Natural History and The Pursuit of Empire

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)
Natural History and the Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Author(s): Paula De Vos
Source: Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Winter, 2007), pp. 209-239
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sponsor: American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies (ASECS).
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NATURAL HISTORY AND THE PURSUIT OF

EMPIREIN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYSPAIN
Paula De Vos
INTRODUCING THE COLLECTION

In the Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain, there is a series of fourteen
legajos-literally "bundles"-of documents that give testimony to the widespread
collection of natural history specimens from virtually every region of Spain's overseas empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. This collection comprised
approximately 345 shipments of a rich variety of thousands of specimens from the
animal, vegetal, and mineral kingdoms that were sent to Madrid over the course
of more than four decades. These collections included "curiosities"-the bones
of a Guatemalan monster, drawings of a hairless cow in Mexico, and collections
of seashells, snails, coral, and butterflies from the Philippines-but the majority
of specimens (approximately 87%) were botanicals chosen for their medicinal,
nutritional, industrial, and ultimately commercial use and destined for the Royal
Botanical Garden, the Royal Pharmacy, or the Museum of Natural History in
Madrid. The collection of these specimens, organized and engineered by highranking officials of the Spanish Crown, was carried out not by trained naturalists
but at the behest of local administrators in the Americas and the Philippines who
relied on the expertise of local people. The extent of resources and coordination
that went into these collections demonstrates the Crown's strong commitment to
natural history, and thus they represent a highly significant chapter in the history
of Spanish science in the age of Enlightenment.
Paula De Vos is an Assistant Professorof LatinAmericanHistory at San Diego State University.

She is the author of articles published in Endeavour, Colonial Latin American Review, and
the Journal of World History, and a contributing editor for an upcoming volume on science
in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires.
Eighteenth-Century
Studies, vol. 40, no. 2 (2007) Pp. 209-239.

210
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES
40 /2
Despite the significance of the collections, however, the documents depicting them have been largely overlooked by historians of Enlightenment science in
Spain.1 Rather, these historians usually focus on the natural history collections
gathered under the aegis of official scientific expeditions to the Americas and Asia
that took place throughout the eighteenth century. These expeditions, aimed at
studying the geography, climate, flora, and fauna of Spain's overseas territories,
numbered almost thirty in all, with eight devoted exclusively to natural history
investigation. They consisted of teams of learned and professional scientists-botanists, naturalists, artists, pharmacists, physicians as well as metallurgists, engineers,
and architects-who were trained in a variety of academic institutions which
emphasized the study of natural history and its uses.2 For historians interested in
natural history and what one has termed the "scientific politics" of eighteenthcentury Spain, these expeditions and the institutions that made them possible are
a logical focus for their work.3
Yet the collections in question here are significant in a number of ways,
not only with regard to the history of natural history in Enlightenment Spain, but
also in promoting greater understanding of the political and economic policies of
the empire at the time. The unique nature and large extent of natural history collecting evident in the documents may shed new light on our understanding of the
"scientific politics" of the Bourbon Crown. In fact, I would argue that without the
information the legajos provide, that understanding is necessarily incomplete.
The purpose of this essay, then, is to alert the historical community to this
little-known but very significant network of natural history collection and to explain
its significance within the historical context of late-eighteenth-centurySpain. I begin
by describing the collections themselves-the logistics of collecting, the methods by
which specimens were gathered, and the types of specimens sought-and make the
argument that the collections in question were in many ways an extension of older
forms of bureaucratic information-gathering that had been in use for centuries.
Thus the collections originated out of an imperial administrative tradition different
from the impulse that led to the professional scientific expeditions, and in that way
constitute a unique form of natural historical practice among European empires of
the eighteenth century. I also argue that the predominance of "useful" specimens in
the collections represents a similarly long-standing tradition of utilitarianism with
regard to natural history in the Spanish Empire, though, as we shall see, utility was
a common goal of the Enlightenment.
At the same time that the collections were part of well-established traditions, however, they also included a number of innovative features representative
of the changing political, economic, and intellectual context of Enlightenment
Spain. For eighteenth-century Spain underwent a massive, even "revolutionary"
reform program initiated with the succession of the Bourbon dynasty to the Spanish throne and aimed at centralizing the entire imperial apparatus and increasing
imperial revenue through economic development, or fomento.4 Several aspects of
the collections-the administrators assigned to oversee collecting, the collection of
actual physical specimens in addition to descriptions and drawings, and the search
for new commodities-reflect these aims and illustrate the importance that natural
history played in the political economy of Bourbon Spain.

DE Vos / Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain
211
The search for new commodities in particular indicates that for Enlightened Spanish statesmen, natural history signified a global economy of nature full
of utilitarian potential, and it was their responsibility to identify and exploit that
potential for the larger benefit of humanity.
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE
COLLECTIONS: SCIENCE, COMMERCE, AND
EMPIRE IN EARLYMODERN EUROPE
In exploring the connection between economic motives and scientific
investigations, this study speaks to a number of recent historiographical findings.
As Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen point out in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (2002), this connection has been
markedly absent from the traditional narrative of the Scientific Revolution. Rather,
historians of science over the course of the last century treated it as a purely intellectual "revolution in theory," largely divorced from mundane concerns.s Yet
Smith and Findlen find that these concerns and the participation of a variety of
actors-artisans, physicians, merchants, and civil servants, among others-in this
process were in fact central to the development of what we understand to be western approaches to the study of nature. Thus in contrast to earlier scholarship, the
authors conclude that "it is in fact now difficult to overestimate the importance of
the link between science and commerce" (18). A similar conclusion was reached
by Margaret Schabas and Neil De Marchi, editors of Oeconomies in the Age of
Newton (2003) who, like Smith and Findlen, see a link between the rise of a global
economic order and the concomitant development of a "scientific" approach to
nature in the early modern period.6
Scholars of early modern natural history have been quick to identify and
understand this link between the economic and the scientific, and have added
political concerns of empire as well to their understanding of natural history's
development. For early modern natural history was well-suited to the needs and
goals of expanding European nations, and as such "turned out to be a remarkably
accommodating rubric under which to ascertain the truth of nature in the service of
empire."7 Edited collections on the European enterprise of natural history collecting, particularly Cultures of Natural History (1996) and Visions of Empire (1996)
underscore the interrelation, rather than the difference, between the investigation
of nature and the pursuit of profit and power.8
With respect to botany specifically, which was a subfield of natural history, recent works by Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire (2004) and Colonial
Botany (2005), edited with Claudia Swan, make an explicit call for the rewriting
of the history of botany that takes into account its political and commercial roots.
Botany has traditionally been understood to have developed out of the rise of
standardized taxonomic schemes in the eighteenth century, coming into its own
only when-as with the narrative of the Scientific Revolution-these theoretical
concerns were divorced from "applied" concerns of medicine. Yet Schiebinger and
Swan, and a host of other contributors (particularly Harold Cook), see it differently, offering "a lively challenge to the historiography of early modern botany"
by viewing it in the context of "the dynamic relationships among plants, peoples,
states, and economies in this period" and taking into account the ways in which

212
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
STUDIES
40 /2
natural history and botany "remained strategically important in global struggles

among emerging nation-states for land and resources."9 Colonial botany became
a search for "green gold" in places where mineral wealth was unavailable or its
extraction declining.10As Schiebinger,Cook, and Steven Harris have pointed out in
various essays, colonial natural history was "big science" and "big business"-and
in our case, part of "big government" as well, at least in absolutist Spain.11
And finally, a new generation of historians of science, many of them contributors to these edited collections, has specificallyrecognized the vital link between
nationalist political economy and the pursuit of natural history in the eighteenth
century that is largely the focus of this essay. Lisbet Koerner's widely recognized
work on Carl Linneaus, the Swedish founder of modern western taxonomy and
binomial nomenclature, casts light on the crucial influence that economic concerns
played in Linneaus's study of natural history.12Determined that Sweden ought to
be self-sufficient, free from dependence on foreign merchants for "exotic" goods,
Linneaus advocated for the investigation of domestic plants that could substitute
for exotics, or for their acclimatization and cultivation in Swedish soil. In this way
he promoted a form of "cameralism," an economic system parallel to mercantilism, in which protectionist measures would serve to make domestic economies
completely self-sufficient.13Cameralism originated in the German states largely in
reaction to the monopolistic trading companies of their imperialistic neighbors.
As documented by Alix Cooper, these ideas led to local investigations of natural
history and the compilation of local inventories of "natural riches" in the German
states.14Thus these studies, which demonstrate a positive link between theories of
political economy and the study of natural history, further highlight the fact that,
in the words of Emma Spary, "[n]otions of natural and national economy were
closely linked. . . ."15
UTILITARIANISM, SCIENCE, AND "IMPROVEMENT"
IN THE SPANISH EMPIRE
The story presented here, of the collection of "useful" specimens of natural
history by the Spanish Crown in order to strengthen its political and economic position and in turn augment the well-being of its subjects, thus echoes similar themes
and developments elsewhere in early modern Europe. It is clearly part of a larger
story of the interconnection between European imperialism and European science
and of the strategic and commercial aspects of early modern natural history-and
of western science in general. At the same time, however, Spanish natural history
investigation was its own unique entity, the product of a particularlyIberian history
and context. With the exception of Spary, whose work focuses mainly on ancien
regime France, studies of the connection between political economy and natural
history focus almost exclusively on the German states and on Sweden, areas whose
non-imperial, inward-looking political situation could hardly be more differentfrom
Spain'sfar-flungempire.'6How did the connection between economics, politics, and
natural history play out in such an empire, where absolutism and Catholicism still
reigned supreme and where Spaniards could draw from the seemingly unlimited
resources of three different continents?
In answering this question, this essay also aims to highlight Spain's unique
role in the development of the western scientific tradition. In this way, it builds

213
on the recent work of Jorge Cafiizares-Esguerraand Antonio Barrera, who have

both pointed to the empirical, practical, and utilitarian nature of Spanish scientific
investigations. Cafiizares has argued that Spain's contribution to the development
of European natural history, and particularly of botany, in the early modern period
was its utilitarian, pragmatic approach. The collections here thus provide a good
example of what Cafiizares has pointed to as Spain's traditions of "utilitarian
knowledge-gathering of massive proportions that did not get cues from the classics or the learned, but from merchants, enterprising settlers, and bureaucrats."17
Indeed, historian Antonio Barrera has traced this type of knowledge-gathering to
the earliest decades of the Spanish presence in the Americas, arguing persuasively
that it provided the basis for a new empirical and experimental approach to natural
phenomena that characterized much of the Scientific Revolution.18
The utilitarian character of natural history investigation in the eighteenth
century-and of Enlightenmentpursuits generally-is admittedly not a new concept.
Works on French botany in the Paris Academy of Sciences and King's Garden have
documented clear evidence of attention to utility and applied science with regard
to botanical investigation.19The preponderance of useful items in Dutch cabinets
of curiosity has been widely interpreted as a natural consequence of their capitalist spirit.20It is the historians of the British Empire, however, who have tended to
dominate the field, establishing clearly the prominence of utility in British Enlightened science, and the gathering of natural history specimens and information with
a view toward their applied uses.21Similarly, histories of British botanical gardens
stress the utilitarian goals of plant cultivation and the idea that increased knowledge would lead to general "improvement" of society.22Their detailed evidence
and careful argumentation have led to the conclusion that scientific research could
indeed take place in the service of empire.
With regard to Spanish science, however, these works have their limitations, for the implication is that eighteenth-century natural history investigation
was a precursor to the modernism of the nineteenth century, that it was setting
the stage for nineteenth-century imperialism within a Protestant, parliamentary,
and increasingly liberal, industrialized society.23Catholic, absolutist, protectionist
Spain would have little role to play within this narrative, and thus these works
are unable to provide an explanation for the scientific activity evident within the
Spanish Empire at this time.24Indeed, these works do not engage in any kind of
comparison with the Spanish Empire, and in fact there is remarkably little crosscultural discussion or comparison of the role of science within the different European empires generally.
For their part, Spanish historians have readily acknowledged the prominence of natural history and botany in the late Empire as well as its political and
commercial significance.25However, unlike the British historians, they tend to dismiss the possibility that "true" science could develop in a system in which political
and commercial interests dominated the type of investigations which took place.
Botanists working with Crown administrators are categorized as little more than
sycophantic bureaucrats whose scientific agendas were driven by desire for political advancement.26The intertwining of political and scientific goals and actions
meant that there was a "lack of theoretical reflection," where "scientific practice
in its strictest sense did not exist," thus creating an enterprise destined to fail as

214
40 / 2
part of an idealistic and unrealistic plan that would end as a "broken illusion."27
Historians of the period seem to attribute this lack of "pure" science to the fact
that the Crown never established an academy of sciences (though it did establish
a number of other institutions of arts and learning).28Without the pure, neutral,
and value-free science that would have taken place within an academy of sciences,
Spanish science, it appears, was doomed to be partisan and utilitarian-not "real"
science, in other words.
This essay attempts to establish dialogue between these two literatures by
first asserting the obvious point that Spain was very much a part of the utilitarian,
scientific tradition of the Enlightenment. Second, I argue that Spanish natural history was simultaneously a scientific, entrepreneurial, and political enterprise and
that being so does not diminish its status as a science. In fact, through its long
tradition of using bureaucratic networks to gain empirical and utilitarian information within the empire, a tradition that meant that the state played an integral
part in the creation of knowledge, Spain followed a unique path vis-a-vis its European neighbors. In many ways, the coordination between the Spanish Crown,
the imperial council that governed the Indies, and the Customs House in Seville
together may have served the institutional role played by academies of sciences in
other parts of Europe.29Thus the means by which Spanish science developed may
have been different, but I would argue-and the legajos studied here show-that
it was quite effective in fostering the development of natural history and botanical
investigation in the eighteenth century.
GATHERING THE COLLECTION: NATURAL
HISTORY COLLECTING AS IMPERIAL TRADITION
The natural history documents located in the Archive of the Indies were the
result of bureaucratic efforts to explore the natural resources of Spain's American
kingdoms and in this way were part of a long tradition of empirical informationgathering in the Empire. These efforts, described by Cafiizares as "perhaps the only
[knowledge-gathering tradition] that was unique to the Spanish empire," involved
the gathering of demographic, cartographic, geological, and natural historical
information about the empire through the use of questionnaires.30These surveys
were sent out periodically throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries from the central governing Council of the Indies (later reformed as the
Secretariat of the Indies) to local bureaucrats in the Americas and the Philippines,
who were charged with gathering the requested information and sending it back
to Spain. The answers were then compiled into Relaciones geogrdficas, which has
become the name for this bureaucratic tradition.31
In this way, the Spanish bureaucracy was well accustomed to this type of
surveillance strategy. The bureaucratic channels in place could thus accommodate
a growing emphasis on natural history information with relative ease.32Indeed,
in several ways, the natural history collections evident in the legajos represent yet
another set of Relaciones. They were gathered and remitted in response to royal
orders in a hierarchical chain of local to central administrators.33These orders
were sent by the Crown to the top administrators in the colonies, the Viceroys of
Peru, New Spain, and later New Granada, and La Plata as well as the governors
of outlying areas and the presidents of the Audiencias (high courts), of which there

215
were fourteen. These leaders in turn forwarded them on to provincial bureaucrats,

with the request that they employ any and all learned persons-"interested amateurs"-to aid in the collection of local natural history specimens that would be of
use or interest to the empire. Thus, in contrast to the many scientific expeditions
organized by the Spanish Crown particularly in the later eighteenth century, the
natural history investigations discussed here were the result of a network of bureaucratic activity where collectors of information and specimens were not trained
professionals-the naturalists, botanists, pharmacists, physicians, and artists of
the scientific expeditions-but rather local officials who gained knowledge, more
often than not, from indigenous inhabitants.34
In addition, like previous Relaciones, the orders were circulated throughout the empire. During the eighteenth century, at least twenty-two different royal
orders requested natural history specimens that would have relied on the same
bureaucratic mechanisms set in place by the Relaciones. A "circular instruction
given by Royal Decree" of August 27, 1788 for the collection of specimens "and
other curiosities" provides a representative example of the extent and coordination of the networks of information gathering. Answers to the request arrived in
Madrid over the course of the next ten months from no less than twenty-four local
and high-ranking officials from northern Mexico to the southern cone. Between
November 1788 and June 1789, the order received acknowledgment from the governors of the islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Trinidad, and Margarita, of Paraguay,
Maracaibo, Cumana, Cartagena, Montevideo, Guayaquil, Santa Fe, Guadalajara,
Merida, C6rdoba de Tucuman, Portobelo, Salta de Tucuman, Panama, Quito, and
Charcas; from the presidents of the Audiencias of Caracas and Guatemala; from
the Captain General of the Provincias Internas de Nueva Espafia; and from the
Viceroys of Buenos Aires and Peru.35
Like the Relaciones, the natural history collections of the legajos were
also part of a long tradition of utilitarianism in the Spanish approach to natural
history that is reflected in the collections themselves. The collecting that went on
in response to these orders was impressive, as evident in both the wide variety and
sheer volume of the specimens identified in the legajos. Although exact quantification
of what arrived is difficult given the lack of cataloguing within the legajos and lack
of systematization within the documents themselves (for some items, weights and
amounts are included; for others they are not, or the designation is an ambiguous
"one barrel of seeds," or "eight boxes of plants"), even a rough estimate indicates
that the overwhelming majority of the remittances were specimens that could be
of possible industrial or commercial use.36Together, the 1,000 or so files in the
legajos document approximately 345 separate remittances of live specimens, 299
or 87% of which came from the plant kingdom (See Table 1). Following plant
specimens, the second most common remittance came from the animal kingdom,
its 18 shipments making up 5% of the total. And finally, shipments containing
mineral specimens made up about 4% of the total.37
Thus specimens of the plant kingdom made up the vast majority of items
collected. Plants and plant products, including saps, balsams, and resins were useful in providing foods, medicines, dyes, textile fibers, and construction materials.
At least 700 different medicinal plants reached Spain through the natural history
collections of colonial administrators. While many of them were new to Europeans,

216
40 / 2
Table 1. Natural History Remittances by Type of Specimen

Type of Specimen
Number of Remittances
Percentage of
Total Remittances (345)
Plant Specimens
Mineral Specimens
Animal Specimens
299
16
18
86.7%
4.6%
5.2%
several plant specimens had been part of the transatlantic trade between Spain and
Spanish America for centuries. Apothecaries at the Royal Pharmacy, for example,
were accustomed to receiving regular shipments of quinine, sugar (used to preserve
medicines), cascarilla, calaguala, canchalagua, ipecacuana, Jalap root, Mechoacin
root, sassafrass, liquidambar, and sarsaparilla.38Non-medicinal cash crops including indigo, cochineal, vanilla, cacao, and tobacco were traditional commodities as
well.39Cacao and vanilla, for example, arrived regularly from Veracruz, the Crown
requesting that they be sent in "sufficient amounts" on a yearly basis.40
Animal specimens, destined mainly for the Natural History Museum,
comprised a relatively minor part of total remittances, but they too represent
significant effort on the part of colonial collectors. In the eighteen shipments that
carried animals, at least 132 live animals and many more preserved animals and
animal parts crossed the Atlantic, and in some cases the Pacific as well, to reach
Spain.41Unlike the plants and minerals, however, the animals and animal parts
were most likely collected for the purposes of display and entertainment. In this
way they would represent the collection of "curiosities" or what Kryzstof Pomian
would term a semiophore, rather than the more obviously utilitarian applications
that plants and minerals could serve.42Minerals, by contrast, largely followed the
traditional and utilitarian model of natural history collection and trade. Minerals
included any number of different varieties, including industrial materials such as
salt, mercury, tin, and copper, stones from newly discovered mines, as well as the
long sought after gold, silver, pearls, emeralds, and the medicinal bezoar stone
(arguably an animal source), one of which reportedly weighed three pounds thirteen ounces.43 Although the precious stones and metals came in relatively small
quantities, larger amounts of tin and copper arrived from time to time-96,144
pounds of copper from Veracruz in 1752, and two bars of tin collectively weighing
85,035 pounds from Lima in 1769.44
ASSESSING THE COLLECTION:
INNOVATION AND REFORM
Thus in many ways, the natural history collections collected by colonial
administrators and remitted to Spain were an extension of a centuries-old system
of administrative information gathering and transatlantic commerce. Yet the legajos were also firmly part of the reforming tradition of the Bourbons, from the
timing of the orders to the bureaucrats who administered them to the locations
and types of specimens targeted. This reforming tradition stemmed from a com-

217
mon perception among Spanish statesmen and reformers of the seventeenth and
early eighteenth century that Spain had entered a period of unmitigated decline. A
century of decreasing colonial revenues, impaired leadership, and the loss of many
key territorial possessions of strategic importance had left the Spanish elite all too
aware that Spain's glorious past did not match its present state.45
When the last Spanish Hapsburg king Charles II (1661-1700) died without
an heir, the War of Spanish Succession (1700-1714) witnessed a dramatic change
in leadership with the accession of Philip V (1700-1746), a member of the French
royal family and nephew of Louis XIV. Over the course of the following century,
the Bourbon kings instituted a series of wide-ranging political, administrative,
economic, and clerical reforms known collectively as the Bourbon Reforms.46
Reaching their height under Charles III (1759-1788), the Bourbon Reforms sought
to regain Spain's former glory, power and wealth by making their rule more centralized and efficient.
The fact that the natural history collections were part of these reforms is
evident, first of all, in that the dates of correspondence in the legajos fall squarely
within the period of greatest reform in Spain and Spanish America. Although the
correspondence spans the period between 1745 and 1819, the time of most intense
activity occurred during the reign of Charles III,whole rule is often looked to as the
best example of Enlightened absolutism in eighteenth-century Spain and the time
of the most sweeping reform. Of the 345 shipments of natural history specimens
received, only 10% arrived prior to his reign, between 1745 and 1759 (See Table
2). Charles III'sreign saw the arrival of over half of the collections-almost 60%
of them, with the remaining 30% arriving during the reign of his son and successor
Charles IV, and during the first turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. Thus
Charles III's reputation as an Enlightened despot, interested in pursuing science
for the benefit of his empire, seems in this case to be deserved.
NATURAL HISTORY COLLECTION AND
ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM
The administratorsin charge of the collecting enterprisealso indicate a shift
from earlier Relaciones practices, a shift that reflects Bourbon aims. The Relaciones
carried out under the Hapsburgs had been initiated and organized by the Council
of the Indies, reflecting the Hapsburg tradition of ruling by council.47By contrast,
the Bourbon collections were overseen not by a Council but by a single Minister of
the Indies who would have direct access to the monarch. The Ministry, created in
1714 and based on the model of Louis XIV, sought to centralize Spanish government by replacing conciliar rule with a more individualized approach of appointing
"Ministers of Universal Dispatch," of which there were five, to rule the empire. The
Minister of the Indies thus had considerable influence over the governing of Spain's
overseas territories, and was the one to initiate the orders for the natural history
collections in the second half of the eighteenth century. During the period of the
collecting, several ministers in particular stand out in the archival correspondence:
Julian de Arriaga (1751-1776), Jos6 de Galvez (1776-1787), Antonio Porlier, and
Antonio Valdes (who was Minister of the Marine). With regard to the collections,
however, the most outstanding of these ministers was the tireless Jos6 de Galvez,
who is also known as one of the foremost architects of reforms under Charles III.48

218
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
STUDIES 40 /2
His time as Minister of the Indies from 1776 to 1787 stands out as the period of
greatest intensification of the collecting enterprise. Of all the specimens that arrived over the course of a sixty year period, almost half came during the eleven
years of Galvez's reign. Significant activity did take place beforehand, particularly
under the leadership of Arriaga, but none match Galvez's record (See Table 2). In
this way, the collecting enterprise was clearly related to the reforms taking place,
particularly in the economic realm.
The colonial administrators and the areas targeted for information also
conformed to Bourbon aims. From the correspondence, it appears that high-level
officials were very involved in the packing and shipment of the specimens, indicating the importance with which the collecting enterprise was viewed as well as
Bourbon desires to realign the political and economic relationship between Spain
and its colonies. The Hapsburgs had conceived of Spain's empire as a loosely unified confederation of kingdoms, a "territorial empire" that connected the Iberian
Peninsula with its European, American, and Philippine possessions.49 By contrast,
the Bourbons aspired to bring these kingdoms under a more centralized and regulated leadership in which Spain's overseas territories would become "colonies"
in the classic mercantilist sense of providing raw materials for the metropolis to
manufacture, and then buying the finished product.50The natural history collections were part of this scheme to render the American kingdoms as colonies, for
not only did they provide the potential raw materials themselves, but they were
put under the direction of peninsular Spaniards. Administrative reforms under
Charles III had limited American-born Spaniards, called "Creoles," to one-third of
administrative offices and banned them from the highest positions. Those positions,
that of Viceroy, Intendant, and Audiencia president, were precisely the ones most
involved in the collecting correspondence. Thus the natural history collections,
conceived of, organized, and carried out by peninsular administrators, were part
of a larger project of exploiting the Indies for the benefit of metropolitan Spain.
Though fomento (development) was the goal, it meant development within Spain
itself, not the wider Empire. Within the context of Enlightenment "improvement,"
however, what was good for Spain would be good for all of its subjects, but clearly
within an asymmetrical system of "unbalanced relationships" in which a select few
dominated the majority of power and resources.51
INNOVATION AND THE COLLECTION OF SPECIMENS
Another difference between the eighteenth-century collections and earlier
Relaciones, and a major indicator of the ways in which these collections were innovative, even unprecedented, lay in the fact that the administrators were directed
to send actual specimens in addition to information. Relaciones of the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries had for the most part requested only descriptions-not physical specimens- of the geographic, demographic, and ethnographic
characteristicsof local populations. Although the eighteenth-centuryquestionnaires
arguably put more emphasis on natural knowledge-Antonio de Ulloa's questionnaire of 1777, for example, aimed at acquiring "the complete knowledge of the
Geography, Physics, Antiquities, Mineralogy, and Metallurgy of the Kingdom of
New Spain"-they still requested information, not specimens.52

219
Table 2. Natural History Remittances by Time Period

Time Period
Number of Remittances
Percentage of
Total Remittances (335)
34
10%
1759-1788
(Reign of Charles III)
199
59%
1776-1787
(Galvez as Secretaria
de Indias)
160
48%
102
30%
1745-1759
1788-1819
Thus the shipment of such large quantities of specimens was a new and
surely very costly enterprise.53These certainly were not the first "natural productions" to reach Spain from the New World-as we have seen, many of the objects
in the natural history collection were very familiar, often items of a well-established
transatlantic trade network, and several were medicines that had long been accepted
into the European pharmacopoeia. But never before, I would argue, had such a
wide-ranging, large-scale collection of specimens both new and well-known been
collected by bureaucrats in the Spanish Empire. This was not a textual collection
or a collection recorded in painted images but a literal menagerie of specimens,
often living, breathing, and requiring sustenance. As such they required an unprecedented degree of logistical care and coordination, which once again points to their
perceived importance to the empire.
The fact that the collections indicated a new era of gathering specimens
as well as information is first indicated in the orders issued by the Secretary of the
Indies. Although the orders focused on here were issued in the latter half of the
eighteenth century, Susan Deans-Smith has pointed out that natural history collecting was a royal prerogative throughout the whole of the century. The orders
specifically stipulated the collection of objects: for example, royal orders issued
forth from Philip V as early as 1712 authorizing the collection of "singular, rare,
and extraordinary things which are found in the Indies" to supply the newly established Royal and Public Libraryof Madrid.54FerdinandVI (1746-1759) established
the first, though short-lived, royal Cabinet of Natural History in Spain in 1752 (it
was reestablished under Charles III in 1771), for which orders requested that "all
types of minerals, natural productions, and curiosities" be collected from "all the
King's dominions."55Finally, orders calling for New World medicines for the Royal
Pharmacy in Madrid issued forth regularly from the 1740s requesting "pharmaceuticals [generos de botica] produced in the Kingdoms of Peru and New Spain and
the surrounding provinces, which are lacking in the Royal Pharmacy."56

220
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
STUDIES 40/2
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221
222
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
STUDIES 40 / 2
Nevertheless, as stated above, the reign of Charles III, and the years of
Galvez's tenure as Secretary of the Indies (1776-1787) in particular, appear to
have been the period of greatest intensification in the bureaucratic efforts to gather
physical specimens. Of approximately nineteen different royal decrees calling for
the remittance of natural history products, fourteen issue from the time of Charles
III, ten of which also fall within the time of Galvez' leadership (See Table 3). To
supply the reestablished Natural History Cabinet, for example, Charles III issued
an empire-wide appeal in 1775 for "examples of the animal, vegetal, or mineral
kingdom for the integrity and use of the Natural History Museum."57 Orders of
1778 and 1779 specifically requested specimens of new plants, trees, and shrubs
from the Americas along with instructions for their care and uses. Moving into
the 1780s, decrees issued forth yearly between 1783 and1789 targeting medicinal
plants and "exquisite" wood in particular. The decree of 1786, for example, asked
that officials send "one or two live specimens of the most exquisite fruit trees and
wood" from their province.58While these products were intended chiefly for the
Botanical Garden and the Royal Pharmacy,the Natural History Museum continued
to receive specimens, for orders of 1789, 1796, and 1800 requested that viceregal
administrators continue to gather specimens from the three kingdoms of nature to
enhance the Natural History Cabinet's collection.59
In sending the physical specimens, officials followed detailed directions
about the packing and labeling of boxes and crates, for packages could shift and
break during the arduous journey over sea and land from the various ports of
Spanish America to their final destination in Madrid. For live specimens, officials
had to include special instructions as to their care and feeding, as was the case for
a tortoise that had to be fed meat, rice, and bread during the long trip from Manila
to Madrid.60In addition, lists were needed with detailed descriptions of the packages' contents if officials in Madrid were to have any idea what they were, where
they were to go, or how they were to be used. According to Crown instructions
the collectors were to keep specimens of different genus and species separate when
packing them, and they ought not to mix animals, minerals, and plants. Specimens
of the same class, furthermore, were best grouped together-for example, "birds
ought to be put in one crate, and fish in another."61In order to prevent rearrangement or breakage of the contents, each specimen had to be wrapped in "flexible
and elastic papers that will keep the objects from turning," and the paper had to
fill every empty space in the crate to hold them in place.62The crates, furthermore,
would be custom-built for the specimens they carried, so that there was no standard
size or volume, but rather each would be different.63Once packed, the crates had to
be lined up and numbered, starting with one, by carving the number into the wood
or stamping it onto a metal plate which was then fixed to the crate. Into each crate
went a list of each specimen, including its name, the climate or terrain from which
it came, its properties, uses and virtues, and the methods by which to "conserve,
cultivate, and propagate it."64And finally, each shipment had to be accompanied
by a master list of all the crates and their contents, which corresponded to the lists
within the crates themselves.
The carefully packed crates were to be addressed to "the Secretariat of the
State and Universal Dispatch of the Indies," with local customs officials verifying
their contents, and indicate whether they would go to the Royal Botanical Garden,

223
Natural History Museum, or the Royal Pharmacy.65

When they arrivedat the port of
Cadiz, the primary port of call (after 1713) for ships from the Indies, the President
of the Casa de la Contrataci6n would oversee their transport to the appropriate
institution in Madrid. Useful and ornamental plants went to the Royal Botanical
Garden established in 1755; animals, some plants, and other curiosities would be
displayed at the Natural History Museum; and both new and known medicines went
to the Royal Pharmacy, which had been in existence from the sixteenth century.66
IMPERIAL BIOPROSPECTING: NEW SPECIMENS IN THE
COLLECTION
As stated above, the specimens included both well-known and new products, the majority of which were useful plants. A significant aim of the collecting
efforts, and the key to understanding them, however, lay in the search for and collection of new materials-what Londa Schiebinger has termed "bioprospecting"
in the colonial Atlantic world.67 Bioprospecting involved the search for products
previously unknown to Europe, or American or Philippine varieties of known
and desirable products, that could be of potential commercial value. The majority
of products were plants whose bark, fruit, sap, or leaves made up various medicinal balsams, oils, and herbs as yet unknown in the European pharmacopoeia,
or which, like the Tahitian breadfuit brought to the West Indies, could provide
large populations with food at very low cost.68They also included potential cash
crops-new varieties of coffee, tea, or dyestuffs, and trees whose wood could be
used in construction projects.6
Officials were particularly interested, for example, in acquiring new dyestuffs. Accordingly, included in the collection was a recipe for preparing "Ultramar," a "most precious" blue dye made from Lapiz lazuli stone, as well as a dye
produced from the bark of the "Paraguatan Tree" in Guyana.70Stones were also
sent from the Province of Maracaibo, used there to make blue and green tints and
sold throughout the area for an economical two to three pesos per pound.71 The
achiote was another potential dye. Sent to Galvez from the President of Guatemala,
it contained forty to fifty bright red seeds that "the Indians use for their paintings,
as a food dressing, and to give color to their food and drink in place of saffron."
When mixed with urine and lime, in fact, it proved to be an indelible dye, and its
paste left nasty stains on napkins and tablecloths that were only removed with
difficulty.72In 1804 the Intendant of Paraguay sent a tree cutting to the Viceroy of
La Plata informing him of its uses as a dye, and in 1803, royal officials requested
that fifty pounds of "Dividivi" dye be remitted to the factories of Guadalajara
where the celebrated chemists Luis Proust and Francisco Carbonell would carry
out "chemical experiments" on it.73
New varieties of other highly profitable cash crops and luxury items were
also sought. American varieties of tea leaves, coffee beans, and various spices
promised the double reward of large revenue and of relieving Spain's dependence
on Dutch monopolies. Tea leaves from the Kingdom of New Granada were especially promising: those of Mariquita and Bogota were said to rival those of the
Levant. Bogota Tea prepared by the naturalist Celestino Mutis, for example, was
"a delicious beverage" whether it was prepared as a powder in the "Japanese
method" or infused with full leaves as the Chinese did-though Mutis found the

224
40 / 2
Japanese-style tea "more active and aromatic."74Mariquita Tea appears to have

reached some level of acceptance on the imperial market: in 1789 over 25,000
pounds of it reached Cadiz.75
Officials also sought and found American varieties of various spices, such
as the Tabasco pepper found in the Province of Chiapas, said to be so flavorful
that it would soon render Spanish dependence on the Eastern spice trade obsolete.76According to the director of the Royal Botanical Garden who examined it
in 1777, the pepper tasted like a mixture of nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, and black
pepper and as such had an "agreeable flavor, as that of all spices combined." In
this way, it could be presented as "a unique spice . . . which could be substituted
for the others."77Live coffee and cinnamon trees also arrived from the Philippines,
indicating Crown interest in studying them and perhaps attempting to acclimatize
them to Spain's climate.78
New products of potential value also included foodstuffs, particularly
those widely used by native American populations. For instance, examples of
pulque arrived, an indigenous drink of central America made from the Maguey
cactus-described as "a tree capable of providing the Indians with water, wine, oil,
vinegar, honey, syrups, cloth, and other things necessary to human life."79Officials
in Peru also sent examples of quinua root, an indigenous staple, and of pallares,
or lima beans, with descriptions of their medicinal and nutritive value.80Another
major focus of the natural history collections was lumber. In the 1780s and into the
'90s especially, royal orders requested samples of "exquisite" and "useful" wood
along with "explication of their name, width and height, uses to which they may
be applied, medicinal qualities, and potential as a dye."81In response, dozens of
varieties of wood arrived from all over the Americas-Havana, Cartagena, Guatemala, Quayaquil, Florida, Louisiana, Buenos Aires, and virtually every province
of Mexico-and from the Philippines as well. According to instructions, officials
sent three to four pieces of each type of local tree with a description of its qualities and the uses to which it was best applied. From Cuba, for example, arrived
samples of the Mora, Granadillo, Evano, Zerillo, Acana, and Masagua trees.82The
Governor of Maracaibo sent examples of twenty-eight different types of wood
from local trees, describing in detail the qualities (color, durability, and relative
abundance) of each type and whether it was best used in constructing the pillars,
balconies, walls, windows, doors, and floors of houses, or in making furniture,
including desks, shelving, and beds.83The wood of the Manzanillo, for example
was considered a soft wood, good for constructing shelves for holding paper and
especially for making beds, since its consistency "did not admit any kind of bedbug
or other louse."
Of all the useful plants sent, the most numerous were potential medicines.
Although it is impossible in some cases to know what use, if any, the plants sent
would serve, it seems that a major aim of the natural history collection was to
investigate and find new medicines that would provide "miracle cures" for disease and be profitable as well.84 The director of the Royal Botanical Garden, for
example, urged the collection and shipment to Spain of medicinal plants from the
Americas both "for the benefit of humanity and the extension of our commerce."8s
At least 700 different types of medicinal plants and plant products arrived in Spain
throughout the 1770s and 1780s.86 The intended destination of about 400 of these

225
plants is indicated in the documentation: about half of them (200) went to the
Royal Pharmacy, with the other half roughly divided between the Royal Botanical
Garden, which received 80 of them, and the Cabinet of Natural History which
received 128.87
Some of these plants seemed promising enough to elicit examination,
chemical analysis, and testing in controlled experiments in order to determine their
healing-and commercial-potential. For example, the Guaco herb from New
Granada was said to be a "universal antidote" for all snakebites by acting against
"all [types of] venom, and acrid and corrosive humors." Its efficacy was tested on
a collection of dogs, cats, hens, and chickens, who were exposed on four successive
days to snakes that had been "stimulated" to bite them.88In 1787, the director of
the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid also called for the testing of a medicine from
Peru called the Eagle Stone, which purportedly aided women in pregnancy and
childbirth. It was said that the Stone would stimulate labor for pregnant women if
placed on the lower parts of the body, and stopped hemorrhages and miscarriages
when placed near the head.89 Other medicines were purported to cure epidemic
diseases, such as the powder from the bark of the Mexican Choch tree, said to cure
malaria, and the mysterious "Herb N" from Cuba that cleansed smallpox sores of
their deadly humor.90Like the Choch powder, which was tested on twenty-eight
hospital patients, an herb called "Angel Hair" arrived in 1789 with express instructions to "use it and experiment with it in the General Hospital" of Madrid.91
EXPLAINING THE COLLECTION: POLITICAL
ECONOMY AND NATURAL HISTORY IN THE
BOURBON REFORMS
On the whole, then, this collection was almost entirely utilitarian. Though
animals and some of the plants were undoubtedly meant for display and ornamentation, this was mainly an imperial botanical endeavor in which the plants collected
served nutritional, industrial, and medicinal purposes. The collections in turn served
political and economic purposes in their emphasis on material goods that would be
of potential use to the Spanish Crown. They were the result of a large-scale effort
on the part of the Spanish bureaucracyto make an inventory of its natural resources
and investigate the potential of those resources. When viewed in this light, they
reveal a particular economic and political strategy on the part of the Crown that
made explicit use of scientific investigation and experimentation.
It has been argued here that what was new about these collections, however, was not the Crown's use of science to realize political and economic goals.
As we have seen, that kind of practice was well established by the late sixteenth
century, particularly with regard to the Relaciones geograficas. What was new was
the fact that physical specimens were sent. The question remains, though, as to
why the Crown committed significant time and energy to the shipment of actual
specimens, and why it did so at this particular moment in history. Why, during a
time of almost continual maritime warfare and competition with England, France,
and Holland over colonial resources, would Spanish ships allocate part of their
quite limited space and resources for barrels of seeds, cages filled with all sorts of
animals, or dozens (sometimes hundreds) of live potted plants requiring precious
water? Clearly, natural history had reached unprecedented importance.

226
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
STUDIES
40 / 2
The explanation for this lies, I would argue, in the particular ethos of the
Spanish Bourbon government in the Age of Enlightenment. That ethos was based
on an evolving political economy that favored the development of natural history
from a practical, commercial standpoint. Specimens, physical objects, needed to
accompany the descriptions of them because they would be examined, manipulated,
experimented upon, propagated, and acclimatized for the benefit of the Spanish
imperial economy and, so the thinking went, for the good of its subjects.92Leading
political economists under Charles III believed that the key to economic and social
improvement lay in fostering local agriculturaland industrial development in Spain,
and this could be accomplished in part through the exploration of natural history
which would reveal new products for commercial exploitation. The increased
prosperity that would come with economic development, they believed, would have
social and moral benefits as well. A common thread throughout Enlightenment
economic theories was the idea that economic gain would bring a general "improvement" of society. 93The idea was that economic prosperity would eventually
benefit all levels of society, thereby improving standards of living and thus contributing to the general well-being of the populace. Historians of the Enlightenment,
in fact, have argued that political economy at this time became a secular ideology
of reform that was common to Spain, England, France, and Italy alike.94In Spain,
this ideology depended in part on the investigation of natural history resources to
bolster the Spanish economy.
In this way, the natural history collections were the result of a connection
between science and political economy in much the same way that the cameralism
of Linneaus and the German princes promoted natural history investigation in
Sweden and Germany. Yet imperialist Spain presents a very different context for
the protectionist policies of domestic self-sufficiency advocated by the cameralists.
Though Spanish statesmen had remarkably similar aims to the cameralists, they
were in fact influenced by a variety of economic doctrines, both protectionist and
liberal, and the policies they prescribed reflected their imperialist perspective. And
unlike the cameralists in northern Europe, Spain could draw on global resources.
Though heavily influenced by foreign ideas, theories, and prescriptions, therefore,
Spain's economic policy, like its pursuit of natural history, was specific to the needs
of its empire. An understanding of the relationship between political economy and
natural history in eighteenth-century Spain may also serve to highlight the unique
ways in which Enlightened ideas played out with regard to science.95
POLITICAL ECONOMY IN ENLIGHTENMENT SPAIN
To understand the Spanish natural history collections, then, it is necessary
to understand the political economy embraced by Spanish statesmen of the late
eighteenth century. The political economists, who had long been giving advice as
to how to improve Spain's economy, were at the forefront of the economic reforms
pursued by the Bourbons. This was true particularly during the reign of Charles
III when interest in political economy reached unprecedented heights and the appointment of several able and powerful statesmen at court led to an intensified
spirit of reform.96In addition, the later eighteenth century was a time of transition
in which distinct and lasting changes in European economic thought were taking
place. From the sixteenth century, Spain and other imperial powers had followed

227
a more or less mercantilist economic model, which held that economies needed
protection from the state in the form of tariffs, trade restrictions, and price-fixing, and that a kingdom's economy functioned best when it maintained a positive
balance of trade and hoarded the resultant excess of gold and silver to back up its
currency.97In the eighteenth century, however, these traditional assumptions about
the ideal function of state economies were increasingly challenged and eventually
displaced by theories of economic liberalism and free trade which held that the
study of economic exchange, like the study of nature, could lead to the formulation of scientific laws.
The first of these "scientific" economic theories to emerge was that of
the French physiocrats who advocated the free trade of staples such as grain so
that they could find their "natural" price.98In the physiocratic model, agriculture
was the basis of all economic activity and the one and only source of new wealth,
whereas local industry and artisanry were deemed the "sterile classes." 99Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations drew in part on the physiocrats' doctrine of free trade
and of agriculture as the primary source of new wealth. However, in contrast to
the physiocrats, Smith argued that capital and labor also played productive roles
in the economy, and that unrestricted international commerce would lead to the
benefit of all of humankind.
These theories had enormous influence on Spanish statesmen and the
political economy they formulated, and the influence of a more liberal thinking is
clearly evident in economic reforms of the latter half of the century. 100At the same
time, however, Spain did not simply mimic the policies of its northern neighbors;
rather, its political economy was shaped in response to the needs and imperatives
of its particular political, cultural, and economic context.101In this way, the policies that emerged were in fact a blending of the old and the new-of protectionism
with liberalization, and of agrarianism with manufacturing. For example, local
economic societies (called Sociedades de Amigos del Pais) were established to foster
both industrial technology and agricultural output. They did so by offering prizes
and other incentives for innovative technologies, by encouraging the production
of regional goods for local industries, by supporting ways to increase agricultural
output, and by sponsoring research to find new products.102In addition, the decrees
of comercio libre (free trade) issued between 1765 and 1788 sought to liberalize
trade while keeping certain protectionist measures in place. The decrees increased
the volume of trade to and from the Americas by opening select Spanish and Spanish American ports to "free trade" within the empire, but this was not free trade in
the sense of a laissez-faire economy.103Although comercio libre allowed merchants
within the empire to trade with each other, by no means were they to have any
business with foreign powers.
FOMENTO AND NATURAL HISTORY
Despite the variety of economic theories influencing the Spanish statesmeneconomists, most all of them were able to agree on the importance of promoting
development, or fomento, within the empire. And whether traditional or "modern,"
whether protectionist or laissez-faire, each of the economic models that influenced
them provided a prescription for economic development that involved investigation into natural history. At their most basic level, mercantilism, liberalism, and

228
40 / 2
physiocracy all took the investigation of natural resources-both the discovery

of new resources and the finding of new uses for known ones-to be the key to
agrarian and industrial development. Mercantilism, for instance, advocated for the
colonial production of raw materials which would then be manufactured in the
metropolis and sold back to the colony, thus doing away with any dependence on
foreign commerce.104In a similar way, cameralism (the domestic or non-imperial
form of mercantilism) encouraged the pursuit of local natural history and the local
acclimatization of "exotic" specimens (i.e., "import substitution") as the proper
path toward self-sufficiency. 105Physiocracy's principle tenet, that agriculture was
the basis of a country's wealth and its only means to generate new wealth, would
have elevated natural history to a new importance. Finally, Adam Smith'sinfluential
work would have only furthered this sentiment. Though Smith identified unfettered international commerce as the global regulator for the science of economics,
he viewed agriculture as "the right and true foundation to subsequent extensions
into trade and commerce."106
For Spanish statesmen desiring reform that would lead to economic development, then, natural history would have been an obvious pursuit. Whether the
specimens collected had agricultural or industrial applications, they would lead to
economic development and at the same time render the colonies the more or less
tributary producers of raw materials. According to historian David Goodman, the
study of natural history in Spain was "the key to improvements in manufactures,"
and was heartily supported by the Spanish clergy as well.107Natural history had
thus become a crucial element in the utilitarian revamping of the Spanish colonial
system. As might be expected, evidence of the importance of natural history appears
in the works of many Spanish political economists of the eighteenth century. The
writings of Pedro Rodriguez, the Count of Campomanes (1723-1802), and Gaspar
Melchor de Jovellanos (1744-1810) are cases in point. Both men were trained in
law and held various important positions as advisors to Charles III's court and
together "may be considered . . . the culminating point of the Enlightenment"
in Spain.108Campomanes's Discourse on the Development of Popular Industry
(1774) and Jovellanos's Report on the Agrarian Law (1795) were some of the most
influential tracts of the period, and through them we can see evidence as to why
natural history reached unprecedented importance during this time.
Campomanes, for his part, favored local industry as a way to foster economic development. In his treatise entitled Discourse on the Development [Fomento]
of Popular Industry, Campomanes sounded remarkably like the cameralists when
he insists that:
Mientrashayen unaprovinciaarbol,yerba,fruto,mineralo viviente
cuyo uso se ignora,es menesterconfesarquepermanecenaunsus habitantesdestituidosde las indagacionesesencialesqueexigela industria
bien establecide. Es gran descuido traer de fuera lo que puede lograrse en
el Pais a menor costa y sin p6rdida de la balanza nacional.09
While there is in any province a tree, herb, fruit, mineral, or living thing
whose use is unknown, it must be said that the inhabitants are missing
the essentials that a well-established industry demands. It is very negligent to bring from outside what can be found from within at low cost
and without losing the national balance [of trade].

229
For Campomanes, the solution to these problems lay in the "knowledge and study
of natural history" which would yield new plants "capable of becoming threads
or dyes."110Campomanes saw the economic societies as the key to encouraging
the practical pursuit of natural history, declaring that the prizes they habitually
offered to those who gave "practical demonstration and proof of the use of [new]
plants" would encourage curiosity and industriousness among the inhabitants of
the empire.111
Campomanes also suggested that the economic societies establish and
oversee natural history museums, in which all the natural history specimens of
a particular region would be gathered together. It was his hope that these local
collections would eventually be brought together in a dictionary that would form
the basis for a "general system of natural history in Spain." Significantly, however,
Campomanes was not satisfied with descriptions. In his plan, physical specimens
had always to be present in order to be studied. "Never," he ordered,
[j]amasse debediscurrirni tratarde producci6nalgunanaturalsin tenerlapresentey enterarsebiende lo que es. Lasespeculaciones
abstractas
sobrelas cosasfisicas,cuandono se fundanen el conocimientorealy
analiticode las mismascosas,estanexpuestasa notablesyerros.112
shouldanynaturalproductionbe describednor drawnwithouthaving [thespecimen]itselfpresentso thatone can acquaintoneselfwith it
well. Abstractspeculationsaboutnaturalphilosophy,whentheyarenot
groundedin realandanalyticalknowledgeof the objectsthemselves,are
liableto containsignificanterrors.
Thus for Campomanes, the study of natural history would lead to both the local
and global discovery of new resources, and the gathering of physical specimens
would allow for the scientific investigations necessary to determine their uses.
Another prolific and influential statesman, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos,
the Asturian advisor to Charles III and author of the Report on the Agrarian Law
presented to the Economic Society of Madrid in 1795, advocated the use of agrarian
innovations to stimulate Spain's economy. Jovellanos sought to promote a utopian
agrarianism where small farmers tended their plots and went to school to learn the
latest techniques and improvements in agriculture. Despite the fact that he favored
a path to fomento that was different from Campomanes, he argued similarly that
natural history was the key to Spain's development. According to Jovellanos, farmers needed to learn about natural history, for natural history provided the farmer
with new crops and new industries:
La historianatural,presentindolelas produccionesde todo el globo,le
mostraranuevassemillas,nuevosfrutos,nuevasplantasy hierbasque
cultivary acomodara 61y nuevosindividuosdel reinoanimalque domociliar en su recinto. 113
Naturalhistory,by presentinghimits specimensfromall overthe globe,

showshimnew seeds,new fruits,new plantsandherbsto cultivateand
arrange,and new individualsfromthe animalkingdomthat he can domesticatein his pasture.
Natural history would thus provide the raw materials for new products that
would be further experimented upon and processed into commercial goods. These

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40 / 2
products, cultivated and manufactured wholly within the Spanish Empire, would
alleviate Spain's dependence on foreign producers and allow for the Empire to
produce all the items-both luxury and subsistence-that it needed. The economic
security and wealth that they generated would in turn lead to improvement in the
material and moral well-being of society as a whole.
CONCLUSION
Given this context of political reform and economic transition in eighteenth-century Spain, the collection of both new and familiar specimens of natural
history, and the sending of actual specimens, makes sense. We can now understand
why the Crown would have invested so much effort on the collections and why it
chose the particular bureaucratic channels it did. Whether the specimens would
have agrarian or industrial applications, whether they served as food, medicines,
or luxury items, they were an integral part of the ideal of fomento and provided
the materials that members of the Economic Societies would use in pursuing their
investigations and winning prizes. In this way, the pursuit of natural history and
the collection of actual specimens were crucial components of the emerging "science" of economics, and of political economy in particular, which held the promise of being able to guarantee the well-being of the whole of the Spanish society.
Thus natural history came to be a powerful political tool of enlightened economic
reform throughout the Spanish empie.
NOTES
1. There is a published guide to these legajos: Maria Teresa L6pez Diaz and Antonio Dominguez
Camacho, Catdlogo de documentos hist6ricos farmaceuticos del Archivo General de Indias (Sevilla:
Universidad de Sevilla, 1983). This guide was absolutely indispensable for the compilation of quantitative data included in this essay and for some general descriptions of the collections. As an aid to
locating documents, however, it is of limited use, since the legajos are themselves largely unorganized,
having neither page numbers nor folders to divide papers on different topics and themes, consisting of
several hundred, and sometimes over one thousand, pages of orders, letters, and lists of remittances.
In addition, the title to the guide gives little indication of the fact that the documents were the product
of an eighteenth-century imperial project of natural history collecting. The authors themselves do not
discuss their significance, apart from a general statement that the documentation is evidence that "the
discovery of the American lands had direct repercussions in the area of science, bringing about at the
time great scientific advances in general and especially in investigations relative to the animal, vegetal,
and mineral kingdoms which resulted in great developments in zoology, botany, and pharmacology."
L6pez Diaz and Dominguez Camacho, 7.
2. Susan Deans-Smith, "Creating the Colonial Subject," Colonial Latin American Review 14.2
(2005): 169-204, 176-78.
3. These authors have consequently produced a thorough literatureon the Spanish scientific expeditions. Although this list is by no means complete, some of the more recent works include: FranciscoJavier
Puerto Sarmiento, La ilusion quebrada: botdnica, sanidad y politica cientifica en la Espala ilustrada
(Barcelona: Serbal; Madrid: CSIC, 1988), Mauricio Nieto Olarte, Remedios para el imperio: historia
natural y la apropiaci6n del Nuevo Mundo (Bogota: Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia y Historia,
2000), and Juan Pimentel, La fisica de la monarqua: ciencia y politica en el pensamiento colonial de
Alejandro Malaspina (1754-1810) (Madrid: Doce Calles, 1998). Anglophone accounts include, among
others, Iris Engstrand, Spanish Scientists in the New World (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1981),
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writingand Transculturation(London: Routledge, 1992), and
more recently, Daniela Bleichmar, "Visual Culture in Eighteenth-Century Natural History: Botanical
Illustrations and Expeditions in the Spanish Atlantic" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univ., 2005).

231
4. I am using Richard Herr's term from the title of his classic work The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959).
5. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, "Introduction," Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge,
2002), 16.
6. Margaret Schabas and Neil de Marchi, eds., Oeconomies in the Age of Newton (Durham: Duke
Univ. Press, 2003). Schabas and De Marchi argue that it is no accident that a "science" of economics
and a science of nature arose at roughly the same time and that, in fact, they developed symbiotically.
"As a result," they conclude, "the factors governing the development of economic thinking of the time
shared a great deal with the factors governing natural science." In fact, in the eighteenth century, the
study of economics and study of nature were seen as two branches of the same scientific methodology:
the "moral" and the "natural." See Schabas and De Marchi, "Introduction," 4.
7. Smith and Findlen, Merchants and Marvels, 18.
8. Visions of Empire, a volume largely devoted to the activities of Joseph Banks, for example, characterizes him as a botanist and an entrepreneur, a fitting symbol of the relationship between scientific,
political, and economic endeavor in eighteenth-century imperial strategy. David Philip Miller and Peter
Hanns Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). The editors of the Cultures of Natural History, moreover, define natural
history in part as being "the basis for the agricultural, commercial, and colonial improvement of the
human estate." Nicholas Jardine and Emma Spary, "The Natures of Cultural History," Cultures of
Natural History, eds. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1996), 3.
9. Londa Schiebinger and Cladia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in
the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 3 and Londa Schiebinger,
Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
2004).
10. Londa Schiebinger in "Prospecting for Drugs: European Naturalists in the West Indies," in Colonial Botany, 119 and in Plants and Empire, 7, and by Jorge Cafiizares-Esguerrain "How Derivative
Was Humboldt?" in Colonial Botany, 163.
11. In addition to Schiebinger'swork, see Harold Cook, "The Cutting Edge of a Revolution? Medicine
and Natural History Near the Shores of the North Sea" in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists,
Scholars, Craftsmen, and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. J. V. Field and Frank
A. J. L. James (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 45-61 and "Global Economies and Local
Knowledge in the East Indies," in Colonial Botany, 100-118, and Steven Harris, "Long-Distance
Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge," Configurations 6.2 (1998): 269-304,
270.
12. Lisbet Koerner, Linneaus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999).
13. See also the work of Staffan Muller-Wille, "Walnuts at Hudson Bay, Coral Reefs in Gotland:
The Colonialism of Linnaean Botany," in Colonial Botany, 34-38 and "Nature as Marketplace: The
Political Economy of Linnaean Botany," in Oeconomies in the Age of Newton.
14. Alix Cooper, "'The Possibilities of the Land': The Inventory of 'Natural Riches' in the Early
Modern German Territories" in Oeconomies in the Age of Newton. See also Cooper, "The Indigenous
versus the Exotic: Debating Natural Origins in Early Modern Europe," Landscape Research 28.1(2003),
51-60.
15. Emma Spary, "Political, Natural, and Bodily Economies," in Cultures of Natural History,
179.
16. Spary'sargument in "Political, Natural, and Bodily Economies" comes closest to the conclusions
reached in this essay (especially in her comments about the importance of natural history to Enlightenment ideas of improvement through political economy, 179-80), probably due to the fact that the
political and economic structures of ancien regime France were more similar to Spain's than were those
of Sweden or the German states. I have found Spary's work to be especially useful in her emphasis on
the fact that natural history was at once an intellectual, political, and economic pursuit. In addition to

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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
her monograph, Utopia's Garden: French Natural History of the Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), see "'Peaches Which the Patriarchs Lacked': Natural History, Natural
Resources, and the Natural Economy in France," in Oeconomies in the Age of Newton, 14-41 and
"Of Nutmegs and Botanists: The Colonial Cultivation of Botanical Identity" in Colonial Botany,
187-203.
17. Jorge Cafiizares, "IberianScience in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer?" Perspectives
on Science 12.1 (2004): 86-124, 91. In this article, Cafiizares argues that the motifs of empirical and
experimental scientific tradition usually attributed to Bacon in Anglophone historiography of science
actually "drew on Iberian motifs of discovery," (87) and that "The English sought to imitate the schools
for pilots institutionalized in Seville and admired the role of Spanish mathematicians, metallurgists,
cosmographers, astronomers, navigators, and hydrographers in the development of empire" (90). See
also Cafiizares, "Spanish America: From Baroque to Modern Colonial Science" in The Cambridge
History of Science Volume 4: Eighteenth-Century Science, Roy Porter, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2003), 718-40 for further characterizaiton of Spanish imperial science in the New World
(especially Mexico).
18. Antonio Barrera, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific
Revolution (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2006). See also Antonio Barrera, "Empire and Empirical
Practices: Commodities and Reports from the New World," Colonial Latin American Review (forthcoming, June 2006), and "Local Herbs, Global Medicines: Commerce, Knowledge, and Commodities
in Spanish America" in Merchants and Marvels, 163-81. For an essay that builds on Barrera'sconclusions and discusses the Crown's involvement in sixteenth-century economic botany projects reflecting
the empirical and the entrepreneurial character of early botanical research in the Spanish Empire, see
Paula De Vos, "The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire,"
Journal of World History 17.4 (December 2006): 399-427.
19. See Alice Stroup, A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at the Seventeenth-Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences (Berkeley: Univ.of California Press, 1990); Spary,
Utopia's Garden; and Drayton, "The Useful Garden," Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain,
and the 'Improvement' of the World (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000); and Robin Briggs, "The
Academie Royale des Sciences and the Pursuit of Utility," Past and Present 131(1991), 38-88.
20. Smith and Findlen, XX. For a discussion of the meaning of utility in the Netherlands, see Lissa
Roberts, "Going Dutch: Situating Science in the Dutch Enlightenment," in The Sciences in Enlightened
Europe, William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer,eds. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999),
351-53.
21. See, for example, John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994).
22. See Drayton, Nature's Government; Miller and Reill, eds., Visions of Empire; Lucille Brockway,
Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Garden (New York: Academic
Press, 1979); Ray Desmond, Kew: The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens (London: Harvill Press
with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1995); and David Mackay, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration,
Science and Empire, 1780-1781 (London: Croom Helm, 1985).
23. The connection between natural history (particularly botany) and commerce in the context of
imperial strategy is taken as an accepted fact in Larry Stewart, "Global Pillage: Science, Commerce, and
Empire," in The Cambridge History of Science Volume 4: Eighteenth-Century Science, 825-44. For an
overview on the Protestant ethic and its assumed influence on scientific development in the traditional
historiography of science, see Smith and Findlen, who discuss at length the "Merton thesis."
24. On the subject of the absence of Spain and the Spanish Empire from discussions of science and
empire, see Juan Pimentel, "The Iberian Vision: Science and Empire in the Framework of a Universal
Monarchy, 1500-1800," Roy McLeod, ed. Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise
(Osiris, 2nd Series 15, 2000), 17-19, Susan Deans-Smith, "Introduction:Nature and ScientificKnowledge
in the Spanish Empire," Colonial Latin American Review 15.1 (June, 2006), 1-2; the historiography
section of Paula De Vos, "Research,Development, and Empire"and especiallyJorge Cailizares-Esguerra,
"Spain in Renaissance Science: Ignored How Much Longer?"
25. Probably the most significant work in this regard is Francisco Javier Puerto Sarmiento, La ilusion
quebrada: botanica, sanidad y politica cientifica en la Espaia ilustrada (Barcelona: Serbal; Madrid:

233
CSIC, 1988). See also Puerto Sarmiento, Ciencia de cdmara: Casimiro G6mez Ortega (1741-1818) el
cientifico cortesano (Madrid: CSIC, 1992); Antonio Gonzalez Bueno, Tres botdnicos de la ilustraci6n:
la ciencia al servicio del poder (Madrid: Nivola Libros y Ediciones, 2002); Joaquin Fernandez Perez
and Ignacio Gonzalez Tasc6n, eds. Ciencia, tecnica y estado en la Espana ilustrada (Madrid: Ministerio de Educaci6n y Ciencia, Secretaria de Estado de Universidades e Investigaci6n: Sociedad Espafiola
de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Tecnicas, 1990); and Manuel Selles, Jose Luis Peset and Antonio
Lafuente, eds. Carlos III y la ciencia de la ilustracion (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1988).
26. See Puerto Sarmiento, Ciencia de cdmara, particularlyChapter 3, "El Poder,"and Gonalez Bueno,
Tres botdnicos de la ilustracidn, for this characterization of Casimiro G6mez Ortega, the director of
the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid.
27. Puerto Sarmiento, La ilusion quebrada, 10 and Gonzflez Bueno and Rodriguez Nozal, Plantas
americanas, xv. Puerto Sarmiento is specifically referring to the involvement of the military in Spanish
science in the quotation cited above. Similarly, in Tres botanicos de la ilustracion, 8, Gonzalez Bueno
argues that the development of botany was state-directed rather than the product of a "natural' or
organic process, which in the end actually hindered botany's development in Spain. In contrast to
the "pharmaceutical" program advocated by G6mez Ortega, that of his successor, Jose Cavanilles is
characterized as more "theoretical." For a more positive valuation of Spanish natural history in the
Enlightenment, see Antonio Lafuente y Jose Luis Peset, "Las Actividades e instituciones cientificas en
la Espafia ilustrada," in Carlos III y la ciencia, 29-79.
28. Gonzflez Bueno and Rodriguez Nozal, Plantas americanas, "Introducci6n," Lafuente and Peset,
"Las actividades e instituciones," and Puerto Sarmiento, Ciencia de cdmara, 81; all mention the lack
of a scientific academy.
29. Spanish authors suggest this as well, but with the interpretation that the Crown's role had a
negative influence on the development of science rather than a productive one, as I would argue.
30. Cafiizares-Esguerra, "Iberian Colonial Science," Isis 95 (2005), 67.
31. For surveys of the Relaciones in English, see Howard E Cline, "The Relaciones Geogrdficas of
the Spanish Indies, 1577-1586," Hispanic American Historical Review 3 (1964): 341-74 and "The
Relaciones Geogrfficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1648" in Guide to the Ethno-Historical Sources,
ed. Howard F Cline, 183-242, vol. 12 of Handbook of Middle American Indians, general ed. Robert
Wauchope, 16 vols. (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1964-1976). An excellent collection that contains
transcriptions of the questionnaires and orders for each set of Relaciones is Francisco de Solano and Pilar
Ponce, eds. Cuestionarios para la formacion de las Relaciones Geogrdficas de Indias, siglos XVI-XIX
(Madrid: CSIC, 1988). The Relaciones are receiving increasing attention from historians. See Raquel
Alvarez Pelfez, La conquista de la naturaleza americana (Madrid: CSIC, 1993); Barbara Mundy, The
Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geogrdficas (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996); and Barrera, Experiencing Nature.
32. Pedro Perez Herrero, "Los cuestionarios y la politica econ6mica," in Solano and Ponce, eds.,
Cuestionarios, LI-LXIII, demonstrates that the Relaciones did become increasingly focused on natural
history and information of a "scientific" nature in the eighteenth century. There is further discussion
of this below.
33. For an interesting discussion of the French imperial bureaucracy's involvement in scientific matters, see James E. McLelland III and Francois Regourd, "The Colonial Machine: French Science and
Colonization in the Ancien Regime" in Nature and Empire, 31-50.
34. Unfortunately I have little to no information as to how local bureaucrats went about gathering
knowledge. Small clues here and there confirm that they relied on indigenous people and also doctors
and pharmacists, military surgeons, friars, and other "interested amateurs," but this is a topic that
needs to be explored further for Spanish America and the Philippines. Several of the articles in Colonial
Botany highlight the importance of the issue of the provenance of natural historical knowledge and
could provide methodological guidance for future studies, including Daniela Bleichmar, "Books, Bodies, and Fields: Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic Encounters with New World Materia Medica," 83-99;
Harold Cook, "Global Economies and Local Knowledge," 100-118; Londa Schiebinger, "Prospecting
for Drugs: European Naturalists in the West Indies," 119-33; and Judith Carney, "Out of Africa: Colonial Rice History in the Black Atlantic," 204-20. See David Goodman, "Science and the Clergy in
the Spanish Enlightenment," History of Science 21 (1983): 111-40 for a good overview of the Spanish
clergy's participation in scientific endeavors.

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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
STUDIES
40 / 2
35. For the order and responses, see Lopez Diaz and Dominguez Camacho, 40-45. There very well
may have been more responses that were lost en route to Seville.
36. Of the 1,237 documents inventoried by L6pez Diaz and Dominguez Camacho, roughly 1,000
are pertinent to this study. The others relate to the establishment of orphanages in the Indies and the
Balmis expedition for smallpox innoculation from 1803-1806. The attempts at quantification here are
based on a combination of my archival notes, photocopies of various documents, and the L6pez Diaz
and Dominguez Camacho catalogue.
37. There were fourteen shipments in which specimens were not identified or where they included a
mix of plants, animals, and minerals. I did not count these shipments, which explains why the percentages only add up to ninety-five rather than one hundred. The estimate for the numbers of specimens
is conservative, and it was impossible to arrive at any truly precise numbers of actual items sent. Oftentimes references were made to a plural "plants" or "animals" without giving specific amounts, so
that the amounts given here more accurately reflect the different types of plants, animals, and minerals
sent rather than the total number of how many of each were sent-for instance, we can know that
"Rabbit Tail Herb" (one of the medicines listed) was sent, but do not know how many specimens of
it arrived.
38. See Paula De Vos, "The Art of Pharmacy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Mexico" (Ph.
D. diss., Univ. of California, Berkeley, 2001), 105-10 and 305-10 for further discussion of New World
medicines used in Mexican and Spanish pharmacies.
39. Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI/S ) Indiferente L. 1545, 6 October 1789 for
the Tea, AGI/S Indiferente L.1546, 24 March 1805.
40. AGI/S Indiferente 1549, Letter to Julian de Arriaga, 10 Agosto 1768. AGI/S Indiferente 1552
includes several representative shipments in 1753 for Cacao Soconusco, chocolate and vanilla powder
in response to Crown orders, so the shipments had been arriving for at least 15 years at that point.
41. As with the plants, this is a relatively conservative estimate. In some cases, the amount of animals-usually birds-was indicated as "dozens," or animals were listed in the plural without giving the
exact amount. In those cases, I took the number to be two, or in the case of "dozens" to be 2 dozen.
42. Kryzstof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800, trans. Elizabeth
Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 20-33. For further discussion of the "curiosities"
contained within the collection, see Paula De Vos, "'Curiosities of Nature and of Art': The 'Curious'
Side of Natural History Collecting in the Spanish Empire," in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese
Empires, 1500-1800, eds. Daniela Bleichmar,Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, manuscript under review).
43. AGI/S Indifernte L. 1549, 12 February 1754.
44. AGI/S L. 1552, 10 Feburary 1752 for the copper and AGI/S Indiference L. 1552, 17 May 1769
for the tin.
45. See Jorge Cafiizares-Esguerra, "Eighteenth-Century Spanish Political Economy: Epistemology
and Decline," Eighteenth-Century Thought, Vol. 1, James G. Buickerwood, ed. (New York: AMS Press,
2003), 295-314, for an informative account of the widespread feeling of decline in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Spain.
46. Works on the Bourbon reforms have until recently focused on economic, political, and anticlerical aims. For examples of reforms in Mexico, see David Brading's class works, Miners and Merchants
in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971); Haciendas and Ranchos
in the Mexican Bajio: Leon 1700-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978); and Church and
State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoacan, 1749-1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1994). Recent scholarship, however, has brought to light the effects of reform on popular culture and
morality, urban planning, and sanitation and hygiene. Histories of this type include Juan Pedro Viqueira
Alban. Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico, trans. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Sergio Rivera
Ayala (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1999); Silvia Marina Arrom, Containing the Poor: The
Mexico City Poor House, 1774-1871 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2001); Pamela Voekel, Alone Before
God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002); and "Peeing
on the Palace: Bodily Resistance to Bourbon Reforms in Mexico City," Journal of Historical Sociology

235
5.2 (1992): 183-208; and Michael Scardaville, "Alcohol Abuse and Tavern Reform in Late Colonial
Mexico," Hispanic American Historical Review 60.4 (1980): 643-71.
47. See Stafford Poole, Juan de Ovando: Governing the Spanish Empire in the Reign of Philip II
(Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 6-8.
48. For more on Galvez, see Herbert Ingram Priestly,Jose de Gdlvez : Visitor-General of New Spain
(1765-1771) (Berkeley : Univ. of California Press, 1916); and, more recently, David A. Brading, The
First America, 467-89. See Paula De Vos, "Research, Development, and Empire," and "An Herbal El
Dorado: The Quest for Botanical Wealth in the Spanish Empire" Endeavour 27.3 (2003): 117-21, for
an elaboration of the relationship between Gilvez and Casimiro G6mez Ortega, director of the Royal
Botanical Garden.
49. The term is Philip Curtin's in The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). See also Juan Pimentel, "The IberianVision," 17-30, and Cafiizares-Esguerra,
"Spanish America: From Baroque to Modern Colonial Science," 719.
50. Ricardo D. Salvatore, "The Strength of Markets in Latin America's Sociopolitical Discourse,
1750-1850," Latin American Perspectives 26.1 (1999): 22-43.
51. I employ the term used by Andrew J. Lewis in "Gathering for the Republic: Botany in Early
Republic America," in Colonial Botany, 67.
52. See Pedro Perez Herrero, "Los cuestionarios y la politica econ6mica," in Solano and Ponce, eds.,
Cuestionarios, LI-LXIII, especially LIX-LXIII. This is not to say that the information of the relaciones
did not count as a collection of sorts. Claudia Swan in "Collecting Naturalia in the Shadow of Early
Modern Dutch Trade," in Colonial Botany, 227-28 makes the argument that there were various kinds
of collections: natural history encyclopedias and botanical gardens constituted natural history collections as well.
53. Anne Larson, "Equipment for the Field," in Cultures of Natural History, 358-77, and Anke
te Heesen, "Accounting for the Natural World: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Field," in Colonial
Botany, 237-51, give some indication of the logistical considerations that went into collecting specimens.
54. AGI/S Indiference, 1549, 6 June 1752. For further discussion, see Susan Deans-Smith, "Creating
the Colonial Subject," 1.
55. Deans-Smith, 12.
56. AGI/S Indiferente, 1552, 14 October 1745. See also De Vos, "The Art of Pharmacy," 304-16,
for more discussion of the medicines sent.
57. AGI/S Indiferente L. 1544, 10 May 1776. See also Deans-Smith, 13. Deans Smith's source cites
1775 while I have found the order to be dated 1776.
58. AGI/S Indiferente 1550, 28 March 1786.
59. See De Vos, "Research, Development, and Empire," 19-20, and "The Art of Pharmacy," 332-8,
for more detailed discussion of these orders. I have compiled here the orders I was able to find or the
ones that bureaucrats made reference to-but I have little doubt that there were more of these and that
they were issued on a regular basis.
60. AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1549. Lista de los cajones que remite al Rey Nuestro Sefior para su Real
Gavinete el Governador de Philipinas en la Fragata la Juno del mando de Don Benito Antonio de Lira
este presente afio de 1780, con la marca del margen "R". 7 January 1780.
61. AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1544, 27 August 1788. This set of packing instructions was written in
response to a number of mishaps and "confusion" resulting from shipments that had been poorly
labeled and improperly packed.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.

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65. AGI/S Indiferente 1550, 27 November 1785 and AGI/S Indiferente 1553, 18 May 1786.
66. AGI/S Indiferente 1545, 21 January 1788 directed the President of the Casa de la Contratacion
to send all live plants arriving in Cadiz to the Royal Gardens of Arinjuez.
67. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire and "Prospecting for Drugs: European Naturalists in the West
Indies," in Colonial Botany, 119-33.
68. On the breadfruit experiment, see Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and
Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994).
69. AGI/S Indiferente 1545, 12 December 1789 describes a "tint produced by the bark of the Paraguatan tree" in Guayana.
70. AGI/Indiferente 1553, 1780s and AGI/S Indiferente 1545, 12 December 1789.
71. AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1549. Noticia de las Virtudes que se han notado tienen algunas maderas,
y otras cosas de las que remite el Governador de Maracaiboa el Rey Nuestro Sefior por mano del IIlustrisimo Sefior Don Joseph de Galvez, Secretario de Estado, y del Despacho Universal de Indias, 14
December 1777.
72. AGI/S Indiferente 1549, 10 December 1786.
73. AGI/S Indiferente 1547, 29 August 1804 and AGI/S Indiferente 1547, 30 November 1803.
74. AGI/S Indiferente 1550, 10 October 1787. There is a larger literature on the Bogota Tea leaf and
much more documentation of it in the Archive of the Botanical Garden in Madrid. See also "El te de
Bogota" (Carta al Conde de Floridablanca, 1795) and "Te de Bogota: sus preciosas virtudes" (Carta
al virrey Antonio Caballero y G6ngora) in Escritos cientificos de Jose Celestino Mutis, ed. Guillermo
Hernandez de Alba (Bogota: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura Hispanica, 1983).
75. AGI/S Indiferente 1545, 6 October 1789.
76. AGI/S Indiferente 1544, 27 July 1777 for Tabasco pepper. Caiiizares points out that Spanish
historians of science have declared the efforts to cultivate coffee, tea, and spices to have been "wasted."
See Cafiizares-Esguerra, "Spanish America," 730. There is also substantial documentation on the
Tabasco pepper. See De Vos, "The Art of Pharmacy," 376-82.
77. AGI/S indiferente, L. 1544. Expediente sobre el fomento, el comercio, y cultivo de la Pimienta
de Tabasco, o Malagueta. 234 February 1777.
78. AGI/S Indiferente 1550, 28 July 1784.
79. AGI/S Indiferente 1780.
80. AGI/S Indiferente 1550 2 February 1786.
81. AGI/S Indiferente 1546, 31 January 1790 for an example of an order that arrived in Durango.
Exact wording is "explicacion de sus nombres, gruesos, y alturas, usos a que pueden aplicarse, cualidades y virtudes medicinales y tinturales ..."
82. AGI/S Indiferente 1549, 25 July 1786 for Guatemala, 17 April 1779 for Havana, and 18 April
1784 for Guayaquil.
83. AGI/S Indiferente, L. 1549. Relaci6n y Noticia que expresa las calidades y aplicaciones que se
dan a las maderas que por numeracion se remiten al Rey Nuestro Senor por mano del Illustrisimo Sefior
Don Joseph de Galvez, Secretario de Estado, y del Despacho Universal de Indias: Todas las quales se
encuentran con mucha abundancia en la Provincia de Maracaibo, 14 December 1777.
84. This issue is discussed in greater detail in De Vos, "An Herbal El Dorado" and in "The Art of
Pharmacy," Chapter 7. See also Antonio Barrera, "Local Herbs, Global Medicines" for an account of
the Spanish discovery and testing of Dominican Balsam, thought to have strong therapeutic value.
85. AGI/S Indiferente 1553. Letter of Don Casimiro G6mez Ortega, 23 November, 1790.
86. These figures are based on an inventory I compiled of medicinal plants from the documents of
Indiferente legajos 1544-1550 and 1552-1553. This is a relatively conservative figure, as I only counted
plants for which I had a specific name, and as stated earlier, I suspect that the actual number of plant

237
specimens sent was actually much higher. For instance, a shipment leaving Guatemala in 1789 (AGI/S
Indiferente 1545, 22 May 1789) was said to have carried 800 "live plants," but since I do not know if
they were 800 of the same plant, or if the shipment was comprised of several different types, I did not
include it in the totals.
87. The fact that the Royal Botanical Garden received the fewest number of plants is somewhat
surprising, but I would argue that this apparent anomaly can be explained by the fact that the Botanical
Garden (and the Natural History Museum as well) would have received the majority of its specimens
from the botanical expeditions commissioned specifically for that purpose. Those documents would
not be included among these, but rather reside at the Botanical Garden's archive.
88. AGI/S Indiferente 1553, 23 November 1790 and AGI/S Indiferente, 1553, Expediente sobre
embios de Especificos y otras especies Medicinales para la Real Botica de Su Magestad, Letter from
Juan G6mez to the Madrid Protomedicato, 22 November 1802.
89. Archivo General de Indias, Seville (AGI/S) Indiferente, L. 1550. Letter from Casimiro G6mez
Ortega to Antonio Valdes, 14 December 1787.
90. AGI/S Indiferente 1553, 12 Feburary 1778 and 12 November 1778 for Choch and AGI/S Indiferente 1553, 31 January 1791 for Herb N.
91. AGI/S Indiferente 1545, 17 September 1789.
92. In this way, Madrid served as a "center of calculation" for the accumulating knowledge and
specimens gathered from the New World. See Bruno Latour,Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists
and Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), Chapter 6, especially 222,
232-33.
93. Political economy provided new, secular ideas promoting social welfare in which the state would
solve problems of poverty and indigence through economic production rather than through the traditional means of charity and pious giving, which was largely the province of the church. Yet at the same
time, in the Spanish context such an ideology was not a threat to the church, but rather a resounding
affirmation of the positive moral benefits that could come from enlightened rule. It was an ideology
that served, therefore, to legitimize state power and provided a "safe" alternative for bureaucrats who
embraced many Enlightenment ideals but did not support anti-clericalism or revolution. This connection
is explained well by John Robertson, "The Enlightenment above National Context: Political Economy
in Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Naples," The Historical Journal 40.3 (1997), 667-97, who also
discusses the work of Franco Venturi on the Italian Enlightenment.
94. According to John Robertson, "it was political economy, at least as much as any other field of
enquiry, which made the Enlightenment the formative intellectual movement of the modern world."
Robertson, 672-73.
95. The relationship between the Enlightenment and the development of science in different national
contexts is treated in Clark, Golinkski, and Schaffer, The Sciences in Enlightened Europe.
96. This group of reformers led to what one author termed "a new political chemistry" in the Spanish
government. The "new chemistry" included the Marques de Esquilache, Minister of War, the Count
of Aranda, president of the Council of Castile, the Count of Floridablanca, Charles III's Minister of
State, and Miguel de Muizquiz, his Minister of Finance, who worked with the Minister of the Indies in
formulating colonial policy. See Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain, 56 and Allan J. Kuethe
and Lowell Blaisdell, "French Influence and the Origins of the Bourbon Colonial Reorganization,"
Hispanic American Historical Review 71.3 (1991): 579-607, 594. For a larger overview of the history
of enlightened thought and particularly of political economy in the later eighteenth century in Spain,
the works of Richard Herr and Jean Saraillh, L'Espagne eclairee de la seconde moitie du XVIIIeme
siecle (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1954) are considered classics of the period. See Robert S. Smith,
"Economists and the Enlightenment in Spain, 1750-1800" Journal of Political Economy, 63 .4 (1955):
345-48 and "The Wealth of Nations in Spain and Hispanic America, 1780-1830," The Journal of
Political Economy 65.2 (1957): 104-25 for further discussion of eighteenth-century Spanish statesmen
and their goals.
97. Mercantilism was a subject of much historiographical debate in the 1960s and '70s, to the
point that the very existence of any truly mercantilist system came into question. For an overview of

238
40 / 2
the debates, see D. C. Colman, ed., Revisions in Mercantilism (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1969);
Coleman, "Mercantilism Revisited," The Historical Journal, 1980, 23(4): 773-91; and Richard C.
Wiles, "Mercantilism and the Idea of Progress," Eighteenth-Century Studies 8.1 (1974): 56-74. For
discussion of mercantilist and other economic doctrine in Spain prior to the period under study here,
see Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, Early Economic Thought in Spain, 1177-1740 (London: George Allen
& Unwin, 1978). This literature and the assumptions that it makes about European exceptionalism in
the rise of global capitalism, however, has been supplanted by a more recent historiography that calls
these assumptions into question. For more recent debates on the rise of the global economy see, for
example, R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Pess, 1998); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe,
and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000); and Robert
B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth
to the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
98. There is an ongoing debate as to how strongly the Spanish political economists were influenced
by physiocracy. Herr, Saraillh, and others assumed that many of the agrarian reforms in Spain were the
result of physiocratic influence. However, Spanish scholars Ernest Lluch and Lluis Argemi I d'Abadal
argue that many scholars "confuse mercantilist agrarianismwith physiocracy," or see policies as physiocratic that are simply the result of "Enlightened liberal agrarianism such as that of Campomanes and
Jovellanos." See Lluch and Argemi i d'Abadal, "La Fisiocracia en Espana," in Agronomia y Fisiocracia
en Espana (1750-1820) (Valencia:Instituci6n Alfonso el Magnanimo, Institutici6 Valenciana d'Estudis
I Investigaci6, 1985), 47, 49, and "Physiocracy in Spain," History of Political Economy 26.4 (1994):
613-27, and Vincente Llombart, "Market for Ideas and Reception of Physiocracy in Spain: Some
Analytical and Historical Suggestions," The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought
2.1 (1995): 29-51.
99. If allowed to circulate freely within an unrestricted economy, according to the physiocrats, goods
would eventually find their "natural" price and as such the economy would function according to a
system of natural, scientific laws.
100. See Lluch and Argemi i d'Abadal and Llombart for the influence of physiocracy. For Smith's
influence on Spanish economists, see Robert Sydney Smith, "The Wealth of Nations in Spain and
Hispanic America, 1780-1830," The Journal of Political Economy 65.2 (1957): 104-25.
101. Kuethe and Blaisdell, "French Influence," 598 agree with John Lynch's conclusions when they
argue that "the reform program of Charles III was essentially an internal affair," not one that was
directed or even significantly influenced by French policies, as was argued by earlier historians.
102. See R. J. Shafer, The Economic Societies in the Spanish World (1763-1821) (Syracuse: Syracuse
Univ. Press, 1958).
103. For a sampling on the extensive literature on comercio libre, see John Fisher, The Economic
Aspects of Spanish Imperialism in America, 1492-1810 (Liverpool, Liverpool Univ. Press, 1997), Commercial Relations between Spain and Spanish America in the Era of Free Trade, 1778-1796 (Liverpool:
Centre for Latin-American Studies, Univ. of Liverpool, 1985); John Lynch, Bourbon Spain: 1700-1808
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 350-74; and, most recently, StanleyJ. Stein and BarbaraH. Stein,
Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759-1789 (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003).
104. For the relationship between mercantilismand cameralism, see D. C. Coleman, "Editor'sIntroduction," 3, and Ingomar Bog, "Mercantilism in Germany,"165-68, both in Revisions in Mercantilism.
105. See the work of Alix Cooper and Lisbet Koerner. The importance of natural history to the
cameralist program is evident in the fact that one of Linneaus's students, Pehr Kalm, wrote to him "I
do know that Historia Naturalis is the base for all Economics, Commerce, Manufactures . . . because
to want to progress far in Economics without mature or sufficient insight into Natural History is to
want to act as a dancing master with only one leg." Quoted in Sverker Sorlin, "Ordering the World
for Europe: Science as Intelligence and Information as Seen from the Northern Periphery,"Nature and
Empire, 65 and in Koerner, 104.
106.
Margaret Schabas, "Adam Smith's Debts to Nature" History of Political Economy, 277-78.


107.
239
Goodman, "Science and the Clergy in the Spanish Enlightenment," 128.
108. Lluis Argemi i d'Abadal, ed., Agricultura e Ilustraci6n: Antologia del pensamiento agrario
ilustrado (Madrid: Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca, y Alimentaci6n, 1988), 45. Though there were
several other significant economists writing at the time, the work of these two statesmen and authors
seems to have been the most influential and the most widely cited by contemporary historians.
109. Pedro Rodriguez de Campomanes, Discurso Sobre el Fomento de la Industria Popular [1774]
(Madrid: Ministerio de Hacienda, 1975) Part 7, 14.
110.
Ibid.
111.
Ibid.
112.
Campomanes, Part 22, 44.
113. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, "Informe de la Sociedad Economica de Madrid al Real y Supremo Consejo de Castilla en el Expediente de Ley Agraria, Extendido por el Autor en Nombre de la
Junta encargada de su Formaci6n" [1795] in Jovellanos: Obras escogidas Vol. I, ed., intro., and notes
Clasicos Castellanos (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, S.A. 1945), 63-64.


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Natural History and the Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain

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NATURAL HISTORY AND THE PURSUIT OF

INTRODUCING THE COLLECTION

Paula De Vos is an Assistant Professorof LatinAmericanHistory at San Diego State University.

Studies, vol. 40, no. 2 (2007) Pp. 209-239.

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DE Vos / Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain

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natural history and botany "remained strategically important in global struggles

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DE Vos / Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain

on the recent work of Jorge Cafiizares-Esguerraand Antonio Barrera, who have

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DE Vos / Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain

were fourteen. These leaders in turn forwarded them on to provincial bureaucrats,

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Table 1. Natural History Remittances by Type of Specimen

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DE Vos / Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain

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DE Vos / Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Table 2. Natural History Remittances by Time Period

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1544 1544 1544

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DE VOS/ Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain

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DE Vos / Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Natural History Museum, or the Royal Pharmacy.65

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Japanese-style tea "more active and aromatic."74Mariquita Tea appears to have

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DE Vos / Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain

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physiocracy all took the investigation of natural resources-both the discovery

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DE Vos / Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Naturalhistory,by presentinghimits specimensfromall overthe globe,

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DE Vos / Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Goodman, "Science and the Clergy in the Spanish Enlightenment," 128.