Description:
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.
Review Quotes: "Nature, Empire, and Nation is a compilation of [Cañizares-Esguerra's] most influential essays on the history of Hispanic science from the early colonial period through the nineteenth century. Taken together, they demonstrate how the much-ignored scientific contributions of the early modern Hispanic world in fact laid much of the groundwork for modern scientific practices... While Cañizares definitively demonstrates that the early modern Iberian scientific culture was both Western and modern, his work is especially innovative in how it recognizes and embraces the aspects of this science that are not entirely modern or rational."--Itinerario