The Spanish Enlightenment and the Comprehension of the New World: Botany, Medicine, and the Search for New Remedies for the Old Empire

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Contents V
3. Asymmetric Ecologies in Europe and South America around 1800: Introduction 1
4. I Epistemic Asymmetries
5. Humboldt and Epistemological Colonialism: Alexandra Wulf’s The Invention of Nature 13
6. Climate, Man, and Culture in Eighteenth- Century Spain: From Feijoo (1728) to Masdeu (1783) 35
7. Andrés Cavo Franco’s Historia de México (1797): Hydrology, Regeneration, and the Superiority of Nature 51
8. Narrative, Writing about “Indians,” and Creole Epistemes in the Historias Naturales by Three Jesuits Banished from America (1767) 65
9. II Asymmetric Identities
10. Race and Reform in Late Colonial Santo Domingo 85
11. The Asymmetries of American Ingenium: Echoes of the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo 113
12. III Asymmetries in Governmentality and Economy
13. Between Agriculture and Culture: The Role of Nature in Jovellanos’s Memoria para el arreglo de la policía de los espectáculos y diversiones públicas and Informe de Ley Agraria 137
14. Andean Metallic Abundance in Republican Times: Mariano de Rivero and his Civic Endeavor 155
15. The Spanish Enlightenment and the Comprehension of the New World: Botany, Medicine, and the Search for New Remedies for the Old Empire 181
16. IV Asymmetric Taxonomies
17. The New World of Noah’s Ark 207
18. Hierarchy and Continuity: The Order of the Natural World in Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man and Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature 233
19. V Asymmetries in Human-Environment Relations
20. Lima 1746: Configurations of Catastrophe and Asymmetric Ecologies 247
21. Island Texts and Archipelagic Writing: Alexander von Humboldt’s Isle de Cube: Antilles en général 277
22. Transatlantic Approaches to Nature: Humboldt and his Environmental Concerns 291
23. List of Contributors 317
24. Name Index 321