Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Volumes 1 and 2: A Critical Edition ed. by Alexander von Humboldt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Volumes 1 and 2: A Critical Edition ed. by Alexander von Humboldt Lucas Nossaman (bio) Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Volumes 1 and 2: A Critical Edition alexander von humboldt, edited by vera m. kutzinski and ottmar ette, translated by j. ryan poytner, kenneth berri, and vera kutzinski University of Chicago Press, 2019 Vol. 1, 586 pp.; Vol. 2, 634 pp. What is the relationship between New World colonialism and the sciences? These newly published volumes from the work of German polymath Alexander von Humboldt, the most celebrated scientist of the nineteenth century in Europe and the US, will help to nuance considerably the usual responses to that question. In The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (U of Chicago P, 2009), Laura Dassow Walls contended that the story of US national origins must include Humboldt to make sense of the nineteenth-century drive to explore, collect, and connect new knowledges of nature. But following her book's title, scholars have focused mainly on the impact of Humboldt's Cosmos (1845–59). These freshly translated and edited volumes, in effect the first of their kind in English since the nineteenth century, remind us that it was the earlier Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (particularly the revised French edition published from 1825 to 1827) that established Humboldt's reputation for combining knowledges of nature and human cultures into interconnected wholes. Susan Scott Parish and others have historicized the various modes of New World science, but many scholars continue to assume that most nineteenth-century European naturalists of the Americas followed Thomas [End Page 623] Jefferson's example: they erased Native presence, idealized the continents as pristine wildernesses, and hardened racial distinctions to justify white paternalism. New Spain, however, offers a glimpse of an alternative nineteenth-century tradition that saw intrinsic value in the land and people of the New World. Humboldt frames his proto-ecological understanding squarely against that of Columbus and Cortés: he pulls the imperialistic past into the present nineteenth century to imagine a future composed of diverse civilizations, racial harmony, and environmental stewardship. The question of whether his vision was ever fulfilled, or will be anytime soon, can direct us to consider how historical scientific literature both contributes to and contests our present world of climate change, global inequality, and racial injustice. To be sure, these particular volumes are not for the faint of heart. They consist primarily of statistical facts and forecasts concerning New Spain's "economy," capaciously understood at the time to include what we now understand as the fields of sociology, anthropology, archaeology, mineralogy, engineering, geography, and geology, among other sciences. Reading New Spain is a dizzying endeavor not only because today we expect facts in tighter analytical categories but also because, even at the time, Humboldt was expanding genre conventions to propose a more global perspective as he progressed toward what he would later call the Cosmos, his numinous term for the ecological chains of connection running through Earth, its people, and even the stars and planets above. For him, New Spain became a unique vista for witnessing the myriad forces shaping Earth's present form: "Nowhere can one better observe the admirable order with which different types of plant life succeed each other. … At every step, one sees changes in the physiognomy of the land, in the appearance of the sky, in the bearing of the plants, the shape of the animals, the customs of the inhabitants and the type of cultivation they practice" (1.409). When Humboldt imagined the web of nature, he grounded his ecological perspective in the facts he amassed during his field studies and archival research of Mexico. Scholars who persevere through these volumes will discover commentary that dissents from the scientific mainstream, and these passages could function as valuable pedagogical material for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on science, literature, and colonialism. For instance, when paired with Jefferson's Notes or Crevecoeur's Letters (Humboldt praises the former but also corrects it, in particular Jefferson's geographic coordinates [End Page 624] for the Presidio of Sante...