Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World - Paperback

by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (Author)

This collection of essay 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.

Front Jacket

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.

Back Jacket

Pathbreaking and provocative throughout, Nature, Empire, and Nation represents revisionist history at its best. The eight essays assembled here focus new attention on a much-neglected area of research: the place of both Spain and Spanish America in the history of early modern science and scientific thought. Cañizares-Esguerra's range of subjects is impressive--botany, cosmography, ecology, race, and more--but he addresses each in a lively, intelligent, and accessible manner. The book should be required reading for historians of science, as well as for anyone with interests in the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern Ibero-Atlantic world. --Richard L. Kagan, Johns Hopkins University

Author Biography

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of the award winning How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford University Press, 2001).