Conquering Nature in Spain and its Empire, 1750-1850

Abstract

‘What do we owe Spain?’, the French geographer Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers provocatively asked in a 1782 essay in the Encyclopédie méthodique. ‘In the past two centuries, the past four, the past ten, what has she done for Europe?’ He was not alone in his derision: French writers routinely engaged in Spanish bashing, claiming the kingdom was mired in obscurantism and religious zealotry, and that it contributed absolutely nothing to knowledge production. Ironically, this attack appeared in the midst of intense Spanish efforts at transforming its scientific institutions, training, and collections, particularly in the natural sciences. As Helen Cowie demonstrates, natural science was vigorously pursued in the Hispanic world in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. Conquering Nature investigates the spaces, places, practices, institutions, and protagonists involved in Hispanic natural history in this period, examining both the peninsula and the Spanish American viceroyalties. The book’s early chapters set the stage by exploring how and why the Spanish crown promoted the pursuit of natural history so intensively in the second half of the eighteenth century. Cowie traces this development to the so-called ‘Bourbon reforms’, an active programme of imperial renovation that took an interest in the natural sciences for their utilitarian promise; invested in new institutions and training programmes; and enrolled imperial administrators across the empire in the collection of objects and observations, in addition to sponsoring the work of numerous naturalists. In the Spanish case – unlike in Britain or France – these efforts were not an Enlightenment phenomenon. Administrators and naturalists alike looked back to sixteenth-century precedents, linking their investigations to the work of men like Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, author of the earliest natural history of the New World; Francisco Hernández, the physician who conducted the first scientific expedition to the Americas in the 1570s under Philip II’s orders; or Nicolás Monardes, a Seville-based physician who in the same decade published news of American medical plants based on his own experiences with them in Europe.