Title: Nature, empire, and nation : explorations of the history of science in the Iberian world /
Authors: Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge.
Publisher: Stanford University Press,
Year: 2006
Subjects: Science Latin America History; Science Spain History; Creoles Latin America Intellectual life; Spain Colonies America.; Spain Politics and government
Abstract: This collection of essays explores two traditions of interpreting and manipulating nature in the early-modern and nineteenth-century Iberian world: one instrumental and imperial, the other patriotic and national. Imperial representations laid the ground for the epistemological transformations of the so-called Scientific Revolutions. The patriotic narratives lie at the core of the first modern representations of the racialized body, Humboldtian theories of biodistribution, and views of the landscape as a historical text representing different layers of historical memory.
Contents: Chivalric epistemology and patriotic narratives : Iberian colonial science -- The colonial Iberian roots of the scientific revolution -- From baroque to modern colonial science -- New world, new stars : patriotic astrology and the invention of Amerindian and Creole bodies in colonial Spanish America, 1600-1650 -- Eighteenth-century Spanish political economy : epistemology and decline -- How derivative was Humboldt? : microcosmic narratives in early modern Spanish America and the (other) origins of Humboldt's ecological sensibilities -- Landscapes and identities : Mexico 1850-1900.