Iberian Empires Research Articles

The European Seaborne Empires: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Age of Revolutions. By Gabriel Paquette (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2019) 312 pp. $35.00

This tidily argued and well-written synthesis contains no new archival research; it is, rather, an updated examination of European state consolidation at home and then creation and maintenance of overseas empires from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Deliberately framed as “an explicit, if critical, homage to seminal works bearing similar titles published in the mid-twentieth century by historians C. R. Boxer and J. H. Parry,” Paquette pursues the themes in those works while updating their arguments and approaches with new scholarship that has appeared in the last four decades or so (4–5).1 Geared to an educated general readership, the book largely focuses on European expansion to other parts of the world, but most especially in the Atlantic. Because the book is entirely focused on the European empires, it will be of limited utility to scholars and teachers of world history, where these storylines are already broadly familiar.Paquette recognizes the book’s limitations at the outset; he states that he “cannot deny or defend the book’s inequality of proportions and lopsidedness” (vii). This is not a fatal flaw by any stretch of the imagination, but the book includes much more material about the Iberian empires than any other. This area is clearly Paquette’s research strength, but even so, the significance of the Dutch, French, and British Empires all coming to challenge and/or overtake their imperial rivals does not underpin the narrative of the book, as it would in a book more focused on empires in world history. Paquette does not offer a direct answer to the question of how European empires came to dominate not just global geopolitics but also an emerging global economy that shifted power away from Asia, though shrewd readers will be able to cobble together their own answers to this important question. Those whose historical expertise is greater outside the Iberian empires than within them will surely be familiar with articles and monographs that, if considered in this book, might have changed the author’s presentation and narrative trajectory.The book, which includes twelve chapters, begins with a definition of empire before proceeding to consider Western Europe in global context, which would have been more useful had this theme been more systematically carried through the book. It then considers the creation of the Iberian empires, the challenges to them from northwestern Europe, and the ways in which these empires developed a kind of mature relationship with their colonies that were largely, but not entirely, in the Americas. Next it delves into a patchy examination of law and political economy in each empire and then various social issues, such as labor, race, and migration, and a breathless discussion of the Age of Revolutions. Each chapter is long enough to hold a reader’s interest and provoke additional questions but not thorough enough to cover its subject. The discussion of John Locke and Hugo Grotius and the ideas of property that they generated, for example, focuses on the difference between them (73–75), but it has nothing to say about Locke’s presence on the English Board of Trade. An extended treatment might have offered a clearer understanding of why Britain’s empire developed its ideas of property and law, and Paquette could have articulated more clearly how these ideas differed from those of other empires.Also more deserving is the theme of smuggling and contraband trade, the presence of which weakened these European empires, but because of the distance involved, also allowed these colonies and territories to function and even thrive. The discussion of migration concentrates so heavily on slavery and other coerced migration that the very people who temporarily migrated to run these empires—from colonial officials to estate managers, attorneys, merchants, and physicians—are never addressed.Even with these omissions, which will be apparent to scholars with regional or methodological expertise different from Paquette’s, the book serves as a good reminder of how global empires fit together, and it strengthens the historical context that generations of scholarship operating purely within national boundaries has tended to erode. Paquette’s book can be a springboard to generate new scholarship outside these geographical borders.

Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668

This expansive history of the relationship between early modern globalization and Iberian empire began life as a translation and expansion of the author's 2004 study, Marte contra Minerva: El precio del imperio español, c. 1450–1600. Between then and now, it has blossomed into a new synthesis of the political economy of the Iberian world during its centuries of rapid expansion, geopolitical vigor, and eventual crisis that breaks out of traditional national and regional boundaries to place the histories of Spain, Portugal, and Europe in global context. Published in an exciting new series edited by two notable European scholars based in East Asia (Manuel Pérez García and Lúcio de Sousa), the book aims to take an approach to European history that is simultaneously internalist and externalist and to interrogate the relationship between war and society in the nascent Iberian world system. In so doing, the book seeks to underline the economic and social dynamism of the Iberian world, even in the face of measurable relative decline in the seventeenth century. Entirely absent are laments about unproductive family networks and dowdy ecclesiastical institutions that would be easily overtaken by efficient northern European competitors. Instead, the “paradoxical” conclusion arises that “it is obvious that the final effect of these (supposedly) inefficient institutions (inefficient, i.e. from the perspective of the new institutional economics) could very well be economic growth of a notable scale within the parameters of pre-industrial societies. . . . And this may be true not only for territories in Europe but also for the colonies” (p. xxv). While American silver encouraged credit in specie in Spain that allowed the nobility to mobilize for war in the sixteenth century, this fell short of the financial revolution that happened in Britain and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century (p. 187).Arranged chronologically and rich in maps and charts, the book continually draws links between economics, politics, and law. Rather than seeing state building and imperialism as discrete processes, the book explores the centralizing and unifying impact of royal courts and the continuities in local and indigenous laws and traditions in Iberia's monarchical corporate and composite states that crisscrossed the early modern world. For the author, such global state building was made possible by a pact between elites and central power within the context of war. This was in turn bolstered by arrangements of various sorts with other states both within and outside Europe, as the case of Hormuz demonstrates, which was given to the Portuguese by agreement with Safawid Persia to counter the Ottomans. Digging down through the layers of negotiated relationships, the book collapses the separation between public and private as well as secular and religious while frequently returning to the importance of family and friendships. While this multilayer system was dynamic, there were also continuities between reconquista and conquista and between Iberian state finances and Islamic patterns of taxation in this age of “state capitalism” (p. 90). Furthermore, the Iberian world system itself was far from sealed off from the rest of Europe and the world, with northern European cities benefiting directly and indirectly from Iberian expansion.While following in the footsteps of Charles Ralph Boxer, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Tamar Herzog, this book is unusual for a number of reasons. The range of historiography it engages is vast. It is hard to name a book that brings together so neatly such divergent traditions as the New Conquest History, new institutional economics, environmental history, and polycentric Iberian imperial history. In the case of the last of these, the author admits that Iberia's world empires were indeed “polycentric” (or, as he puts it, “multinuclear” or “nodal”), while noting that the Iberian empire was not particularly exceptional in this respect (p. 345). He does not, however, expand too much on which other examples he has in mind. Unusual among works of political economy, the book also interacts seriously with the historical work of notable twentieth-century economists, including John Maynard Keynes and the Nobel Prize–winning economist Douglass North. This said, from the perspective of those more rooted in the historiography of colonial Latin America, there are some puzzling remarks, such as when he seemingly rejects the idea that the indigenous population of the Americas might have also been consumers of goods imported from Europe (p. 293). Given the focus on economics, it is also odd that so little space is devoted to the history of Iberian slavery, which recent work has shown was hardly limited to the Atlantic world.Overall, however, the book provides an excellent graduate-level survey. While there is occasional repetition, as is unavoidable in a book of this length and scope, each chapter offers numerous important insights on a part of the Iberian world. Graduate students and scholars rewriting their lecture courses will profit from perusing this ambitious volume.

Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization, edited by Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, and Rachel Sarah O’Toole

Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization, edited by Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, and Rachel Sarah O’Toole

Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal's Empire, 1450–1700

The history of science in the early modern Iberian world is a blooming field. The recent decades have provided excellent contributions in English from historians based in both US and European universities and research centers, not to mention myriad studies authored by scholars based in the Iberian Peninsula, who usually publish in their own languages. As in many other areas of history, the Portuguese side of this story is often the poor cousin. This is especially true for the subject of colonial medicine prior to the nineteenth century, which is what Assembling the Tropics primarily covers; hence a reason, among many others, to welcome Hugh Cagle's first book. We have substantive studies for Dutch and British colonial medicine, but the Portuguese empire has lacked so far an all-encompassing, argumentative study, despite the solid work produced by several historians, especially Timothy Walker.Written at the crossroads of various fields, Assembling the Tropics makes an artful use of the available primary sources and displays mastery of the relevant literature for different cultural zones of the early modern world. The book covers more than two centuries, from the mid-1550s to the late 1770s, and takes the reader successively from sub-Saharan Africa (chapter 2) to the Indian Ocean world (chapters 3 to 5) and the South Atlantic (chapters 6 to 8). Cagle's purpose and research agenda are clearly presented in the first chapter of the book and recalled in its epilogue: the author seeks to investigate “distinctive cultures of inquiry” in the Portuguese empire concerning nature and disease in order to understand developments on the ground, “in each theater of colonial engagement,” and therefore “to reorient and pluralize the history of early modern science” (p. 309).In so doing, Cagle rightly refuses a teleological (often-nationalistic) view of early modern Portuguese science, which is invariably associated with the rise of modernity and the historiographically controversial scientific revolution. He likewise questions the centrality of Lisbon and the metropole while giving room to medicinal developments on the ground, be it in South Asia or the South Atlantic. Needless to note, this exercise of relocation is incompatible with the diffusionist paradigm or the center-periphery model. Alternatively, such relocation implies strong engagement with a historiographical current, very much in vogue, that underlines the importance of movement and circulation, porosity and fluidity, and entanglements and connections. Finally, Cagle embraces a holistic view of the Portuguese empire; instead of spatially segmenting his work, he pays equal attention to the Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean settings as well as to the intriguing intertropical phenomena at stake.Assembling the Tropics brings into play a plethora of figures, texts, places, and practices. Jesuit missionaries and obscure native practitioners—the embodiment of relocated expertise—populate this work. It is clear, though, that the Asian section of the book is dominated by Garcia de Orta and his Colóquios dos simples, e drogas e cousas medicinais da India (published in Goa in 1563), while the book's Atlantic section is molded by Aleixo de Abreu's Tratado de las siete enfermedades (published in Lisbon in 1623) and Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão's Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil (written in 1618). These are chapters of impeccable scholarship, but it might be problematic to rely on a handful of authors and materials in order to demonstrate—without, somewhat ironically, being able to avoid a certain teleological stance—how the tropics were fully assembled by the late seventeenth century; this leaves the impression that Cagle's arguments and evidence are sometimes stretched too far.On the other hand, if the emphasis is put on “proliferating centers and cosmopolitan colonies,” then we need to take the argument a step further (p. 16). What about scholarly medicinal conversations across the Iberian empires, with cities like Mexico City, Lima, and Manila probably taking an active role? (Abreu's Tratado was written in Castilian, and one wonders what its readership was in colonial Spanish America.) Were there numerous, even if tense, scientific interactions with the Dutch in both oceans? (Cagle hardly mentions Willem Piso and Jacobus Bontius.) And why should East Asia be excluded from the Indian Ocean world when we know that Macao and Nagasaki were the locus of significant hybrid medical experiments in this period? The author favors the study of human entanglements but indirectly contributes to compartmentalizing the subject matter.Despite these shortcomings, Assembling the Tropics constitutes an excellent and much-needed scholarly endeavor written in a clear and engaging style. Cagle's work is geared toward historians and students of the Portuguese empire and the history of science (namely medicine) in early modern times but certainly has the potential to attract a much wider audience.

Legal Files and Empires: Form and Materiality of the Benguela District Court Documents

Abstract Much has been said on the role of judges, legal officials, and courts in the making of colonial regimes. Nevertheless, historiography lacks specific methodological reflections on lawsuits in the Iberian Empires. In order to raise some methodological issues concerning lawsuits as primary sources, I argue that historians could also engage with legal files by looking at instead of just looking through them. In this sense, I seek to establish a dialogue with discussions that anthropologists and social scientists put forward concerning the role of documents as constitutive of bureaucracies and administrative institutions. In order to do so, I will focus on specific aspects of the Benguela District Court collection of legal files.

Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1830

As its title suggests, Entangled Empires is a book about how the Spanish, Portuguese, and British empires engaged with each other over the course of the early modern period. Edited by the renowned historian of the Hispanic world Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, the volume reflects the connected history approach that has characterized the latest publications of the esteemed historian. However, rather than merely cataloging instances and patterns of interimperial interactions, the volume in question was written with a bolder proposition in mind. In a nutshell, Entangled Empires suggests that it is impossible to understand properly any of these empires without considering their entanglement, for they all belonged to a common hemispheric system.Part 1, titled “Severed Histories,” focuses on uncovering how, in an effort to assert England's imperial authority, English officials and actors rendered interimperial entanglement invisible by hiding their debt to Spanish and Portuguese precedents. The chapters in this section show that, in spite of deliberate silences in the archives, early modern merchants often led itinerant lives across imperial frontiers and often relied on Africans to achieve their goals. Moreover, the section shows that the early modern drug trade was directly dependent on how these merchants circulated commodities and natural knowledge across the Iberian and British worlds.Part 2, titled “Brokers and Translators,” focuses on how thinkers and go-betweens stimulated Anglo-Iberian interactions. Ranging from intellectual to social and political history, the chapters in this section highlight how Iberian achievements in the New World served as a fountain of knowledge for the British imperial project, both in terms of the imperial imagination and in terms of the people who circulated across imperial lines, particularly Iberian conversos. Moreover, the late Christopher Schmidt-Nowara shows that influence also went in the reverse direction, especially through the many Irishmen who played important roles in the transformation of Spanish political culture from the 1760s to the 1820s.Part 3, titled “Possession, Sovereignty, and Legitimacy,” demonstrates that, in spite of contemporary rhetoric, Iberian and English discourses and strategies of possession over New World territories had more in common than previously thought. From comparing Catholic and Calvinist discourses of possession to reconstructing the shared ways in which the British and Spanish empires interacted with indigenous peoples, part 3 convincingly demonstrates that the English built on the discourses and tactics that Spain pioneered in its efforts to assert its authority over the New World.Finally, part 4, titled “Trade and War,” focuses on the ways in which trade, diplomacy, and war entangled the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic and Pacific worlds. From reconstructing cross-imperial trade in the Caribbean to detailing how warfare in the Pacific remade Spanish and English hegemony in the Philippines, part 4 takes the reader through the messy, on-the-ground reality of trade and war, which no single empire could control according to its own whims.Entangled Empires is certainly a welcome scholarly contribution, especially since it has demonstrated how connected histories allow us to understand the Atlantic world in new, exciting, and more comprehensive ways. I can only hope that this work will inspire new synthetic accounts that also take into consideration the French and Dutch Atlantics.In the spirit of constructive scholarly discussion, I should mention that I have two minor quibbles with the book. First, the volume vacillates between two main contentions. Sometimes the chapters suggest that Britain consistently drew on the pioneering Iberian example to design its own Atlantic imperial project. At other moments, the chapters simply show that the Iberian and British empires consistently drew on each other to assert their authority in the Atlantic world. Most of the chapters support the former perspective, but a few actually prove the latter. The distinction might be subtle, but it is important nonetheless. I wish the authors had made a greater effort to underscore which of the aforementioned arguments more closely aligns with the evidence.Second, and perhaps most importantly, the introduction claims that the ultimate goal of the book is “to bring into focus the centrality of the Iberian-Latino past to the very constitution of the history of” the United States (pp. 3–4). While I am sympathetic to the effort, I do not think that this volume actually proves this assertion. Of course, the volume does clearly show that the inhabitants of the Iberian empires influenced the course of history in the Atlantic world and colonial North America. However, the stronger claim cited above, while plausible, requires a different set of tools and chapters to sustain it.These minor quibbles aside, this is an exciting and welcome addition to the historiography of the Atlantic world. The book can certainly be read alongside more conventional accounts as prompts for discussion in graduate and upper-level undergraduate seminars on the Atlantic world.

The Congress of Vienna and the Making of Second Slavery

Abstract This article analyzes the ways that discussions regarding the abolition of the slave trade held at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) affected slavery in the Iberian empires. Drawing from newspaper coverage, diplomatic correspondence, and conference minutes, we reassess the conditions under which Portuguese and Spanish agents negotiated with their British counterparts; highlight the Iberian political dilemmas that surfaced at the Congress; and elucidate the plenipotentiaries’ subsequent resolutions addressing the transatlantic slave trade. As a result of the talks held in Vienna, Spanish subjects in Cuba and Portuguese subjects in Brazil established political and diplomatic strategies to support slavery in order to maintain their positions in the world market of tropical goods. In other words, while slavery was undergoing reconfiguration in Brazil and Cuba, slave-owners and their political representatives were forced to engage with the hegemonic, abolitionist discourse systematically established by the British at the Congress in order to formulate their proslavery response. The article thus demonstrates that the Congress of Vienna was integral to the international consolidation of the politics of “second slavery” in the Americas. In other words, Brazil and Cuba were forced to engage with the hegemonic discourse systematically established by the British at the Congress in reconfiguring slavery and formulating their proslavery defense.

Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks ‐ edited by Rosenmüller, Christoph

Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks ‐ edited by Rosenmüller, Christoph

Assessing Worth across the Iberian Empires: Pearls and the Role of Human Capital in the Creation of Value, c. 1500–1700

Assessing Worth across the Iberian Empires: Pearls and the Role of Human Capital in the Creation of Value, c. 1500–1700

Introduction: Iberian Empire and the History of Capitalism

Introduction: Iberian Empire and the History of Capitalism

Possessive Individualism and the Spirit of Capitalism in the Iberian Slave Trade

Although Marx and Weber are traditionally read as offering opposing narratives of the transition to capitalism, Weber's notion of the Protestant ethic can clarify the subjective dimensions of the process Marx calls primitive accumulation, which set the capital-relation in motion. By rooting these cultural values in northern Europe, however, Weber cannot account for the foundational role of the Iberian empire in this process. Rather than the Protestant ethic, this essay takes up the concept of possessive individualism to consider the spirit of capitalism that emerged in the context of the initial, Iberian-led phase of the transatlantic slave trade. Iberian scholastics, especially Jesuits, used the concept of dominium, or property rights, to develop a theory of the individual as the owner of the self and of freedom as a possession that could be freely sold on the market. Voluntary enslavement and freedom of exchange were thus mobilized to justify a relatively autonomous sphere of economic activity in which the transatlantic slave trade could develop. In formulating these arguments, Jesuit authors drew on interviews with slave merchants that reflect a subjective orientation toward profit over morality. The Jesuits' ambivalent response both highlights and attempts to rationalize the contradictions of an emerging economic order based on the global circulation of commodities and racialized bodies.

Imperial Collapse or Revolution?

A book forum featuring The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770–1830 by Brian R. Hamnett. His 2017 volume argues that the origins of Ibero-American Independence must be found in the interplay between the Spanish and Lusitanian monarchies and the American empires ruled by them. It was internal conflict within these empires that led to independence, not revolution, separatist sentiment, or the emergence of American nation-states. Monica Ricketts, Eduardo Posada-Carbó, Clément Thibaud strongly commend the work while offering constructive criticism and analysis. Reviewers raise questions about socio-cultural forces and changes, the role of politics, the exclusion of an Atlantic perspective, and the lack of attention to revolutionary thought and nationalism. The book is celebrated for its breadth, its historiographical contribution, and the strength of its argument for the continuities from the Iberian monarchies and empires to the nation states that grew out of them. Hamnett responds to the reviewers.

Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks

Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks

Iberian Empires - Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks. Edited by Christoph Rosenmüller . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Pp. 240. $65.00 cloth.

Iberian Empires - Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks. Edited by Christoph Rosenmüller . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Pp. 240. $65.00 cloth.

Jurisdictional Autonomy and the Autonomy of Law: End of Empire and the Functional Differentiation of Law in 19th-century Latin America

This contribution discusses the collapse of the Iberian Empire and the transformation of legal regimes in 19th-century Latin America. While most of the literature on this period centers on the process of state-building and the reform of legal institutions, my discussion will focus on the important changes produced in the form of law according to Luhmann’s theory of functional differentiation. The main argument is that systems theory can provide a re-evaluation of the history of law in the 19th and 20th centuries if one focuses on the idea of the autonomy of law. I argue that this way of reading the functioning of law is analogous to the legal historical re-evaluation of early-modern Iberian legal regimes through the idea of jurisdictional autonomy. Taken together both ways of understanding autonomy in legal observation direct our attention to shifts in law that go beyond the question of empire and nation-state building.

Empires, Nations, and Revolutions.

This essay examines the ways in which the age of revolutions expanded the repertoire of political ideas and identities available to new and old political subjects. It questions the traditional narrative that replaces a model of old regimes and empires with a new one of imagined unitary nation-states. Instead, it argues that the nature of the political crisis of the Iberian empires gave rise to a reinvention of familiar categories, like monarchy and empire, and sired a wider range of new ones that did not fit the national mold.

Politics, Scholarship, and the Iberian Routes of the Repubic of Letters: The Late Renaissance Itinerary of Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654)

The trajectory of Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654) demonstrates how an Iberian intellectual who was well attuned to the composite governmental structure of the Iberian empire (c.1580–c.1640) strengthened the ties between state communication systems and learned communities during the Late Renaissance. This article highlights the political valence of historical knowledge that was gathered and distributed throughout the Republic of Letters with emphasis on the code-switching of a scholar who styled himself differently across learned communities depending on his political circumstances, interests, and interlocutors. The study of Nogueira’s itinerary demonstrates the need for a history of early modern scholarship that takes into account the ways that early modern politics and state communication systems were connected by learned networks.

Colonial Connections

“Colonial Connections” explores historical connections and patterns between Iberian and British colonialism that have been ignored by conventional anti-Eurocentric and postcolonial narratives. At issue are the erasure of inter-imperial linkages and the omission of the Iberian empires of Spain and Portugal and the colonization Abya Yala/Latin America as well as the importance that Iberian colonialism and indigenous civilizations had in the shaping of the modern world such as capitalism, racism and the coloniality of gender. The article provides a brief examination of anti-Eurocentric literature that rescues Asia, foremost China, from the dustbin of history while ignoring the importance of Iberian colonialism in the fall of China and the role that indigenous and African slave labor played in the development of capitalism and the triumph of the West. It also explores the artificial separation between Iberian and British colonialism that minimizes the role of religion in British colonialism and the commonalities that emerge once religion is accounted for. Finally, the article addresses the coloniality of democracy or the expulsion of the colony from the polity that emerges from conquest and the dehumanization of indigenous women and men of Abya Yala and notes the unevenness and divergences that surface when British and Iberian colonialisms are compared.

Family and Empire: Pantaleão Ferreira and His Heirs in Sixteenth-Century Portugal

Emigration overseas offered new career possibilities for the sons of elite families in the city of Porto, Portugal, although girls increasingly entered convents. This work explores the case of Pantaleão Ferreira, a man of recent noble status, and how his life and the lives of his family members were affected by the availability of new territories provided by the Iberian Empires during the sixteenth century. The lives of the members of the Ferreira family are reconstructed in order to unveil their affections, inheritance strategies, and family relationships.

A Behind-the-Scenes Glimpse into the Princeps Edition of Colóquios dos simples (Goa, 1563)

Considered by many to be the most learned Portuguese physician who lived in Goa during the sixteenth century, Garcia de Orta (c. 1500-1568) was the author of CoIoquios dos Simples, e Dro gas he cousas medicinais da India [Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India] (Goa, 1563). Devoted entirely to the description of Asian natural resour ces, very little is known about how this treatise came into existence. Publish ed at the edges of the Portuguese empire, and a hostage to technical, structural and human constraints, the princeps edition had a limited circulation. The diffusion around Europe of the novelties described in Col6quios dos Simples owed in part to the efforts of Clusius (1526-1609), one of the leading botanists of the time. This scholar promptly published Aromatum et Simplicium (Antwerp, 1567), a Latin epitome of Coloquios dos Simples. This complete reframing of Orta's treatise guaranteed the wide dissemination of the new knowledge about Asian plants, fruits and drugs validated by the Portuguese physician on the periphery of the empire. In this essay I analyse the background to the publication of the Portuguese treatise and demonstrate that, especially due to structural constraints, the princeps edition had a limited circulation. I show that the wide diffusion of the novelties about the natural resources of the Indies was dependent on the technical equipment, artistic skills and editorial criteria dictated and managed by European academics, artists and printers. I propose that the appropriation of local knowledge collected and validated in the Iberian Empires by imperial agents challenged European academics and typographers to create innovative treatises about the Indies' natural resources that assured the widespread circulation of an entirely new natural knowledge.