Bartolomé Inga’s mining technologies: Indians, science, cyphered secrecy, and modernity in the new world

Abstract

ABSTRACTPrint culture is allegedly the cornerstone of modernity, responsible for the rise of the ‘public sphere’. The Spanish Empire throws these tenets into question. Print culture never became a major force as it would in Northern Europe. A world of manuscript production was fertile nonetheless. It was within reach for every subject to write, petition, and debate with officials and the Crown. This did not produce a public sphere in which printed books traded hands in cafés. Indeed, this epistolary culture was highly secretive. There was widespread literacy in encrypting. This vertical, secretive system of petitioning nonetheless produced immense amounts of new knowledge on nature, politics, ethnography, and political economy, upending the pervasive theory of openness-as-knowledge.