Research, Development, and Empire: State Support of Science in the Later Spanish Empire*

^*. I would like to thank Susan Deans-Smith, Daniela Bleichmar, and Antonio Barrera for providing both helpful feedback and stimulating conversation, which contributed to substantial revision of an earlier version of this paper. Susan Deans-Smith, in particular, read several drafts and provided wise and gracious counsel. I am also grateful to David Christian, who read the paper carefully and gave me a world historian's perspective on the importance of the Americas in the development of Western science.

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Notes

^*. I would like to thank Susan Deans-Smith, Daniela Bleichmar, and Antonio Barrera for providing both helpful feedback and stimulating conversation, which contributed to substantial revision of an earlier version of this paper. Susan Deans-Smith, in particular, read several drafts and provided wise and gracious counsel. I am also grateful to David Christian, who read the paper carefully and gave me a world historian's perspective on the importance of the Americas in the development of Western science.

¹ Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI/S) Indiferente, L. 1549. Lista de los cajones que remite al Rey Nuestro Señor para su Real Gavinete el Governador de Philipinas en la Fragata la Juno del mando de Don Benito Antonio de Lira este presente año de 1780, con la marca del margen ‘R,’ 7 January 1780.

² Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI/S) Indiferente, L. 1549. Lista de los cajones que remite al Rey Nuestro Señor para su Real Gavinete el Governador de Philipinas en la Fragata la Juno del mando de Don Benito Antonio de Lira este presente año de 1780, con la marca del margen ‘R,’ 7 January 1780.

³ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1553. Noticia de las especies Medicinales recogidas en este Departamento de San Miguel de la Rivera Oriental del Uruguay: explicanse las virtudes, uso para los efectos de ellas, y modo de composición; y demás que contiene a la inteligencia de ello, 6 December 1786.

⁴ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1550. Relación instructiva de lo que son los Arboles Guacimo, Jobo, Tamarindo, y Nispero, que en la presente ocasión se remiten del Puerto de Cumaná a España, a disposición del Excelentísimo Señor Ministro de Indias, sobre el Bergantín María Virgén del Rosario, del mando de San Salvador Mestre y Venepres; sus frutas, semillas, y virtudes, con los terrenos que requieren, y lo demas suficiente a dar una idea que baste para procurar su propagación en aquellos Reynos.

⁵ One exception to this is Juan Pimentel (1998), who argues that Malaspina was charged with investigating the political relationship between Spain and its American colonies to determine whether there were any natural laws that governed that relationship in the same way that Newtonian laws governed the physical world. Another obvious exception in the anglophone literature is the work of Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (2001), which argues that Spanish and Spanish American historiography of the New World in the eighteenth century had important epistemological ramifications not only for the writing of history but also for the testing of knowledge as a whole.

⁶ In their chapter, Antonio Lafuente and José Luis Peset (1988) do credit the late seventeenth century as a time in which scientific development once again began to take place in Spain, but they see this largely as part of, or a prelude to, the Enlightenment rather than a set of developments with their own significance.

⁷ In his chapter, which traces the historiography of science and empire, Roy MacLeod discusses the fact that earlier historians, particularly W. K. Hancock, judged Western science as a ‘value-free aid to material progress and civilization.’ For this reason, its role in aiding colonizers through the spread of Western values was not viewed as a form of domination but as a universally beneficial process (MacLeod 1987, 218)

⁸ See also Petitjean, Jami, and Moulin (1992, ix) in which the editors refer to the relationship between science and empire as an ‘autonomous problem in the history of science.’ According to the editors, this is a new approach, ‘divorced from the two traditional perspectives of analysis: the “geographical” (“science IN the empire” viewed as a value-free activity) and the utilitarian-political (“science FOR the empire” or “the tools of empire,” where science is considered as a mere instrument for colonial and imperial domination).’

⁹ Similarly, within the field of medicine, most work tends to focus on the development of tropical medicine which, though it has its roots in the eighteenth century, is largely a nineteenth-century phenomenon.

¹⁰ For example, Mackay (1985, 8) describes the inclusion of ‘scientific parties’ in Cook's entourage as ‘not an entirely new development, much less an entirely English one’ without giving further explanation or references.

¹¹ There is a similar divide in terms of chronology. Historians of the ‘first phase’ of European expansion—the establishment of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonies in the sixteenth century—have little, if any, dialogue with historians of the ‘second phase’—the Age of Imperialism. Though there can be little dispute that these empires were established under different conditions in very different contexts, it is certainly possible that the second phase developed out of the first, and that architects of nineteenth-century imperialism learned something from their predecessors. Conversely, in order for historians of earlier empires to evaluate the significance of early European colonialism, is it not necessary for them to be aware of later developments? While I am not suggesting that every colonialist needs to be an expert in all fields spanning more than four centuries, at the same time there is an argument to be made here for further dialogue, awareness, and collaboration.

¹² The first of these works is the recent publication by Schiebinger and Swan (2005), which includes several essays on Spain and Spanish America. Another is an edition of Osiris edited by Roy MacLeod (2000), with articles on science in Spanish, Portuguese, and French America. MacLeod demonstrates his awareness of the narrow approach often taken in treating this topic when he advocates broader geographic and theoretical approaches and recognizes ‘the process of multiple engagements’ (2000, 6) involved in colonial and imperial science. The two other works that bridge the anglophone/Hispanic divide are Lafuente and Ortega (1993) and Petitjean, Jami, and Moulin (1992). These works are both the result of international conferences and are essentially publications of conference proceedings.

¹³ The role of the European discovery of America in the development of Western science—and in particular its impact on the scientific revolution—from the perspective of world history has been explored by David Christian. As Christian points out, ‘the most distinctive features of modern science should be thought of not so much as canny methodological choices taken by European scientists from the sixteenth century, but rather as unavoidable consequences of the accelerating globalization of information networks,’ of which the contact between Europeans and indigenous Americans was an important feature (2002, 159). I thank David Christian for pointing this connection out to me. See also Anthony Pagden's discussion of the New World as the basis for early European anthropological theories of human development (1982).

¹⁴ For an overview of histories (political as well as natural) of Spanish America by contemporary chroniclers see Esteve Barba (1992) and Brading (1991). For early writings on natural history see also Gerbi (1985).

¹⁵ One reason for this lack of coalescence may be the Crown's refusal to publish the findings of the various enterprises owing to its desire for secrecy. In 1562, for example, the Crown issued a decree which required a royal license for any publication. A number of manuscripts were thus refused publication, including Francisco Hernández's writing, the encyclopedic work of the Franciscan Bernardino Sahagún, and the Cruz-Badiano text describing Nahua medicines.

¹⁶ According to Henry Kamen, ‘historians have assumed that [Spain during this time] plunged into an absolute decline from which it emerged only at the end of the eighteenth century’ (1980, vii). For a broader discussion of science and medicine under Charles II and in seventeenth-century Spain generally see López Piñero (1969, 1976, 1979).

¹⁷ Kamen (1980, 317). Kamen makes the argument that it may have been Charles II's very weakness that allowed for innovation and a growing ‘spirit of criticism’ during his reign.

¹⁸ Archivo General de la Nación Mexico City (AGN/M), Civil, vol. 1276, Expediente 14.

¹⁹ The role of the Royal Pharmacy and its relationship to the Royal Chemical Laboratory is a topic that requires further research. There is little secondary work on this topic, but I do touch on it in chaps. 5 and 7 of my dissertation (De Vos 2001).

²⁰ I discuss in detail the incorporation of pharmacies into Mexican hospitals in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in chap. 6 of my dissertation (De Vos 2001). The role of pharmacies in indicating further medical specialization of hospitals is significant in challenging the generally accepted timing of the ‘medicalization’ of the hospital. In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault (1994) asserts (and many have followed) that ‘medicalization’ did not happen until the late eighteenth century, with the influence of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Following from my argument that the Enlightenment is not responsible for all eighteenth-century innovation, I see the incorporation of pharmacies into hospitals—an important step in ‘medicalization’—as a product of the seventeenth century.

²¹ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1544. Informes de Don Casimiro Gómez Ortega sobre el sistema o modo de estampar al natural las Plantas, como presento Don Celedonio de Arce. Letter from Casimiro Gómez Ortega to Jose de Gálvez, 10 February 1779.

²² Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), criticized this accepted practice when he said:

The exclusive trade of the mother countries tends to diminish, or, at least, to keep down below what they would otherwise rise to, both the enjoyments and industry of all those nations in general, and of the American colonies in particular. It is a dead weight upon the action of one of the great springs which puts into motion a great part of the business of mankind. (Smith 1976, 104–5)

²³ John Fisher provides evidence that a number of Spanish intellectuals had in fact been aware of these problems from the early seventeenth century. It was not until the 1760s, however, that the ‘clamour for change and by extension the condemnation of existing economic policies, were loudest in the circle of men who were not only theorists but holders of high office’ and in this way could initiate reforms (Fisher 1997, 2–3).

²⁴ Comercio libre actually consists of a series of decrees issued from the 1760s to the 1780s in which economic liberalization happened only gradually. The first of these, for example, only allowed for a relaxation of the rigid convoy fleet system. Between 1765 and 1778, more decrees opened up free trade between select areas of Spanish America and eight ports in Spain (as opposed to Cadiz as the sole port, having taken over from Seville in 1713). New Spain was initially excluded from this order, as officials feared that its booming economy would overshadow areas with fledgling economies, and thus the monopoly convoy system continued there until 1789.

²⁵ See the work of John Gascoigne (1994, 1998) for further discussion of the relationship between the English Crown and private individuals and organizations in the pursuit of imperial science.

²⁶ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1552. Remitiendoles una memoria de los Generos medicinales que hacen falta en la Botica del Rey para que los embien. San Ildefonso, 14 October 1745.

²⁷ I do not mean to imply here that Spain's commitment to science in the eighteenth century was an uncomplicated process of linear development. Rather, Spanish ministers’ support for science waxed and waned according to Spain's economic and military fortunes throughout the eighteenth century, and Spanish support for the Enlightenment was tried severely after the French Revolution. At the same time, however, the reign of Charles III does stand out as one that was committed to policies of political economy that favored scientific development, and it is during this reign that much of what I analyze here occurred.

²⁸ In fact, it was the copious letter-writing which indicated closely coordinated activity between the two that led me to this connection in the first place. Beginning in 1777, their names appear in almost every set of correspondence having to do with the natural history collections remitted to Spain from the Americas.

²⁹ During this time, the Crown oversaw the creation of the Viceroyalty of La Plata and the Captaincy of Caracas (both in 1776), the establishment of the royal tobacco monopoly, the organization of a Creole militia, the creation of the intendancy system, the reform of tax collection, and the institution of comercio libre. For more on Gálvez see Martí (1963), Priestley (1916), and Brading (1991, 467–89).

³⁰ Francisco Javier Puerto Sarmiento has written an extensive biography of Gómez Ortega (1992). Antonio González Bueno has also written a brief biography of Gómez Ortega (2002), which compares the three directors of the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to González Bueno, Gómez Ortega was the most interested of the three in the practical, useful elements of botany, particularly in investigating the pharmaceutical properties of plants.

³¹ Translations included Henri-Louis Duhamel de Monceau's Theoretical-Practical Elements of Agriculture and a compendium of Duhamel de Monceau's writings ‘on seedlings and plantings of trees and their cultivation,’ both published in Madrid in 1805.

³² In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louis Pratt argues that eighteenth-century scientific expeditions, natural history collections, and Linnaean classification of non-European plants and animals were means of establishing European dominance. Though represented as ‘scientific,’ and therefore neutral and value-free, descriptions of these efforts were in effect ‘strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment that they assert European hegemony’ (Pratt 1992, 7–9).

³³ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1549. Compendio de las noticias que S.M. por su Real Ordén de 20 de Octubre proximo pasado ordena que se puntualisen para el completo conocimiento de la Geografía, Física, Antiguedades, Mineralogía y Metalurgía de este Reyno de Nueva España, fol. 1, 23 January 1777. Natural history is not included in the title of the document but it does include a section on natural history. See West (1964–76).

³⁴ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1549. Compendio de las noticias, fol. 5, 23 January 1777. The cochinilla was a great example of obtaining natural history curiosities that could be both useful and profitable. The cochinilla insect came from the area around Oaxaca, and when ground up produced a red dye. For a more detailed study of the socioeconomic impact of cochineal on Oaxacan society see Hamnett (1971) and Baskes (2000).

³⁵ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1549. Compendio de las noticias, fol. 5, 23 January 1777.

³⁶ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1549. Compendio de las noticias, fol. 5, 23 January 1777.

³⁷ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1549. Compendio de las noticias, fol. 5, 23 January 1777.

³⁸ For further elaboration on this argument see De Vos (2003). See chap. 5 of González Bueno and Rodríguez Nozal (1994) for a discussion of the investigations that took place into the medicinal properties of American plants.

³⁹ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1544. Letter from the viceroy of Peru to Don José de Gálvez, 5 October 1779.

⁴⁰ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1544. Letter of 21 March 1779.

⁴¹ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1544. Letter of 21 March 1779.

⁴² AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1553. Letter from the President of Guatemala to José de Gálvez, 12 July 1784.

⁴³ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1550. Letter from the Intendant of Sonora to José de Gálvez, 19 July 1784.

⁴⁴ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1544. Letter by José de Gálvez, 10 May 1796.

⁴⁵ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1544. Letter by José de Gálvez, 10 May 1796.

⁴⁶ This line of argument is also elaborated in Puerto Sarmiento (1988) and followed by Antonio González Bueno, another prolific author on eighteenth-century botany in the Spanish empire.

⁴⁷ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1549. El Governador y Comité General de la Ciudad y Provincia de Maracaibo al Ilustrísimo Señor Don Josef de Gálvez, 15 December 1777.

⁴⁸ Ibid. See Schiebinger (2004, 2005) for further discussion of the methods by which European colonists gained information about the uses of plants in the West Indies.

⁴⁹ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1549. Noticia de las Cosas particulares de Historia Natural y otras hechas de maderas esquisitas que remite a el Rey Nuestro Señor el Governador de Maracaibo, por mano del Illustrísimo Señor Don Joseph de Gálvez, Secretario de Estado, y del Despacho Universal de Indias, 14 December 1777.

⁵⁰ The impact of these medicines on the Spanish pharmacopoeia and healing practices is unclear and requires further research, though I discuss it in greater detail in my dissertation (De Vos 2001, 345–66). From the documents I collected, however, it is clear that the Crown was particularly interested in one of the medicines, Sonora Gum, which was used to treat pleurisy (a serious disease causing inflammation of the lining of the lungs). Several orders went out between 1785 and 1787 requesting quantities of the gum.

⁵¹ AGI/S Indiferente 1553. Letter of Don Casimiro Gómez Ortega, 23 November 1790.

⁵² AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1553. Letter from Joseph Lafarga to the Duque de Losada, 12 November 1778.

⁵³ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1552. Disertación físico, chimica, botanica del Te de Bogotá comparado con el de Levante, 16 August 1786. Cañizares-Esguerra (2005, 159) also discusses the tea, pointing out that José Celestino Mutis, head of the royal botanical expedition in New Granada, believed that the Bogotá tea ‘was as good if not better than the tea Europeans had been importing from China.’ The chemical analysis performed on the tea was no doubt part of an effort to determine its effectiveness as well as its botanical relation to Eastern teas.

⁵⁴ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1544. Expediente sobre el fomento, el comercio, y cultivo de la Pimienta de Tabasco, o Malagueta. Letter by Juan Isidro de San Martín y Logones, 17 February 1777.

⁵⁵ AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1544. Expediente sobre el fomento, el comercio, y cultivo de la Pimienta de Tabasco, o Malagueta. Letter by Juan Isidro de San Martín y Logones, 17 February 1777.

⁵⁶ For information on Atlantic trade in the sixteenth century see Chaunu and Chaunu's exhaustive Seville et l'Atlantique (1955–59). For eighteenth-century trade information see Antonio García Baquero González (1976), which is the eighteenth-century counterpart to Pierre Chaunu. See also Stein and Stein (2000, 2003).