Empires and science

Abstract

The Iberian Empire created modern science, and, in turn, modern science fostered the expansion and establishment of the empire. Navigation, for example, made possible the establishment of empires in America, and the commercial and political needs of the empire pushed medieval maritime practices in the direction of modern nautical science. In the early-modern Christian-European context, empire and science were asymmetrically co-created during the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iberian expansion in Africa, Asia, and America. As the Iberian Empire linked different regions and socio-political communities, knowing these regions and communities became integral to the empire’s formation. The Iberian Empire established the institutions and practices of modern science as an empirical activity based on the articulation of experience in reports and the circulation of these reports. This science emerged in the context of an empire that connected regions with different peoples and resources—people with their own knowledge and expertise about those resources. As Christians entered in contact with these communities of knowledge, they established and eventually institutionalised systems to verify local knowledge: testing and reporting methods. This chapter focuses on the sixteenth-century Spanish American empire as a case study of the co-creation of empire and science in the early-modern period.