Republics of Knowledge: Nations of the Future in Latin America

Abstract

Americans, declared Simón Bolívar at the opening of the 1819 Congress of Angostura, had been “subject to the threefold yoke of ignorance, tyranny, and vice” during the long centuries of Spanish rule. Consequently, “American people have been unable to acquire knowledge, power, or virtue.” As Nicola Miller shows in this splendid book, had Bolívar lived 100 years later, he might have been less pessimistic about the spread of knowledge across the hemisphere. Republics of Knowledge is a sustained attack on the belief that the “modern knowledge order” was largely a European affair that rippled outward from its enlightened homeland, eventually reaching the sluggish backwaters of the Americas (p. 3). Miller provides a kaleidoscopic vision of the many types of knowledge that flourished in Spanish America during the first century after independence. Focusing on Argentina, Chile, and Peru, she offers a dazzling array of microbiographies, vignettes, and case studies of entrepreneurial publishers, radical educationists, agronomists, lexicographers, and others, through which she demonstrates the importance of individuals as bearers of knowledge as well as the region's appreciation of applied science against a disembodied questing after truth. Knowledge, she shows, thrived not solely or even primarily in universities but also in journalism, private associations, technical bodies, and energetic individual actors and so reached beyond elite circles.Miller identifies shared features that united these diverse knowledge communities. Linguists and drawing instructors alike insisted that the Americas needed to be understood on its own terms rather than through the prism of imported theories. “Many of the philological rules of the Old World have no application here,” argued the linguist Samuel Lafone Quevedo in 1895 (p. 132). Miller's nineteenth-century protagonists were not simply creating new, site-appropriate knowledge. They were intellectual pioneers, anticipating twentieth-century developments such as dependency and postcolonial theory. Phrases recur along the lines of “similar arguments were made in mid-twentieth-century Europe by members of the Frankfurt School” or “150 years before Frantz Fanon wrote about the decolonisation of the mind, Spanish Americans proclaimed that life after colonialism would require new ways of thinking” (pp. 100, 219). The initial chapters review the institutions and shared intellectual frameworks (“repertoires of knowledge”) that supported these knowledge communities. Later chapters argue that these knowledge practices and communities helped forge a sense of national identity.Miller doesn't argue only that these shared knowledge practices contributed to a sense of national identity. More than this, she maintains that nations are better conceptualized not as Andersonian imagined political communities but as communities of shared knowledge. Viewing the nation as a community of shared knowledge highlights the transnational and political forces that help create shared experiences, and which she considers more important than the shared cultural practices often viewed as essential to modern nationalism. Were the activities of geographical societies truly more important than shared cultural practices around food, music, or sports in forging what Michael Billig called banal nationalism? Miller shows well the significance of her “repertoires of knowledge” to the formation of a sense of Argentine, or Chilean, identity. It's a little less clear to me that this approach is the best way to explain why Argentines might be moved to tears by the triumph of the national team in the Copa América, but it's evident that the shared ideas that Miller documents did help create distinctive communities united through a belief in the transformative power of modern knowledge.Often the individuals whose stories Miller recounts in such fascinating detail were swimming against the tide, and the impressive ambitions to make knowledge more accessible did not always translate into reality. The magnificent national libraries, whose public missions were defended so hotly by their founders and directors, were used by only a minority of citizens. Neither did every community of knowledge truly work for the benefit of all the region's inhabitants, as Miller shows in her discussion of the role of mapping in sustaining military campaigns. These more somber histories are however not her primary focus. Republics of Knowledge is a triumphant demonstration of the intellectual vitality of Spanish Americans in the first century of independence. It draws on an extraordinary array of sources and rests on very deep intellectual foundations. Miller writes authoritatively on topics from the history of library classification systems to the principles of philology. This heavy mantle of scholarship is worn very lightly. Its limpid prose makes Republics of Knowledge a pleasure to read; Miller leads us through complex debates about the philosophy of history and the role of tariffs without sacrificing either rigor or clarity. The Americas, she shows, was no backwater, pathetically imitating the scientific achievements and investigative zeal of Europeans. Republics of Knowledge tells a gripping story of the vibrant world of curious, impassioned, and visionary individuals who inhabited these republics of knowledge and whose stories deserve to be much better known.