Enlightenment in an Imperial Context: Local Science in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World
- ISSN: 03697827
- DOI: 10.1086/649324
Abstract
This paper aims to assess the figuration of local and metropolitan scientific practices and theories in the eighteenth-century Hispanic Empire by focusing on two colonies: New Spain (Mexico) and New Granada (Colombia). In New Spain, Creole and metropolitan scientists negotiated the assimilation of old local wisdom with new European knowledge in their botanical studies of native plants. Through the openness of both groups of scientists to new ideas, the naturalization of standardized procedures, and the verbalization of old problems in new terminology, the globalization process of scientific practices was successfully integrated there at the local level. In New Granada, less favorably, the Royal Botanical Expedition (1783-1816) provoked disagreement between representatives of the viceroy and of the colony's Creole intelligentsia not only about plant classification systems, but about the proper relationship between scientific and political interests.
Enlightenment in an Imperial Context: Local Science in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World
The History of Science Society
Enlightenment in an Imperial Context: Local Science in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Hispanic
World
Author(s): Antonio Lafuente
Source: Osiris, 2nd Series, Vol. 15, Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise
(2000), pp. 155-173
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/301946
Accessed: 27/10/2008 12:16
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