful cross-section of contemporary concerns in sections covering topics such as the frustrating effects of distance on knowledge transmission and the role of imperial politics in scientific discourse. The large scale of the early modern European empires provided both opportunities and challenges that shaped scientific ambitions, theory, and practice. For example, Portuondo 2009 explores the way metropolitan scholars took advantage of Spain’s 16th-century expansion in pursuing unprecedented global geographical and astronomical surveys, while the sheer volume of resulting data forced epistemological adjustments on scholars struggling to order them. The realities of empire led to the bureaucratization of epistemology in which “to gather” was “to ask,” “to compile” “to collect,” “to synthesize,” and “to file.” Cosmographers broke with humanist textual practices as they assembled data by either sending expeditions of experts or standardizing instructions and questionnaires for nonexpert observers. Empire did not only have a transformative effect on these metropolitan projects, however. Cook 2007 addresses the pressures on Dutch merchants and scientific practitioners of communicating across vast distances and cultural and linguistic barriers, while Barrera-Osorio 2006 traces the development of an entrepreneurial scientific culture in the Spanish Americas which claimed independence from scholars in the distant metropolis. In both cases, a transformation in the essentials of scientific knowledge—“matters of fact” in the first case and “experience” in the latter—resulted from the scale and distributed nature of a global imperial enterprise. Recent scholars have also pursued ways that these conditions frustrated scientific knowledge and practice. Schiebinger 2004, for one, analyzes the partial and culturally and politically determined transmission of botanical knowledge from the Caribbean to scholars in Europe.

Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.
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Explores a commercial and scientific culture founded on claims to “experience” that resulted from artisanal and entrepreneurial response to New World novelties. Spain’s imperial response to this vibrant, competitive climate in the Americas was to establish an institutional apparatus with which to mediate and collect these individual, entrepreneurial innovations.
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Cook, Harold J. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
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Presents Dutch commercial agents as global vectors of natural and medical knowledge in the 17th century, and Dutch scientific practitioners as empiricists preoccupied with the establishment of matters of fact. In this arrangement, scientific and medical priorities influenced those of commerce and political economy, and vice versa, in the Dutch-mediated global market for materia medica and natural knowledge.
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Delbourgo, James, and Nicholas Dew, eds. Science and Empire in the Atlantic World. New York: Routledge, 2008.
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This collected volume organizes twelve essays by specialists working with the Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, and French empires into sections covering knowledge networks, the natural world of the Americas, collecting, and imperial competition. Provides an excellent overview of contemporary questions in the relationship of science and imperial power.
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Drayton, Richard. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
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Traces the evolution of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew in order to illustrate the logic of British imperial expansion. Drayton argues for the roots of the Enlightenment discourse of improvement in Christian formulations of man’s relationship with nature. In this discourse, maintenance and improvement of the natural world and its resources justify their possession.
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Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1830. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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Sets the beginnings of conservationist thinking in the global encounter of European empires with the tropics. More interested in tracing the development of “environmentalist” ideas than with the practical considerations of scientists concerned with developing solutions to environmental catastrophe, but provides a useful presentation of the application of scientific approaches in a variety of imperial contexts.
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Portuondo, María M. Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
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Develops the scientific benefits of empire in 16th-century Spain by outlining large-scale cosmographical projects pursued in different institutional contexts. These projects were simultaneously global and (partially) veiled in secrecy—both consequences of the globally dispersed imperial apparatus that spawned them. These expansive empirical projects challenge the narrative of the Scientific Revolution that empiricism and the mathematization of nature led to new theories and the expansion of print culture.
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Raminelli, Ronald. Viagens ultramarinas: Monarcas, vassalos e governo à distância. São Paulo, Brazil: Alameda, 2008.
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Identifies the importance of the patronage relationships between the Portuguese Crown in Lisbon and the Luso-Brazilian intellectual elite in securing loyalty to the Crown throughout the empire. Aside from the patronage itself, its delivery in the form of support for voyages of discovery and other projects in the interior of Brazil, and Portuguese possessions in Africa and Asia as well, served to define these large hinterlands as Portuguese colonial spaces.
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Schiebinger, Londa. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
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Explores the interimperial competition over bioprospecting in the late-17th- and 18th-century Caribbean. Primarily analyzes the culturally, economically, and politically motivated transformation and elision of natural knowledge as it traveled through the empire. Scientific ignorance need not be the product of active suppression, but it may result from the collision of different priorities among actors in different imperial contexts.
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