(Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History) László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Eds.) - Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires - A Decenter

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Negotiating Knowledge in
Early Modern Empires
A Decentered View
Edited by
László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani,
and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török
ISBN 978-1-349-50333-9 ISBN 978-1-137-48401-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-48401-7
NEGOTIATING KNOWLEDGE IN EARLY MODERN EMPIRES

Copyright © László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, and
Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-48399-7
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Contributors ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, and
Borbála Zsuzsanna Török
Part I Negotiation of (Trans-)Imperial Patronage

1 Was Astronomy the Science of Empires? An
Eighteenth-Century Debate in View of the
Cases of Tycho and Galileo 25
Gábor Almási
2 The Jesuits’ Negotiation of Science between France and

China (1685–1722): Knowledge and Modes of Imperial
Expansion 53
Catherine Jami
3 The Uses of Knowledge and the Symbolic Map of the

Enlightened Monarchy of the Habsburgs: Maximilian
Hell as Imperial and Royal Astronomer (1755–1792) 79
László Kontler
Part II Competition of Empires: A Motor of Change

in Knowledge Acquisition and Authentication
4 Capitalizing Manuscripts, Confronting Empires:
Anquetil-Duperron and the Economy of Oriental
Knowledge in the Context of the Seven Years’ War 109
Stéphane Van Damme
5 Contested Locations of Knowledge: The Malaspina

Expedition along the Eastern Coast of Patagonia (1789) 129
Marcelo Fabián Figueroa
vii
viii Contents
6 “To Round Out this Immense Country”: The Circulation of

Cartographic and Historiographical Knowledge between
Brazil and Angola in the Eighteenth Century 153
Catarina Madeira-Santos
Part III Self-assertion of New Nodes of

Knowledge Production
7 Mexico, an American Hub in the Making of European
China in the Seventeenth Century 181
Antonella Romano
8 Anthropology beyond Empires: Samuel Stanhope Smith

and the Reconfiguration of the Atlantic World 207
Silvia Sebastiani
9 Measuring the Strength of a State: Staatenkunde in

Hungary around 1800 235
Index 263
Contributors
Gábor Almási is postdoctoral fellow of the Hungarian Academy of

Sciences, Budapest. Holder of a PhD degree in history from Central
European University (Budapest), his fields of interest include fifteenth-
to seventeenth-century intellectual history, religious history, history
of science, patriotism, and later nationalism. Among other publications,
he is the author of The Uses of Humanism: Andreas Dudith (1533−1589),
Johannes Sambucus (1531−1584), and the East Central European Republic
of Letters (2009).
Marcelo Fabián Figueroa is assistant professor at the National

University of Tucumán and assistant researcher at the National
Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina. He earned his
PhD degree at Pablo de Olavide University, Spain, and pursued post-
doctoral studies at the European University Institute, Florence. His
fields of interest are eighteenth-century natural history, collecting
history, and history of collections in the Spanish trans-Atlantic area.
He has published several journal articles and book chapters on these
topics.
Catherine Jami is senior researcher at the Centre national de la

recherche scientifique (Paris). She was originally trained as a mathe-
matician, and then in Chinese studies. She has published extensively
on mathematics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, as
well as on the Jesuit missionaries and the reception of the sciences
they introduced to late Ming and early Qing China. She maintains
an active interest in studies of the globalization of science during
the modern era. She is the author of The Emperor’s New Mathematics:
Western Learning and Imperial Authority in China during the Kangxi Reign
(1662–1722) (2012).
László Kontler is professor of history at Central European University

(Budapest). His research and publications range across the history
of political and historical thought, translation and reception in the
history of ideas, and the production and exchange of knowledge
in the early modern period, and mainly the Enlightenment. His
English language books include A History of Hungary (1999/2002) and
ix
x Contributors
Translations, Histories, Enlightenments: William Robertson in Germany,

1760–1795 (2014). He is one of the editors of the European Review of
History / Revue d’histoire européenne and Europäische Geschichte Online/
European History Online.
Catarina Madeira-Santos is associate professor at the Institut des

Mondes Africains, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris).
Her research focuses on the Portuguese Empire and the history of
African societies in Angola, in particular on the construction of the
colonial project of the Enlightenment, the uses of writing in oral cul-
tures, and the history and memory of slavery in Africa. She is the
author of Goa é a Chave de Toda a Índia: Perfil Político da capital do
Estado da Índia (1999), and (with A. P. Tavares) Africae Monumenta. A
Apropriação da escrita pelos Africanos, vol. I, Arquivo Caculo Cacahenda
(2002). Her next book, As Palavras da Escravatura em Angola, will be
published in 2015.
Antonella Romano is full professor at the École des hautes études

en sciences sociales (Paris), and director of the Centre Alexandre
Koyré. A specialist of early modern Catholic mission and science,
she has extensively published on the subjects, while running several
collective programs and opening the chair in history of science at
the European University Institute (Florence). She has edited Rome et
la science moderne entre Renaissance et Lumières (2008), and coedited
Escrituras de la modernidad. Los jesuitas entre cultura retorica y cultura
científica (2008), and a special issue of Quaderni storici on “Produzione
di saperi. Costruzione di spazi.” Her new book (2015) deals with
Catholic Europe and the discovery of China (1550–1670). She is
member of the editorial board of the Annales, HSS.
Silvia Sebastiani is associate professor at the École des hautes

études en sciences sociales (Paris), where she teaches seminars on
Enlightenment historiographies and on ideology of race in the early
modern period. Specialist of the Scottish Enlightenment, she has
published extensively on the questions of race, gender, and history
writing in international journals and collective volumes. A revised
English edition of her book (published in Italian in 2008) has recently
appeared, with the title The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and
the Limits of Progress (2013). She is a member of the editorial board of
Modern Intellectual History.
Borbála Zsuzsanna Török is research fellow at the Zukunftskolleg at

the University of Konstanz. Historian of modern East-Central Europe,
Contributors xi
her research and teaching embraces the history of the migration of

knowledge and literary art, of scholars and writers, in the long nine-
teenth and the short twentieth centuries, the entanglements between
scholarship and nationalism, and the impact of the politics of differ-
ence on the configuration of knowledge. Her current project, titled
The Science of Governance: Imperial Framework, Trans-Regional Exchanges
and State Building in Hungary, 1770–1848/60, deals with the transfer of
the sciences of state across Europe and their relevance to the shaping
of modern governance in the Habsburg Monarchy.
Stéphane Van Damme is professor of the history of science at the

European University Institute (Florence). His broad research field is
the origins of early modern scientific knowledge in European culture
between 1650 and 1850, focusing on topics such as scientific cen-
ters (Lyon, Paris, London, Edinburgh, New York), founding fathers
(especially Descartes), paradigmatic disciplines (philosophy, natural
history, antiquarianism), and imperial projects. He currently works
on the issue of the geography and anthropology of skeptical knowl-
edge in Europe, especially the orientalization of libertinism. His latest
book is A toutes voiles vers la vérité. Philosophes au travail (1650–1800)
(2014).
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Acknowledgments
The completion of this volume would have been impossible without

support from many individuals and institutions over several years, and
we would like to express our gratitude for the opportunity to benefit
from their generosity. On submitting the completed manuscript, we
are amazed to realize that the idea of the volume and earlier drafts of
the chapters were discussed at no less than six workshops specifically
dedicated to this purpose. The locations of these workshops included
Florence (European University Institute [EUI]—February 2007 and
June 2007), Budapest (Central European University [CEU]—March
2008), Konstanz (Zukunftskolleg, Universität Konstanz—September
2010 and December 2011), and Paris (SciencesPo—September 2012).
In addition, some interim results of the research toward the contri-
butions were also presented in thematic panels at two major inter-
national conferences: “Ideas and Instruments in Social Context”
(XXIII International Congress of History of Science and Technology,
Budapest, August 2009) and the 4th International Conference of the
European Society for the History of Science (Barcelona, November
2010). We were also privileged to be able to test many of our ideas
in lecture and seminar series in the regular curriculum of the History
Departments of both the EUI and CEU (between 2008 and 2010),
and during an exciting two-week summer university course at CEU
(July 2009). We would like to express our appreciation for the finan-
cial support for all of these types of activities to the EUI (Chair of
History of Science), Pasts Inc. Center for Historical Studies at CEU, the
CEU Summer University, the Thyssen Stiftung, SciencesPo, and the
Zukunftskolleg (which, in addition, also provided a grant for editing
the manuscript). Among the individuals who have helped us clarify
and fine-tune our thoughts and arguments, the first to mention are
the dozens of motivated and critical-minded graduate students who
took our seminars at the EUI and CEU, and the summer university
course at CEU. We are very grateful for their dedicated participation.
We have also benefited greatly from interaction with a host of col-
leagues who have shared their knowledge with us as guest lecturers
in these courses or as participants in the six project workshops. They
xiii
xiv Acknowledgments
include Emese Bálint, Peter Becker, Dóra Bobory, Hans Erich Bödeker,
the late Yehuda Elkana, Karl Hall, Peter Jones, Ildikó Kristóf, Marina
Mogilner, Karen O’Brien, Manolis Patiniotis, Kapil Raj, Carmen Salazar-
Soler, Alexander Semyonov, Marie-Christine Skuncke, Teodora Shek-
Brnardić, and Endre György Szőnyi. Special thanks are due to Nicola
Di Cosmo, Anthony La Vopa, and Maria Portuondo, who commented
in depth on each and every draft at the second Konstanz workshop.
Finally, as non-native writers of English, we greatly appreciate the
careful work of Thomas Szerecz in rendering our Frenglish, Hunglish,
Italoglish, Portuglish, and Spanglish into something acceptable for
a serious English-language academic publisher. Naturally, the sole
responsibility for all remaining shortcomings rests with the authors
and the editors.
The Editors
Budapest—Konstanz—Paris, September 2014
Introduction*
László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, and
Knowledge in the empires, knowledge of empires
This volume is the result of a long journey that started in the hills
surrounding Florence during the spring of 2006. It arose from discus-
sions, exchanges, debates, and negotiations among a group of scholars
belonging to different generations and coming from a wide array of
countries and intellectual training, some of us working on European
topics, others on trans-Atlantic or trans-Asiatic ones. What we share
is a common interest in, and inspiration from, the now sizeable lit-
erature on the practices that shaped “science” in the early modern
period, with a special emphasis on the ones bred by the emulation,
competition, and conflict that encounters across the globe between
different cultural and political entities generated. The locations of
these encounters tended to be marked out by the shifting boundaries
of Europe’s colonial expansion into other continents, beginning in
the sixteenth century. This literature has challenged the “diffusion-
ist” model of the rise of modern science, understood until recently as
a “European” concept.1 It has invited us to endorse a highly plastic
understanding of the dynamics of negotiations between various fields
of knowledge, even entire knowledge systems, and their representa-
tives (not all of them necessarily being anointed practitioners of a
recognized discipline), as a result of which “Western” science attained
its character. We have learned immensely from the explorations of
the “contact zones,” in which metropolitan and peripheral agents of
consolidating colonial empires confronted, absorbed, manipulated,
abused, stigmatized, or repudiated one another’s knowledges. As the
relationship between such agents was inevitably one of unequal reci-
procity, colonial science could not have been a mere imposition. It
also could hardly have been anything other than colonial.2
1
2 Kontler, Romano, Sebastiani, and Zsuzsanna Török
What we attempt here is not the assembly of another book in this

relatively recent but already respectable tradition of “science and
empire.”3 Rather than adding further nuance to our understand-
ing of the routes in which the negotiations of knowledge between
metropolises and provinces ultimately tended to determine the
course of Europe’s rise to world hegemony, or of the local dimen-
sion of Western knowledge production, our volume intends to take a
“decentered” look at early modern empires. There are various ways in
which such a “decentering” approach is carried out in the individual
contributions. All the chapters deal with European empires, but the
angle from which this is pursued has been marked out by the lessons
drawn from the non-Eurocentric studies referred to below. This focus
is the result of both a contingency and of a state of the art: the con-
tingency derives from the fact that most of the contributors of the
volume are specialists of European empires; but, on the other hand,
we may acknowledge with regard to the period under consideration
that historiography is still highly unbalanced. This is true not only if
we compare European and non-European empires, but also if we pay
attention to Europe itself, where the divide between the western and
the eastern part of the continent has been overstressed by the “great
divergence” between western and eastern historiographies through-
out the twentieth century. To some extent, this is one of the novelties
of our volume: it builds upon an unconventional geographical set of
cases, including the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, and China.
Some of the contributing authors study European knowledge prac-
tices as being embraced by non-European imperial agents in order to
consolidate their own empire in the face of both local contestants
and remote Europeans. Others explore cases in which “doing” science
presented itself as a means for imperial peripheries to “strike back”
or to challenge the hegemony of the center, whether the empire in
question was maritime-colonial or landlocked-continental. In still
other cases, colonial peripheries/spaces are shown to be competent
to fruitfully transfer, between themselves, important knowledge prac-
tices that had been originally framed at the center with the distinct
purpose of managing the empire—but this time they were doing so
bilaterally, to the exclusion of the metropolis. This book is primar-
ily about early modern empires. It tries to benefit from the method-
ological and theoretical ammunition accumulated in the literature
about science and knowledge at the interface between Europe and
non-Europe, as well as scholarship focused on specific areas.
Introduction 3
This introduction is articulated in three main parts. In order to

highlight the aims and intentions that framed the negotiations of
knowledge in the imperial settings explored in this volume, we shall
first investigate the various senses in which “empire” was an intelligi-
ble notion in the early modern period. Second, we shall pay attention
to the “new imperial history,” with glimpses into the “new history
of science,” or the “history of new science.” Finally, we shall explain
how the individual essays contribute to this range of topics.
Early modern empires: Semantics and politics
As is well known, the concept of empire and its implementations

has a long story that started with antiquity and developed all around
Eurasia. By referring to such a geographical and cultural unit, we aim
at outlining the historical dimension of Europe itself and the impor-
tance of spatial entities in shaping the subject of analysis. This is
clearly the position adopted by the anthropologist Jack Goody, whose
entire work could be summarized as an attempt to understand the
long-lasting and complex relationship between Europe and Asia, start-
ing in the Bronze Age with the idea of Eurasia as a whole, from which
Europe detached itself at some point of their common story in order
to impose itself on the rest of the world. Goody systematically empha-
sizes Europe’s great divergence, especially with Asia, by using the writ-
ing of history as one of its major tools to “thieve” others’ history.4 This
twist, in his view, happened in the early modern period, and it may
not be a coincidence that it corresponds with an intensive moment of
reassessment of the notion of empire in Europe itself. There are other
reasons for this, the first being related to the long-distance expansion
process that took place during this period, starting with the Portuguese
merchant networks and further implemented by the Spanish, Dutch,
French, and English. Second, one must mention the amazing develop-
ment of the Ottoman Empire pushing its maritime and terrestrial bor-
ders across three continents and challenging the Eurasian geopolitical
balance of the previous period. Third, there was the accumulation of
information about remote models of empires, not only because of the
colonization process of American territories since the end of the fif-
teenth century, but also because of the better understanding of far east
Asia as it was “discovered.”
The European location of these three convergent phenomena
opened up a deep reassessment of the idea of empire, where new
elements of analysis were confronted not only with ancient legacy,

but also with other non-European patterns that were more and more
systematically discussed by rulers and philosophers in a comparative
perspective.5 Empires thus became central topics of the reflections
that took place among the European elite. In the Spanish school of
Salamanca in the sixteenth century, or among the historians of the
Scottish Enlightenment, depending on times and places, the debate
about empires may be considered as one of the first ones that shaped
an early modern sense of globality.
A now classical historiography, mostly anchored in the field
of political thought, has emphasized the centrality of the Dutch,
French, and English philosophical contributions to the shaping of
the concept of empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.6
Nevertheless, and as a first step toward a decentering of this his-
toriographical construction, it is important to stress that for most
European men and women throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries, “empire” denoted not an abstract concept but a particular
entity: the Holy Roman Empire (“of the German nation,” as it came
to be referred to with increasing frequency). Skeptical evaluations of
the claim of the empire to actually being one are well known from
the period.7 Yet, the ambition of Charles V in the sixteenth cen-
tury, and his successors in the seventeenth, made the restoration of
empire on a scale unseen in Europe since the fall of Rome look like a
realistic possibility. And yet, after the debacle of this project with the
settlement of Münster and Osnabrück that ended the Thirty Years’
War in 1648, the complex legal arrangements determining the rela-
tionship among a kaleidoscope of territories and suzerainties, known
as a “constitution,” were remarkably tenacious in the face of denom-
inational strife, regional separatism, and lordly aggrandizement; and
the Reich remained politically self-evident until the revolutionary
era. The imperial title and crown not only carried a considerable
amount of prestige and patronage value, belonging to the first in
the order of precedence among European rulers, but also were cov-
eted and contested, sometimes heavily, even as late as in the famous
instance of the elections of 1745. The German ius publicum and the
polity to which it referred appeared to its students not as monstrous,
but as a system of civil liberty and security deeply rooted in cus-
tom and climate and enshrined in laws and institutions. The gradual
development of the existing structures presented a strong argument
in their favor as the key to their “appropriateness”: the proposition
Introduction 5
that as the imperial constitution had organically evolved over many

centuries, and had come to incorporate the character of the nation,
there had thus emerged a correspondence between its political order
and its political culture.8
The Reich in the aspect in which it was dear to German imperial
patriots not only lacked the feature that from classical antiquity
through medieval neo-Aristotelians was indispensable to “empire,”
but also asserted itself in defiance to the ever reviving efforts of
emperors to impose that feature on it. As imperium had ceased to
denote merely the power of supreme command and, compounded
with Romanum, came to be applied to a form of polity, the notion
of “empire” assumed the quality of a perfecta communitas, implying
both self-sufficiency and undivided sovereignty.9 While the realities
of the Holy Roman Empire were a far cry from this ideal, some of the
monarchical states of late medieval and early modern Europe fash-
ioned an identity more in conformity with it. As the formula rex in
regno suo est imperator regni sui attests, the concept of empire/emperor
was instrumental to the early statements, by late thirteenth- and early
fourteenth-century Neapolitan and French jurists, of the idea of royal
territorial sovereignty.10 This idea was deployed primarily against the
emperor himself, but it was equally capable of being used to offset
the claims of the other wielder of universal authority: the papacy.
The most salient instance of this is the Act in Restraint of Appeals,
adopted by Henry VIII’s parliament in 1533, asserting that “this
realm of England is an empire” in the sense of independence from
papal, indeed all external, jurisdiction: it claimed the exclusive right
of governance by the English monarchy over its subjects in all aspects
of their lives. At the same time, it also signaled the “incorporating”
character of the English monarchy: its pretension to exercise imperial
rule over “bodies” that historically had come under its sway by lord-
ship or conquest, such as the Celtic fringes of the British Isles.11
Empire in the first sense, as the exclusion of all jurisdictional
authority originating outside the physical boundaries of the pol-
ity, was irrespective of the territorial expanse of those boundaries.
Empire in the second sense was not. In 1576, Jean Bodin’s Six Books
of the Commonwealth established a novel vocabulary to describe the
former, namely state sovereignty, a feat that perhaps had a part in
the increasing (re)association of empire with the “immensity” of the
territory—as Tacitus had once put it—over whose people as subjects a
single sovereign exercised imperial authority. Further complications,
however, still existed as a result of the hazy, even uneasy, connec-

tion between empire and two other concepts readily applicable to
European polities of extended and/or expanding size: “composite”
and “universal” monarchy.
Both these terms have proved indispensable to historiographical
efforts over the past few decades to better understand the nature of
early modern European state formation. While the latter has long
been a part of Western political vocabulary, the former is a coinage
that arose out of these efforts themselves: it has been introduced
to denote extensive and polyglot polities whose different, in some
cases quite numerous, composite parts were united under a single
dynasty, and over time developed both a sense of belonging together
and institutions in whose operation this sense obtained some visible
reality.12 Yet, the territorial units from which such states were com-
posed had accrued to them at different historical moments, among
different historical circumstances, and always retained a fair degree
of autonomy—facts that are adequately registered in the multiple
titles that the rulers of composite states bore, and consequently in
the diverging nature of the ties that bound them to each of their pos-
sessions. Arguably, even the most centralized states of Europe in the
late Middle Ages and the early modern period can be characterized as
“composite” in this sense, and new combinations continued to arise,
if anything, with greater vigor in the centuries after 1500 through
inheritance, marriage, sheer aggression, or the partition of weaker
neighbors. A wide range of strategies were adopted by rulers and gov-
ernments aiming at the assimilation of newly added provinces and
the integration of incrementally growing territories. Generally, they
could not help realizing that the key to success lay in a modus vivendi
with, and an active involvement of, local elites in their projects of
consolidation, respecting custom, tradition, and institutional and
procedural heritage.13 But in certain important historical moments at
least some of them opted for enforcement.
In such moments, an attempt at monarchia universalis14 was some-
times diagnosed by contemporaries. The monarchy that Charles V
attempted to convert into a “universal” one was an epitome of what is
described as a composite monarchy: even taken separately, his Central
European, “Burgundian” (Dutch and Flemish), and Ibero-Italian pos-
sessions were composite entities to which Charles as a ruler held
very different titles on different grounds and conditions. “Universal
monarchy” was the sum of Charles’s formidable efforts to consolidate
Introduction 7
these vast, noncontiguous territories as a single entity under unitary

administrative and military control, or at least under the control of
the same fundamental principles, in continental dimensions. At the
same time, Habsburg universalism never lacked a strong Catholic
connotation (even kathólikos, meaning universal, is tautological).
The assertion of confessional uniformity within their European pos-
sessions and the propagation of empire through Christian missions
overseas were also closely intertwined agendas—like for the Roman
emperors of the Christian era, from whom the claim to be “lord of all
the world” was borrowed for Charles V by his advisors.15
The Habsburgs ruled the only European empire thus called at the
beginning of the early modern era, and even as late as at the time of
the 1779 “potato war” against Prussia, Joseph II was still suspected
of endeavoring an enlightened version of “universal monarchy,”
consolidating at least the hereditary provinces and the Danubian
possessions of the dynasty into a rationally governed, bureaucratic
Gesamtstaat or unitary state.16 Yet, Holy Roman Emperors were not
alone in raising the claim of being “lords of all the world”: it was
vindicated for and by the Spanish line of the imperial family, as well
as the kings of England and France, and employed to signal a funda-
mentally economic penetration and appropriation of overseas territo-
ries. This was of seminal importance for the history of the European
semantics of empire. From the late seventeenth century onward, and
especially in the eighteenth century, philosophers and historians
came to regard the old continent as an unsuitable terrain for “uni-
versal monarchy.” Their “Europe” (replacing Christendom as a unit
of analysis in cultural geography) was a balancing system or “com-
monwealth” of medium, even small size, monarchies and republics;
polities described as limited by Montesquieu. In this environment
the project of Louis XIV to achieve hegemony through administra-
tive and military control over a sizeable chunk of the continent,
while posing a formidable threat, was not only thwarted but also
apparently doomed to inevitable failure by the inherent logic of his-
torical structures. The very same structures of development, however,
also seemed to render the states of Europe—sovereign or “imperial”
as they were, in the sense of exercising full control over their domes-
tic resources and internal and external relations—suitable cores of a
new type of empire-building, based on overseas mercantile-colonial
expansion, supported by increasing military exertion, and justified
by the gospel of commerce and civilization.
As this concise panorama illustrates, the early modern Europeans

who became involved in this ultimately global enterprise could build
upon “homegrown” experiences and imaginaries of empire and
empire-building that were highly diverse, fluid, and elusive. This was
also the case in non-European contexts, where the concept of sover-
eignty was worked out through other political experiences, whether
connected with the idea of empire or not.17 Although the current
historiography dealing with these areas has not systematically devel-
oped along the lines of conceptual history, in the early modern period
many actors involved in the business of rulership were nevertheless
familiar with a large amount of imperial experiences. The conceptual
or material apparatus at their disposal for making sense of their own
relevant activities itself arose out of a series of options among these
diverse experiences and imaginaries.18 They were enriched by their
face-to-face confrontation with other definitions of ruling, whether
imperial or not, as was constantly the case with the Ottomans and
less systematically with other forms of sovereignty coined as imperial.
All through the eighteenth century the “oriental” paradigm repre-
sented by India and China is one among the historicized expressions
of the European shaping of concepts through a permanent confron-
tation with its neighbors.19 In many ways, empire itself was a decen-
tered phenomenon from many of the perspectives adopted. This is of
vital importance for the study of those negotiations of knowledge in
imperial contexts that the contributions to this volume explore: in
order to understand what the agents were doing, it is indispensable
to understand what they understood themselves to be doing. For the
same reason, the discussion of intra-European and extra-European
negotiations of knowledge, which decentered empires, promises to
shine on the field an unusual but hopefully instructive light.
Connecting early modern empires and

confronting imperial science
In recent decades the theme of empire has permeated the study of his-
tory more and more systematically from a global and/or comparative
perspective. The reason is partly intrinsic to the overall thrust of his-
torical studies, including the history of science. These years have wit-
nessed an intensive preoccupation with transnational phenomena, a
growing interest in entanglements and transfers, and the concomi-
tant rehabilitation of the significance of spatial considerations—of
Introduction 9
movement in space, as well as of situatedness—for historical interpre-

tation.20 This introduction is not the place for an extensive overview
of these often distinct and competitive historiographies, which also
engage with global history and the endless search of its definitions.21
Nonetheless, it is important to notice that such developments have
favored the enshrinement of empire as a focal object of inquiry
into the dynamics of history, in a period when voyages “round the
world”22 and maritime, commercial-colonial expansion first made
that history truly global in any tangible sense. Imperial studies are
more systematically comparative, as well as constructivist, focusing
as they do on processes of formation. If not entirely “provincializing
Europe,”23 such investigations have taken us at least a long way in
reassessing the dynamics of the intercourse between Europe and the
rest of the globe from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century,
and also in undermining Eurocentric interpretations of the history of
the period, despite a still vivid criticism toward history construed as
the “theft” of other histories (and their epistemologies).24
What the so-called “new imperial history” has brought to our
understanding of empires may be summarized in two major elements:
a more systematically comparative approach, and, in some cases, an
entangled analysis; and an increased interest in practices (in contrast
to concepts) in a broad chronological framework. These two major
concerns are, for instance, at the core of the recent book by Jane
Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and
the Politics of Difference, where the title endorses a polysemic under-
standing of sovereignty, which suits better the ruling practices and
conceptions developed outside Europe. This is why, among the dif-
ferent historiographies that have inspired our collective work, what
has been identified as the new imperial history is certainly one of the
most relevant. As outlined by Cooper and Burbank, empires invite
one to “widen perspectives on the political history of the world,”
with the major goal of challenging the grand narrative of the rise
of the West. The choice to focus mostly on Eurasia, while departing
from Goody’s perspective, enables the two authors to discuss “both
a broad range of imperial types and a story of dense and long-term
interactions,” and to explore the “multiplicity of ways that differ-
ent empires worked,” looking at “both the extent and limits of their
efforts across time and in a variety of contexts.”25
Beyond the available historiographies on singular empires that have
sometimes looked back to consolidated traditions, either “nationally
based,” as was the case of the European empires (often written in

their specific national languages), or rooted in the framework of area
studies and focused on expansions, we aim rather to account for both
contiguous empires, such as that of the Habsburgs or the Romanovs,
and for empires in their internal dynamics. This is a way to challenge
any essentialist view about their configuration, or obviousness.26 In
this sense, the study of encounters, clashes, exchanges, transfers,
and rejections may be fruitfully revisited if located across empires, as
also argued by Cooper and Burbank, who stress, on the basis of the
Chinese case, the role of borders in imperial governance.
Despite the asymmetric development of studies in relation to dif-
ferent empires, and despite the difficulty of comparing units that
do not share the same legacy, it may be relevant to notice that one
of the major commonalities of these imperial structures lies in the
structural pattern represented by the court. The focus on courts not
only means a change of topic, it also provides a different approach
while working on political units and knowledge interests. Looking at
courts and courtiers entails a change of approach; it shifts attention
to practices and rituals more than to conceptualizations and juridical
systems. The switch from one focus to another opens a new research
agenda that might be an interesting way to avoid a Europe-based sys-
tem of references. This is of major importance in relation to science
and empire, as soon as we admit, as recent scholarship has aimed at
showing, that courts may be studied as agents and places of science,
as “lieux de savoir.”27
Historians of science in the early modern period have had every
reason to concentrate on the different aspects of such a vast sub-
ject, the full understanding of which, however, is connected to the
above-described transparencies of the meaning of the term empire.
By bringing together studies of science in different types of impe-
rial contexts, it is this kind of inquiry that this volume intends to
encourage. But more broadly, our volume offers different examples
of the multiple agencies engaged in the production of knowledge.
Nevertheless, we differentiate ourselves from many works that keep
the imperial framework as relevant by definition.28 Differently from
them, our major emphasis is on knowledge production: we work with
cases that highlight the part knowledge production plays in the pro-
cess of establishing, contesting, or reshaping the imperial framework,
often presented as unified and homogeneous. This is how empires
become decentered in our volume. Considered as one of the possible
Introduction 11
political units that characterize the period, and seen as facing pro-
found processes of reorganization and reconceptualization, empires
depend on different kinds of knowledge: spatial, astronomical, legal,
and political, whose definitions are in the making through constant
exchanges, regardless of whether or not they are desired by the cen-
tral structures of power.
The chapters presented here share the assumption that the period
comprised of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, when the
collision of different epistemes and political meanings of empire
reached a global scale, reveals interesting processes that allow for
their historicization. Of course, this period has a specific significance
in a European historiography that has mostly served the progres-
sive narrative of modernity, paved by the “glorious” moments of
the Renaissance, the “scientific revolution,” and the Enlightenment.
Though each of these categories have been fiercely criticized and
challenged as reifications, they have also proved to possess last-
ing heuristic value. From our point of view, the reference to these
historiographical categories does not coincide with a Eurocentric
approach to history, but with the historicized understanding of their
conceptualization by some of the analysts. “Renaissance” was coined
by two European scholars in the middle of the nineteenth century,
the French historian Jules Michelet and the Swiss-German art his-
torian Jacob Burckhardt, in order to single out what was happening
in Europe between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. They
understood it as a major break from a long-lasting period of obscu-
rantism and cultural stagnation, and as the flourishing of the arts and
sciences.29 One and a half centuries after Burckhardt and Michelet,
the Renaissance can be rethought along other historiographical para-
digms. One of them, identified according to some authors as the “first
globalization” or as “archaic globalization,”30 is useful for us as soon
as we admit that this was the moment in which the earth became
global, and not only as a European worldview but also as a practice
that cannot be reduced to the European conquest of the globe in
front of a subjected passive world.31 Furthermore, as noticed by Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, such a sense of globality led many sixteenth-century
historians, either Europeans or not, to be world historians.32
The Enlightenment is also crucial in this process, since it generated
two phenomena that were at once complementary and in tension
with one another. On one hand, European civilization became criti-
cized by voices speaking from inside and outside the continent. On
the other hand, new traditions of empirical experimental inquiry and

“methodical doubt” led to new procedures of scientific investigation,
which reinforced continental self-confidence. The Enlightenment is
thus regarded as having a pivotal role in the reassessment of knowl-
edge about the world within a process that began in the sixteenth
century and entered a new phase in the nineteenth century: the
birth of the modern world.33 But here again, working today on the
Enlightenment does not mean to reduce it to an “internal” European
process.
We would thus like to revisit this chronological framework, con-
sidering the development of European maritime empires as taking
place amidst other imperial expansions and entanglements across
the world. Investigating cases of knowledge production within the
framework of empires worldwide, we hope not only to further decen-
ter the Eurocentric narrative about modernity, but also to engage
more directly with the political constraints and incentives that made
knowledge and scientific practices jump across oceans and borders in
a multipolar world, challenging empires themselves.
Negotiating knowledge, decentering

empires through case studies
The collection of essays we present in this volume sketches an early

modern geopolitics of science that rejects the center/periphery divide
and is based on the analysis of imperial units: Chinese, Holy Roman,
Habsburg, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and British—a list that does
not pretend to cover the globe. Referring to Portuguese Africa, China,
and Central and Eastern Europe, the focus is on imperial dynamics,
without muddling them with studies about the European projections
in the world. This is where the essays aim at seizing the spatial dynam-
ics of the scientific enterprise. The starting point and shared feature
for all the contributions to the volume is thus the analysis of situ-
ated practices. Most of the plots/cases are located in (intellectual, cul-
tural, emerging, and administrative) hubs, the mutual configurations
of which are highlighted through communication and circulations
exceeding the imperial partitioning of the political space. Mexico,
Paris, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, Beijing, Vienna, and Pest-Buda are
among the hubs of these circulations of knowledge; they are not all
capitals,34 but rather places for negotiation.
In the concluding section of the introduction, let us briefly explain
how we envisage each of the chapters to contribute to the attainment
Introduction 13
of the goals of the volume. They are organized along three major
sets of questions that have emerged from the confrontation of the
papers themselves. The first set of chapters focuses on issues rooted
in governance. As most of the early modern empires took shape in
a court system, the relationship between the ruler and his courtiers
is central to knowledge production. Here the issue of patronage is
explored from the perspective of a system of multiple allegiances,
as a result of multiple belongings to princes’ clienteles. The position
of scholars, missionaries, or administrators as courtiers in different
imperial courts is analyzed as a way of negotiating knowledge and
decentering empires, where a peculiar type of “economy of gift” in
mutual (if asymmetrical) relationships governed by interest, depen-
dence, and loyalty is played out in different imperial economies of
knowledge at the same time. The second set of chapters, connected
to the previous issue, focuses on imperial competition not only as a
stimulus for knowledge practices but also as a distinctive context for
the shaping of knowledge. Regarding the fundamental question of
how politics affects the production of knowledge, these chapters dis-
cuss the development of scholarship as a result of imperial struggles,
as a battlefield, in relation to the material (and symbolic) investment
in it by both metropolitan authorities and their local representatives.
The chapters gathered in the third part of this volume mostly empha-
size the spatial dimension of the negotiations at stake: new locations
where all the processes previously described take place invite one to
reconsider the imperial framework and its multiple centers of grav-
ity. The cultivation of certain types or corpuses of knowledge in and
across imperial provinces or former imperial dependencies, with the
exclusion or the direct challenge of the metropolis, contributed to the
realignment of relations between the composite parts of the empire
in question.
The first section opens with the chapter of Gábor Almási, which
reexamines the life project of the astronomer Tycho Brahe and deals
with important questions about the self-legitimation of early modern
states vis-à-vis scientific inquiry. The study investigates a key moment
in the peregrination of the scholar and the imperial patronage he
enjoyed in exile, when not only Venice but also the Habsburg court
had an interest in him. It demonstrates that the relationship between
the imperial patron, Rudolph II, and his glamorous client was far less
asymmetric than hitherto assumed, and was anchored as much in
the strategies of princely self-fashioning as in the growing prestige
of the natural and mathematical sciences. How important the happy

coincidence of both factors was for the well-being of the astronomer
in Prague is demonstrated by newer findings on the grudging sup-
port Galileo Galilei received during his stay in “republican” Venice,
which Almási explores as a counterexample. The parallel story of the
two astronomers is presented from the perspective of an eighteenth-
century debate between the Italian professor Giuseppe Toaldo and
the French Jean-Sylvain Bailly on the state form best suited for the
advancement of astronomy as a science. The debate serves to heighten
our sensitivity toward historically grown biases on the meanings of
republic, monarchy, and science, which had all gone through consid-
erable changes by the very end of the early modern period, and today
invite a situated analysis.
How strategic state interest may foster the scientific endeavor of
astronomers is also the theme of the chapter by Catherine Jami. The
case study analyzes the in situ production of knowledge in China
in the seventeenth century after the Manchu conquest, when Jesuit
scholars were allowed to accompany the new rulers to the border ter-
ritories hitherto closed to European travelers. Focusing on the “Eight
Journeys to Tartary” undertaken by the French Jesuit mathematician
Jean-François Gerbillon in the entourage of the Kangxi emperor, the
author presents a new imperial patronage in exploring the border
territories, while the European agents serve the interests of two sepa-
rate empires. The one regards the internal plans for the territorial
rationalization of China, while the French are keen on acquiring car-
tographic knowledge of China and the Manchurian and Mongolian
regions. Jami also draws attention to the conjuncture of mapmaking
because of contemporary Russian and Qing disputes over a common
border. Therefore, as the author notes, “Western European cartogra-
phy benefited from a war that took place at the other end of the
Eurasian continent between two major continental empires,” where
the mutual construction of science and imperial might took place at
both local and global levels.
How mistaken Monsieur Bailly had been about his assumption
on the unconditional support of monarchies for astronomy even
in his own age could be proven by reading the chapter by László
Kontler. Kontler investigates the shifts of geographical interest in the
Ephemerides Astronomicae (1757–1792), one of the earliest astronomi-
cal journals involving concerted international cooperation of schol-
ars in eighteenth-century Central Europe. The journal was written
Introduction 15
by the Jesuit scholar Maximilian Hell in his capacity as imperial and

royal astronomer in Vienna. The chapter inquires into the impact of
a fundamental breach in Hell’s career and editorial work, represented
by the suppression of his order in 1773, in terms of both patron-
age and intellectual ambience. Even if Hell maintains his titles and
position, the loss of Jesuit leverage is felt keenly. If he had managed
before 1773 to become what the author describes as a “nodal astrono-
mer” in the network of the most prestigious continental European
practitioners, the period afterward witnesses a significant narrowing
and inward looking of the scholarly perspective. Kontler interprets
Hell’s new orientation toward Central and Northern Europe, paired
with emphatic historical and philological interest in his narrower
Hungarus homeland, as a virtue born of necessity. This also exempli-
fies beyond the contingencies of scientific patronage in a multipo-
lar world the disentanglement of increasingly secular polities from
religion at the end of the early modern period, which cannot be
described in Whiggish terms, but as a process that produced winners
and losers in the republic of science.
Under the second issue of the “competition of empires,”
Stéphane Van Damme revisits the knowledge practices of the first
“field Indianist,” the French scholar Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-
Duperron, in the context of the Seven Years’ War in South-East
Asia. The war is seen as decisive in the framing of the debates on
practices of the emerging Orientalist scholarship in Europe and
not merely as an act of aggression that caused the disruption of an
“ancient order of information” between local empires and foreign
agents. Duperron’s discursive strategies attending the translation of
the Zend-Avesta as well as the ensuing debunking of his methods
as unreliable by the then young William Jones were readily perme-
ated by the antagonistic rhetoric of the war. The latter transforms a
scholarly dispute into a rhetorical warfare waged for reshuffling the
hierarchy between the two competing European powers of knowl-
edge, France and Britain, on a global scale.
Marcelo Fabián Figueroa focuses on the fieldwork practices deployed
by the expedition conducted by Alejandro Malaspina in the period of
1789–1794 on behalf of the Spanish crown, along the southernmost
coastal regions of South America. The expedition, described by the
participants as an “imperial inspection,” took place on a contested
ground. The author scrutinizes what the manners of inspection and
the scientific knowledge thus produced reveal about the condition of
the eastern shore of Patagonia, a territory where the status of Spain

as a colonial power was challenged both by indigenous peoples and
by other European colonial powers, in particular the British and the
French. The naturalists’ fieldwork logs and Malaspina’s instructions
reveal that the scientific and political purposes of the expedition
were in conflict with one another, leading to what Figueroa calls the
“decentralization” of the Spanish power; while the political incentive
pursued the subjection of the territory under Spanish control, the sci-
entific strategy was codependent on the cooperative will of the local
inhabitants as well as the larger scientific community.
Catarina Madeira-Santos investigates the rationalization of the
amorphous colonial space of the Portuguese Empire in the late eigh-
teenth century, pointing out the different epistemological vantage
points and methods of territorial survey between Europe and Angola.
The chapter explores how the Portuguese colony of Brazil collaborated
and competed with Angola during this process, placing the study in
the context of the South Atlantic space and, even more importantly,
intra-colonial relationships and contentions. The chapter analyzes
the production of geographical knowledge by placing Europe in the
background, the latter being only one among the places of knowledge
production within a polycentric system of communication and power
relations, to which the sites in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, and Luanda
contributed significantly. The chapter reconstructs the cartographic
and historical work of colonial administrator-philosophers in Angola
in the context of the emergent Luandan elite, their economic and
political interests, and an emergent new collective identity shaped
against both the metropolitan model and the Brazilian one.
In the chapters of the third section, the idea of scientific knowl-
edge as potentially or actually decentering empires in the early mod-
ern world is addressed first by Antonella Romano. In her analysis of
the hitherto neglected role of Mexico in shaping knowledge in the
European continent during the seventeenth century, the focus is on
the work Historia de la conquista de la China por el tartaro (posthu-
mously published in Madrid and Paris, 1670) by Juan de Palafox, the
Spanish archbishop of Puebla, New Spain. The author investigates
the unique theological and political dimension of the historical trea-
tise, which turns the narration of the Manchu conquest of the Ming
dynasty into an exhortation of the Spanish Crown for its weakness
against contemporary Portuguese imperial self-assertion, considering
the possibility of curtailing the influence of Jesuit missionaries loyal
Introduction 17
to Portugal in Asia. Romano emphasizes that Palafox’s theological

and political views grew on the grounds of his environment in New
Spain, the “closest American neighborhood of China,” with particular
intellectual and political resources of its own. The presence of secular
clergy and Dominican networks contributed both to the anti-Jesuit
stance of Palafox and to his perspective on the Manchu as potential
converts to Christianity against the Chinese, the latter considered as
lost to Western religion. Touching on a later translation of Palafox’s
work into French, Romano demonstrates that Palafox’s voice, carried
posthumously by Catholic networks, became widely heard in Europe
and contributed significantly to later understandings of seventeenth-
century China and its history.
Silvia Sebastiani in her chapter on the trans-Atlantic and trans-im-
perial trajectories of racial knowledge between Britain and the new-
born United States focuses on the context of the emerging science
of anthropology. The analysis of three editions at different places
(Philadelphia and London, then Edinburgh, and finally Princeton) of
An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human
Species by Samuel Stanhope Smith, professor of Moral Philosophy and
later president of the College of New Jersey, enables the charting of
a new Atlantic perspective in understanding the American genealogy
of racial anthropology, between the Edinburgh Medical School and
the American academic milieus. The evolving semantics of “race” in
Smith’s treatise reveals a double process through which the North
American academe consciously asserted its authority in the fields of
Moral Philosophy and Natural History. On one hand, it shifted the
discursive ground from the Scottish university centers of the empire
to the United States of America, while construing the scientific ques-
tion of race as a central part of the curriculum. On the other hand,
the topic of human difference is grounded in the postindependence
American debates on slavery and abolitionism.
Finally, the chapter by Borbála Zsuzsanna Török deals with the
emergence of Staatenkunde/Statistik in the legal education of the late
eighteenth-century Kingdom of Hungary. Staatenkunde originated
in German academia as part of the legal and historical discourse
on early modern governmental power. As the latter increasingly
depended on knowledge of one’s (and each other’s) military and
economic “strength,” it became an exigency also for emerging
bureaucracies and scholars. Originally a formal academic disci-
pline, Staatenkunde gradually became an empirical and comparative
science of states. The analysis of the Statistik des Königreichs Ungern

by Martin Schwartner, university professor in Pest, reconstructs the
process through which the Maria Theresian “infrastructural pow-
ers” called forth new nodes in the lands of the Habsburg “empire,”
and these nodes in turn raised their own claims for producing
and validating knowledge about the lands. This knowledge could
become, as the case study shows, the basis for the renegotiation of
the relationship between the lands and the monarchy, as well as for
the reassertion of the claim to dominance of the local elite over the
rest of the population.
Notes
* The authors are grateful to Stéphane Van Damme for his thought-
ful comments and contributions during the process of composing this
introduction.
1. The classic example of such an approach is Georges G. Basalla, “The
Spread of Western Science,” Science 156/3775 (1967): 611–622.
2. Among the seminal references, see Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel
Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Lissa Roberts, ed.,
“Science and Global History, 1750–1850: Local Encounters and Global
Circulation,” special issue of Itinerario 33/1 (2009): 7–95; see especially
Lissa Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History: Local Exchanges and
Networks of Circulation,” Itinerario 33/1 (2009): 9–30.
3. From an extensive literature, see Roy McLeod and Philip F. Rehbock,
eds., Nature in Its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific (Honolulu:
U. of Hawaii P., 1988); Patrick Petitjean, Catherine Jami, and Anne-
Marie Moulin, eds., Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific
Development and European Expansion (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992); David
Philip Miller and Peter Hans Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany
and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1996); Benedikt
Stuchtey, ed., Science Across the European Empires, 1800–1950 (Oxford:
Oxford U. P., 2005); Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and
Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, Seventeenth
to Nineteenth Centuries (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006); James Delbourgo
and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York:
Routledge, 2008).
4. Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1996);
Jack Goody, Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2004); Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.,
2006); Jack Goody, The Eurasian Miracle (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
5. With regard to the Ancients, Sabina McCormack has shown how the
Spanish writings on the Inca Empire in the sixteenth century were
shaped through the analytical tools offered by Roman history: On the
Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton: Princeton
Introduction 19
U. P., 2007). In relation to non-European models, Enlightenment phi-

losophes were particularly interested in the alternative models offered by
China or India. See also Rolando Minuti, Oriente barbarico e storiografia
settecentesca. Rappresentazioni della storia dei Tartari nella cultura francese
del XVIII secolo (Venice: Marsilio, 1994); David Allen Harvey, The French
Enlightenment and Its Others: The Mandarin, the Savage, and the Invention of
the Human Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
6. See, among others, the interesting contributions by David Armitage, The
Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2000);
Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton U. P.,
2003); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperialism in Britain and
France (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2005).
7. The best known is certainly the judgment of the empire as monstro simile
in Severinus de Monzambano [Samuel von Pufendorf], De statu imperii
Germanici (The Hague, 1667), bk. 6:1 and 9; modern German edition:
Die Verfassung des deutschen Reiches, ed. Horst Denzer (Stuttgart: Reclam,
1976). But one could also refer to Enlightenment classics, like Voltaire or
Gibbon.
8. Maiken Umbach, Federalism and Enlightenment in Germany, 1740–1806
(London: Hambledon Press, 2000), 133–134.
9. Sallust seems to have spoken first of imperium Romanum referring to the
Roman state; the medieval locus classicus of the idea of the “perfect com-
munity” is Aquinas’ De regimine principum, on which, see Peter A. Blunt,
“Laus imperii,” in Imperialism in the Ancient World, ed. P. A. Garnsey and
C. R. Whittaker (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1978), 159–191; Anthony
Pagden, “Fellow Citizens and Imperial Subjects: Conquest and Sovereignty
in Europe’s Overseas Empires,” History and Theory 44/4 (2005): 32.
10. Joseph P. Canning, “Law, Sovereignty and Corporation Theory, 1300–
1450,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c.
1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1988), 465–466.
11. John Guy, “The Henrician Age,” in The Varieties of British Political Thought
1500–1800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon Schochet, and Louise G. Schwoerer
(Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1993), 35ff.; Graham Nicholson, “The Act
of Appeals and the English Reformation,” in Law and Government under the
Tudors, ed. Claire Cross, David Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick (Cambridge:
Cambridge U. P., 1988), 19–30; John Robertson, “Empire and Union: Two
Concepts of the Early Modern European Political Order,” in A Union for
Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson
(Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1995), 8ff.
12. For the formative literature on the subject, see especially Helmut G.
Koenigsberger, Estates and Revolutions: Essays in Early Modern History (Ithaca:
Cornell U. P., 1971); Mark Greengrass, ed., Conquest and Coalescence: The
Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe (London: Ashgate, 1991); John
H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present 137/1
(1992): 48–71.
13. This historiographical debate has constantly been nourished by a dia-
logue among historians and comparisons with the ancient models of
empires, the Roman Empire being the reference. See Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd,
The Ambitions of Curiosity. Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and

China (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2002). A very helpful term to describe
the nature of the authority of the rulers of such states is “infrastructural
power” (as against “absolute,” “centralized,” etc.), on which, see Karin J.
MacHardy, War, Religion and Court Patronage in Habsburg Austria: The Social
and Cultural Dimensions of Political Interaction, 1521–1622 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), chap. 1.
14. Franz Bosbach, Monarchia Universalis. Ein politischer Leitbegriff der Frühen
Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988); Alfred Kohler,
Das Reich im Kampf um die Hegemonie in Europa 1521–1648 (Munich:
Oldenbourg, 1990).
15. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain
and France c. 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1995).
16. The physician and translator Johann Philipp Ebeling to the Scottish his-
torian William Robertson on November 17, 1779, Robertson-MacDonald
papers, National Library of Scotland, MS. 3943, 106–107.
17. The recent works on the nomadic states of Asia have proved to be highly
stimulating in this regard, see Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its
Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge:
Cambridge U. P., 2002).
18. Denys Lombard, Le Carrefour Javanais. Essai d’histoire globale, 3 vols. (Paris:
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1990); Muzaffar Alam and
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and
Politics (New York: Columbia U. P., 2012).
19. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Gli imperi. Dall’antichità all’età contemporanea (Bologna:
Il Mulino, 2009), develops the reflection into a long chronological focus
on world imperial encounters and sheds light on different historical con-
texts, not necessarily “Eurocentered.” See, among the different contribu-
tions, the one about ancient China by Nicola Di Cosmo, “Ancient China
and Its Enemies,” 93–119. Another illuminating approach is offered by
Pierre Briant, whose recent Alexandre des Lumières. Fragments d’histoire
européenne (Paris: Gallimard, 2012) investigates the refashioning of
Alexander the Great by the eighteenth-century European historians in
close relation with their understanding of Asia.
20. On situatedness, see Raj, Relocating Modern Science; Kapil Raj and Mary
Terrall, eds., “Circulation and Locality in Early Modern Science,” special
issue of The British Journal for the History of Science, 43/4 (2010): 513–606.
On connections, see Sanjay Subramanhyam, Explorations in Connected
History: From the Tagus to the Ganges (New Delhi: Oxford U. P., 2004);
Sanjay Subramanhyam, Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and
Franks (New Delhi: Oxford U. P., 2004); Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts
Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World : Go-Betweens and
Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Uppsala Studies in the History of Science,
vol. 35) (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009). On
spaces and knowledge production, see Sabina Brevaglieri and Antonella
Romano, eds., “Produzione di saperi. Costruzione di spazi,” special issue,
Quaderni storici 48/1 (April 2013).
Introduction 21
21. To limit the references to the field of the history of science, some attempts are
available in Sujit Sivasundaram, ed., “Focus: Global Histories of Science,” Isis
101/1 (2010): 95–158; Carla Nappi, “The Global and Beyond: Adventures in
the Local Historiographies of Science,” Isis 104 (2013): 102–110.
22. Titles of travelogues including this phrase were highly rhetorical: the
holistic claim implied by them was in tension with the thinness of the
line of itinerary represented on the maps; Harry Liebersohn, The Traveler’s
World: Europe to the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 2006).
23. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2000).
24. Goody, The Theft of History. About an Islamic perspective on history and
historiography, see Aziz Al-Azmeh, The Times of History: Universal Topics in
Islamic Historiography (Budapest: Central European U. P., 2007).
25. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and
the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2010), xi–xii.
26. This is why the contribution by John H. Elliot is methodologically so rel-
evant when it comes to comparing empires, in spite of its restricted geo-
graphical coverage and Eurocentric perspective: see Empires of the Atlantic
World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale U. P.,
2006).
27. Christian Jacob, ed., Lieuxde, vol. 1: Espaces et communautés; vol. 2: Les
mains de l’intellect (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007–2011). About the Chinese
case, see Catherine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning
and Imperial Authority during the Kangxi Reign (1662–1722) (Oxford: Oxford
U. P., 2012).
28. For instance, with his claim for an “Iberian science,” Jorge Cañizares-
Esguerra tends to naturalize the imperial framework, leaving outside the
picture the negotiated dimensions of imperial encounters; see especially
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic,
1550–1700 (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2006); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra,
Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian
World (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2006). For the French context, see James
E. McClellan III and François Regourd, The Colonial Machine: French Science
and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011).
29. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (first ed. 1860
in German; English trans. 1878); Jules Michelet, Histoire de la France au
XVIe siècle. La Renaissance (Paris: Chamerot, 1855).
30. Serge Gruzinski, Les Quatre parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialisa-
tion (Paris: Éditions de la Martinière, 2004); Christopher A. Bayley, The
Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
31. Frank Lestringant, L’Atelier du cosmographe, ou l’image du monde à la
Renaissance (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991); Jean-Marc Besse, Les grandeurs
de la Terre. Aspects du savoir géographique à la Rennaissance (Paris: Ecole
Normale Supérieure, 2003).
32. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century,”
Representations 91 (2005): 26–57.
33. “AHR Roundtable: Historians and the Question of ‘Modernity,’” American

Historical Review 116/3 (2011): 631–751; see especially Richard Wolin,
“‘Modernity’: The Peregrinations of a Contested Historiographical
Concept,” AHR 116/3 (2011): 741–751.
34. According to the sociologist Bruno Latour, “we could of course talk of
‘capital’ that is something (money, knowledge, credit, power) that has
no other function but to be instantly reinvested into another cycle of
accumulation . . . However, using this expression would be begging the
question: what is capitalized is necessarily turned into capital, it does
not tell us what it is—besides, the word ‘capitalism’ has had too confus-
ing a career.” Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and
Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1987), 223. See also
Antonella Romano and Stéphane Van Damme, “Science and World Cities:
Thinking Urban Knowledge and Science at Large (16th–18th century),”
Itinerario 33/1 (2009): 79–95.
Part I
Negotiation of (Trans-)Imperial
Patronage
1
Was Astronomy the Science of
Empires? An Eighteenth-Century
Debate in View of the Cases of
Tycho and Galileo
Gábor Almási
The debate this chapter is going to reconstruct happened between

two eighteenth-century astronomers, the Italian Catholic priest
Giuseppe Toaldo (1719–1797), professor of “astronomy and meteors”
at the University of Padua, and the Frenchman Jean-Sylvain Bailly
(1736–1793), full member of the Academy of Sciences and the French
Academy as well as later president of the National Assembly and first
mayor of Paris.1 The controversy concerned the history of astronomy,
in particular the question whether monarchies were more supportive
of the advancement of astronomy than republics. Bailly argued in
his monumental history of astronomy that experimental and obser-
vational sciences advanced better in monarchies than in republics. It
is no wonder he had little respect for ancient Roman astronomy, by
which he meant Republican Rome:
[In the Roman republic] one cultivated eloquence as it led to

dignities. But if someone searched for glory in a scientific career
he would not have found it: his fellow citizens would not have
noticed him. This is what regards the sciences in general, but one
may also add that those sciences which are founded on observa-
tion and experience, and which, as a consequence, demand dedi-
cation and work, like the study of the sky, do not make much
progress in republics. Their utility, which almost always depends
on their perfection, is too distant to impress the multitude.2
25
26 Gábor Almási
Experimental and observational sciences better suited monarchies,

where royal patronage and example could inspire men of genius; see
the Medici or Louis XIV.3
When Giuseppe Toaldo read Bailly’s history in the French original
he decided to defend his state and prepared an essay on Venice’s
merits in astronomy.4 While it seemed easy to defend republics in
general, a greater part of the defense of Venetian science concerned
travel writers and geographers and had little to say of astronomy.
Moreover, Toaldo’s examples were often thwarted through the mud-
dling of private and state patronage.5 Toaldo was aware of these
weaknesses and admitted that listing examples of private individu-
als and private patronage would not satisfy Mr. Bailly, who would
argue that republics care chiefly about their commercial interests,
the preservation of public order, and therefore dislike novelties.
Yet, as the reasoning went, Venice was always generous toward all
the sciences, even if it did not reveal entusiasmo, “which might be
a vice and surely a danger.”6 Toaldo confirmed that two examples
would suffice to convince the reader: one concerned Galileo Galilei,
the other Tycho Brahe. However, concerning Galileo he was curi-
ously short. He did not want to emphasize Galileo’s invitation to
the University of Padua, at the time before he became famous.
Yet, it was in Venice’s favor that she expressed her appreciation to
Galileo through salary raises.7 Tolado argued that Galileo later suf-
fered for his ingratitude, abandoning such a generous lord (as the
state of Venice), which could have also protected him against future
persecutions.
Of the two stories by Toaldo, Tycho’s appears outwardly more
convincing. Toaldo claimed that Venice had spontaneously made a
decree to support the Danish astronomer in realizing his mission to
Alexandria, where he desired to carry out astronomical observations.
Recent scholarship, however, has undermined his thesis, in fact,
showing it to be mistaken.8 While Tycho’s Astronomiae Instauratae
Mechanica (1598) makes an indirect reference to a positive deci-
sion in Venice, it also makes it clear that no action had been taken.9
Apparently, one of the goals of Tycho’s book, which he sent as a gift
copy also to Venice, was to enhance the commitment of the Republic.
As we will see, we have good reason to agree with the assessment of
Luisa Pigatto, that if Venice failed to support Tycho in realizing his
abstract goals it was because the city cared only about the pragmatic
uses of sciences.10
Was Astronomy the Science of Empires? 27
This chapter invites the reader to reinvestigate the cases Toaldo

offered in defense of republican science. It will lead back to the six-
teenth century and explain the context of the Alexandrian project
in Tycho’s life and work, and analyze the patronage relationships
that truly mattered to Tycho, which were pointing not toward Venice
but the Holy Roman Empire. While studying the case of Tycho and
interpreting Galileo’s attitude toward the Republic of Venice, the
dynamics of scientific patronage will come into focus. In the con-
text of late Renaissance science the importance of social and epis-
temological legitimation of princely patronage will be underscored,
which seemingly supports Bailly’s monarchic claims. However, as will
be pointed out, these claims derived from the philosophical agenda
of an enlightened intellectual, which had a great deal more to do
with the eighteenth-century French context, in which Bailly’s career
unfolded, than with the “hard facts” of early modern astronomical
practice. Thus, apart from reconsidering questions of early modern
patronage in its political contexts, the cases of Tycho and Galileo will
serve to highlight the ways early modern thinkers strove to negoti-
ate fundamental concepts like science and republic, the meaning of
which we are liable to take for granted.
Tycho’s scientific problems
In 1588, after many years of maturation, Tycho Brahe finally produced

his first magnum opus, Concerning Recent Phenomena,11 which dealt
with the comet of 1577–1578 and included in its eighth chapter a new
theory of the world system, which had the Sun revolve around a stable
Earth and all other planets revolve around the Sun. The publication of
the monograph led to the emergence of new challenges and expecta-
tions, which Tycho was eager to meet. As a result, he had four new
strongly interrelated goals. First, criticism had to be vehemently refuted
(most famously of John Craig). Second, the primacy of his natural phil-
osophical claims needed to be confirmed (principally against Raimar
Ursus). Third, his scholarly credit had to be further increased so that
his scientific claims would not be questioned any more. These three
tasks Tycho accomplished with admirable success through a clever use
of the printing press, most importantly by publishing his scientific cor-
respondence tailored precisely for these objectives.12 However, he also
had a fourth and more difficult task to resolve: to better explain and
more firmly support his geo-heliocentric hypothesis.
28 Gábor Almási
The mission to Egypt, proposed to Venice and mentioned by

Toaldo, could have been a contribution to this latter goal. The astro-
nomical aim of the mission was rather complex, serving to discredit
one of Copernicus’s starting points, which regarded certain irregu-
larities in the motion of the fixed stars, which, as Tycho realized,
was in correlation with the “intricate motion of the terrestrial axis.”13
The plan to newly measure the geographical longitude of Alexandria
and some Italian cities and to confront the results with the data of
Ptolemy and Pliny served to demonstrate that there was no oscilla-
tion of the terrestrial axis (resulting from the so-called theory of trepi-
dation introduced in the ninth century). Another goal was to better
base comparisons between ancient and modern observational data
since Ptolemy had used Alexandria as his reference point. If Tycho’s
thesis could be proven, it would demonstrate a new argument against
Copernicus’s system of triple motion that had the heavy Earth rotate
in such an absurd way.14 Moreover, it also would have been a triumph
over Copernicus the observer, and confirm that Tycho, possessing
infallible instruments, respected no authority but experience.
The above-mentioned set of new goals was thus largely the out-
come of the publication of Concerning Recent Phenomena, which does
not mean they were the only scientific goals Tycho had in mind. The
“instauration of astronomy” could not be performed without a new
lunar and solar theory firmly based on observational evidence, a new
star catalogue, and practically more reliable observation of all celes-
tial bodies. All in all these should have led to the drawing up of new
tables, replacing both the Alfonsine and the Prutenic Tables. This was
grand, aristocratic astronomy—as John Christianson has asserted—
with a broad and clear vision. Responsible for its realization was the
Institute of Uraniborg, with a staff of a dozen assistants and scholars
financed basically by the state. As we know, this large project could in
no way be finished in Tycho’s life, also because the institute was prac-
tically shut down when the young Danish king, Christian IV, finally
took power. Spoiled by the rule of regency and unaccustomed to a
new royal patron, the withdrawal of patronage took Tycho as a brutal
surprise and he left his patria indignantly.15 Uraniborg would soon
appear to him as a “Baconian dream.”
Placed in this larger context the planned mission to Egypt had
only secondary importance. It was a piece of a larger picture, and,
as a matter of fact, Alexandria was not the only place where he was
planning to carry out measurements of longitudes. Tycho claimed
to have worked out the longitude of Frombork (Frauenburg), a city

that Copernicus previously measured, and made concerted efforts to
measure the longitude of Italian cities.16 Nevertheless, the results of
these missions remained spuriously unpublished. The potential uses
of the Alexandrian mission were also dubious, even if Tycho was pre-
pared to explain away quite a large margin of error with reference to
Ptolemy’s observational inaccuracy or the problem of refraction, first
noticed and tackled by Tycho himself. However, in the lack of better
arguments, the mission was surely not insignificant and could have
also presented a good trial of his influence.
Tycho’s first contact with the imperial court

and the failed mission to Egypt
To realize the observations in Egypt, Tycho needed backing on a

European level. In particular, he expected the support of the mari-
time empire of Venice, the ambassadorial network of which extended
also to Alexandria at the time.17 Since he had no direct relationship
with anyone in Venice, he used the contacts he already had: these
were primarily courtiers at the imperial court and recent contacts in
Italy. Consequently, when Tycho launched the idea of the mission to
Egypt in 1590, he sent letters the same day to Bologna and Prague.
In Bologna he addressed the Italian astronomer Giovanni Antonio
Magini, in Prague the imperial vice-chancellor Jacob Kurz.
Rudolf II’s loyal and highly erudite servant Jacob Kurz von
Senftenau (1554–1594) was a scientific practitioner in his own right.
He was profoundly a Renaissance figure, interested not only in the
sciences, but also in architecture, music, and botany.18 The most vivid
details of his personality are preserved in the diaries of the magician-
mathematician John Dee.19 Although the vice-chancellor was gentle
enough to give a long reception to the bizarre Englishman, and even
arranged for him the opportunity to receive a doctoral grade at the
University of Prague,20 he was probably more interested in Dee’s
mathematical past than as a magician. In any case, if Dee—“sent to
Prague by God”21—was not well received at that “Mannerist” court,
which is so often associated with his name, and was later even ban-
ished from the city, it was not in a small degree due to Kurz’s skepti-
cal approach, as Dee also realized.22
Quite another treatment was given to Tycho, who approached Kurz
through his old friend, the Bohemian astronomer Tadeáš Hájek.23
30 Gábor Almási
There was no better excuse for initiating a contact than the appear-
ance of Concerning Recent Phenomena, distributed in a circle of privi-
leged scholars. On Tycho’s instigation, Hájek wondered about Kurz’s
opinion of Tycho’s planetary hypothesis. Kurz answered that these
questions should not be hastily judged—which did not please Tycho
at all.24 Imperial vice-chancellor Kurz had to be won over. However,
direct contact needed to be established with caution, basing it on
the rhetoric of friendship and collegiality (with Tycho’s dominance),
bypassing courtly etiquette. This was not something Kurz was ready
to accept unconditionally, and a game began between the two of
them, using Hájek as a middleman. Kurz wondered why the com-
pulsory copies of Tycho’s book had not arrived in exchange for
the diploma of imperial copyright privilege that had been given to
Tycho.25 Hájek suggested Tycho should personally respond to Kurz
and ask for his friendship. However, Tycho still felt his position was
too weak for that. He first needed to convince Kurz of his astronomi-
cal theories.26 Concerning the copyright privilege, he wished it had
a better wording and demanded something more eloquent, possibly
without the inclusion of the usual reference to the avoidance of reli-
gious offense.27 A few months later the new privilege was promised
but still not sent. Most probably Kurz was waiting for Tycho’s direct
address, but instead of a polite letter he received the first printed
part of Epistolae astronomicae, the book meant as a major instru-
ment of establishing Tycho’s credibility and primacy.28 When finally
Tycho’s personal address arrived, Kurz responded most enthusiasti-
cally, describing Tycho as the best astronomer of Europe—“when I
say Europe I mean the whole world”29—and sent him the demanded
copyright privilege written on parchment (as Tycho desired), with a
private courier at his own expense.30 Kurz was also enthusiastic about
Tycho’s anti-Aristotelian conclusions and judged his world system a
promising hypothesis but one that still needed to be proven. The same
positive affirmations were also included in the copyright diploma:
Next to freeing the exact science of comets of the deep-rooted

errors of earlier scholars, which you have smartly done in a pub-
lication, there is also a new hypothesis of celestial motions await-
ing us, which should exactly correspond to the observations of all
times, which was neither the case with the earlier hypothesis of
Ptolemy nor with the later one of Copernicus, as it is proven also
by you, thanks to your most accurate observations.31
The text was written in the emperor’s name but not without his knowl-
edge: “I guaranteed the emperor that it was saying the truth”—Kurz
affirmed in the accompanying letter, which Tycho later printed.32 As
we can see, the imperial court was ready to provide Tycho not only
social legitimation but also epistemological legitimation, even if not
unconditionally; Kurz made clear in both the diploma and the letter
that he treated Tycho’s hypothesis as still unproven.33 It needed to
indicate “the positions of stars in the past, present, and future times,”
as Kurz demanded.34
Kurz’s response has perhaps greater importance in Tycho’s sci-
entific career than hitherto acknowledged. If the entire scientific
community was to be convinced about his world system he needed
to find more exact proofs of it. Kurz’s letter certainly strengthened
Tycho’s conviction that the “instauration of astronomy” was to be
based exclusively on his own observations. It was also the best way
to avoid fallacy and establish his primacy given that the quantity
and quality of his observations were due to his privileged position
as an aristocratic scholar. In response to Kurz he promised to show
that his hypothesis agreed with past and present observations alike.
He demanded even more exact observations than those made by
Ptolemy, who had used the magnificent instruments of the Egyptians,
which had been built at royal expense.35 The project of longitudinal
measurements—announced a few months later—departed from here.
As has been said, the same day as he informed Magini in a famous
letter, Tycho also announced the project to Kurz. He wrote that he
decided to send one of his assistants to measure the longitudes of
some cities on the way toward Prague, plus Nuremberg, the city of
Regiomontanus. The assistant would carry a portable sextant, which
Kurz could then study and remake in Prague. Tycho explained that
Sascerides, building a sextant, would do similar observations in Italy,
and asked Kurz to help him obtain Venetian support.36
It surely did not depend on Kurz that Venice finally did not support
the project. Ten months later Kurz personally went to see the Venetian
ambassador in Prague and implored him to convince Venice to back
Tycho’s complicated request.37 As a result, the Venetian ambassador
informed the doge of Tycho’s project in the simplest terms; by mea-
suring the longitudes and latitudes of diverse places, Tycho was to
correct many mistakes in astronomy and bring to perfection a work
he had been writing per commodo universale. He mentioned neither
the cosmological problems behind the project (which Kurz probably
32 Gábor Almási
did not explain to him) nor the potential uses of longitudinal mea-
surements in navigation. Rather, the diplomat wrote lengthily but
dispassionately about Kurz’s enthusiasm for Tycho, who being the
best in his profession justly merited the love of any prince (i.e., the
doge). However, the ambassador’s main argument was Kurz’s author-
ity and personal importance in the imperial government.38 Despite
all the efforts, these traditional arguments for patronage had appar-
ently little effect on the Venetian government. Certainly Tycho’s plan
was complex and abstract, and would have needed a local leader.39
This becomes even more obvious when we compare this case with
Galileo’s appeal to Venice in 1609, when the Paduan professor of
mathematics was presenting his spyglass to the doge. Galileo empha-
sized that the great magnifying effect of his telescope was
of invaluable utility to every affair and enterprise both maritime

and terrestrial: in fact, boats and ships of the enemy can be seen at
sea at a distance much greater than usual, so we can notice them
more than two hours before they can see us, so that being able to
see the number of boats and tonnage, and evaluate their forces, we
can decide to chase them, to fight or run away.40
While Tycho was not prepared to speak the subservient language

of usefulness, he was not going to give it up either. Seven years later,
already in exile, he gave it a new try. He included excerpts and let-
ters into his impressive Astronomiae instauratae mechanica (1598),
suggesting that Venice indeed had agreed to back his project (mis-
leading later Gassendi, hence also Toaldo).41 He also explained why
the mission to Alexandria was still important: to confirm his (recent)
observations of the sun’s motion and his accuracy in observing the
fixed stars and to demonstrate (in agreement with Ptolemy) that the
terrestrial axis had no oscillation, which “the great Copernicus had
imagined in order to save changes of the obliquity of the ecliptic.”42
The arguments were now truly abstract and were again of no avail.
Venice did not support the Danish astronomer, not even at this sec-
ond attempt.43 Although by 1600 Rudolf’s anti-Popish politics may
well have overshadowed Tycho’s good fame (already destroyed by
the scandal of the expulsion of the Capuchins from Prague, which
happened allegedly on his advice),44 we may presume that these
concerns mattered little in contemporary Venice. More importantly,
communal decision-making tended to embrace only those projects
that appeared useful for the majority of the political community and
fit to the ideology of reason of state.45
Becoming an imperial client
Two weeks before Vice-Chancellor Jacob Kurz approached the

Venetian ambassador (in August 1591), he appointed Raimar Ursus to
the position of imperial mathematician in the name of the emperor.
This appointment happened despite the accusation of plagiarism
hurled at him by Tycho,46 who must have remained shocked. His
clash with that ignoble “Bear” (or “Beast,” as Tycho often called him)
started in earnest only now, taking much of his time and energy.
Although Tycho apparently had no intention to become imperial
mathematician at this point (a title he would never care to use), he
was clearly offended by Ursus’s appointment. Even if the relation-
ship toward Kurz (who died in 1594) survived the trauma, the project
of Alexandria lay still for seven years. When Tycho left Denmark in
1597, the contact with the imperial court had to be rebuilt anew. By
then, thanks to his published Epistolae astronomicae (1596), he was
the unquestioned prince of astronomy in northern Europe.
The main goal of Tycho’s exile was to achieve his rehabilitation
in Denmark and return to his patria.47 If he ended up living on the
loaned money and estates of Heinrich Rantzau, lord of Schleswig and
Holstein, it was in great part the outcome of the overly immense
dignity he demanded for himself in Denmark. However, Christian
IV saw a danger in Tycho’s privileged position outside of the logic of
feudal ruling, and decided to make an example of his astronomer. In
search of rehabilitation and patronage, an obvious second choice was
the imperial court. As Tycho wrote once, the emperor was, after all,
“first among the kings of Europe.”48
Tycho’s approach to the imperial court was most circumspect. He
was not only eager to be recommended by the most influential peo-
ple and find as many middlemen and potential local brokers and sup-
porters as possible, but also a perfectionist in the preparation of the
works he meant to present to Rudolf II in person. Among his patrons
the greatest credit went to the Elector Archbishop of Cologne, Ernst,
cousin of Rudolf, who was outraged by the treatment Tycho had
received from King Christian IV. Ernst allegedly insisted on learning
from Tycho’s messenger how much money they were actually talk-
ing about. When he was told that the money Tycho had received
34 Gábor Almási
from the Kingdom of Denmark could not have been much more than
yearly 4,000 tallers(!), Ernst was shocked: “What? Should such a man
be allowed to move out of the country when so little money is at
stake? This is a shame.”49
Next to powerful supporters abroad, Tycho was lucky to have
enthusiastic brokers at court. Curiously, the follower of Jakob Kurz,
Vice-Chancellor Rudolfus Corraducius, was apparently also inter-
ested in the sciences,50 and even the immensely influential secretary
Johannes Barvitius appeared the most benevolent toward him.51 But
even when the ground was prepared, Tycho kept delaying his arrival
with different excuses: his daughter was sick, the roads were muddy,
or he still needed to finish the gift volumes. This strategy served
him well. The emperor was more and more impatient to receive
and honor him, and the imbalance of power between Tycho and his
future patron became slightly reduced, and the price of his presence
increased.
Nevertheless, it is still not perfectly clear why Rudolf was so keen
on having this Lutheran astronomer at court with a pension of 3,000
guldens, higher than the salary of the best-paid courtiers. The usual
explanation points to the emperor’s interest in the occult sciences,
but there was obviously more to it than the want of an expert astrolo-
ger, an image Tycho became cautious to embody.52 I would rather
argue that Tycho arrived in a period of deepest crisis when Rudolf’s
isolation and distrust of anyone Popish or Spanish had reached
unprecedented heights. Rudolf’s main concern was surely not the
instauration of astronomy but the preservation of his throne and the
unresolved problem of succession, which his brothers and enemies
used to put him under pressure. He was convinced that Archduke
Albrecht wanted to dethrone him with the help of the Pope and
some Catholic princes, and as a consequence he opened up toward
Protestants.53 He preferred not to employ outspokenly Catholic
councilors (and sometimes avoided all councilors), and other times
believed that Protestants could serve him more loyally and as better
patriots.54
While Rudolf’s imperial throne became a question of open debate
among his brothers and enemies, his throne was contested also at a
more general level. By the end of the sixteenth century, claims for the
title of Holy Roman Emperor were more and more in need of justi-
fication. While the emperor was relatively poor and powerless there
were new contenders for his title—most importantly from Spain
and Portugal, new lords of transcontinental empires. How much

the imperial title became negotiable is reflected also in Jean Bodin’s
opinion, who refuted the “theory of four monarchies” and claimed it
would have been more just to consider as heir to the Roman empire
the sultan of the Turks.55 In fact, nothing justified the imperial title
better than the fight against the Ottoman Empire, which, as a matter
of fact, produced few positive results in the very last years of the six-
teenth century. Nevertheless, the ambassador of the naval “empire”
of the Republic of Venice asserted that the “kind of dignity and lofti-
ness” that remained with the Holy Roman Emperor needed to be
“preserved because having no force it can do no harm but much good
is maintained with that pre-eminence, which is shared by various
people.”56
If the Danish astronomer wanted a patron who was the first among
European patrons, Rudolf needed Tycho to demonstrate that he was
indeed still the first among European patrons. Denying his patronage
to Tycho, recommended by German electors and princes, would have
meant a lost opportunity to affirm his imperial status, not to mention
consequent shame. Moreover, Tycho was not just a Lutheran astrono-
mer, and Rudolf most probably cared little about his personal beliefs,
but it was his public persona, that is, social-scientific authority, that
the emperor was eager to tap: by the late 1590s Tycho’s “princely”
status—despite Ursus’s lethal irony about it—was generally recog-
nized.57 Tycho was a really big fish that rarely swam into the net
of the emperor. After all, while Prague might have been an attrac-
tive place for many a famous men and heterodox thinkers, it would
hardly lure a Titian or a Monteverdi. The moderate and rhapsodically
paid salaries were widely known.
Despite Tycho’s efforts to mitigate the clear-cut image of a patron-
client relationship, he acquiesced to being Rudolf’s loyal servant; his
fame, ostentation, and secret knowledge served the emperor now. In a
letter to Churfürst Joachim Friedrich von Brandenburg, written in the
interest of Tycho, Rudolf affirmed that out of love for astronomical-
mathematical sciences he had ordered Tycho to Prague, who recently
obediently appeared “with the state recommendation of the empire’s
princes and electors.”58 This was probably the only adequate way
Rudolf could have thought of this relationship: he ordered Tycho
to come, who obeyed. This princely rhetoric had a lasting influence
on how we conceive of Renaissance client-patron relationships. In
reality, this scholarly “servant” of the court was a real gem, with a
36 Gábor Almási
rapidly growing influence over the emperor. The road to intimacy

and trust was paved with his astrological and alchemical knowledge.59
It is worth noting here that Galileo later chose a similar path when
approaching the young Cosimo II de Medici (r. 1609–1621), sending
him the Sidereus Nuncius with the nativity of the young prince.60
In conclusion to Tycho’s case with the empire, first of all we need
to emphasize that the relationship between imperial patronage
and Tycho’s scholarship was not unidirectional, as princely patron-
age is usually imagined, but bidirectional. The standard history of
“Rudolfine Prague,” with the emperor surrounding himself with
exceptional figures, is as much misleading as the idea of “liberal”
Venice as a shelter of intellectuals like Bruno and Galileo. As we can
see, both Rudolf and Tycho needed each other at a certain moment of
their lives, and these moments happily coincided. The principal actor
in this story was not Rudolf but Tycho. If Johann Kepler later made
the imperial court truly famous as a cradle of Copernican astronomy,
it was partly because of Tycho, who invited Kepler to Prague and
paved the way for him. Moreover, the importance of Rudolf’s erudite
councilors, like Vice-chancellors Jacob Kurz and Rudolf Corraducius,
should be given greater recognition in the development of Rudolfine
Prague. But even in the relationship between Tycho and Jacob Kurz,
the dominating factor was the Danish astronomer and his need to
confirm his credibility and authority through imperial acknowledg-
ment. It is stimulating to ask why Tycho needed that acknowledg-
ment so much in the 1590s. I believe, most importantly, that it is
because he lacked the solid foundations that he continued claiming
for his astronomy. Kurz pointed out that the hypothesis Tycho cared
so much to add to his name was still not proven. The orbits of the
planets were still not reconstructed and fully understood. The obser-
vations he carried out were difficult to check. Moreover, although
not a Copernican, Tycho attacked several socially embedded ortho-
dox views with his criticism of Aristotelian natural philosophy.
What he thus expected from the court was social and epistemologi-
cal legitimation.
Legitimation appears to be the key also if we look at the other side
of the coin, and ask why Rudolf needed Tycho. I argued that Tycho’s
incredibly high salary should be related to the instability of Rudolf’s
position as emperor. Tycho offered Rudolf an opportunity to reaf-
firm his imperial persona, which was under attack at different lev-
els. In other words, investment in Tycho’s scientific activity meant
conspicuous consumption in the interest of imperial legitimation.61

If the illustrious astronomer could also provide cosmological legiti-
mation and astrological knowledge, it was all the better. Although
this crude approach to scientific princely patronage may not fit to all
contexts, it apparently works well with the so-called observational
and experimental sciences about which Bailly was talking. Tycho’s
precious presence in Prague meant that some of the latest technolo-
gies of observational astronomy came under control of the emperor.
As Europe’s most famous observational astronomer and instrument
maker, Tycho and his devices were to become the most precious
objects of the emperor’s famous cabinet of curiosities. Understanding
nature as a warehouse of marvels, curiosities, and secrets was the
characteristic epistemological field of Renaissance patrons, religious
and secular alike. Despite the fundamental difference between the
epistemological horizons of client and patron there were also some
common points: astrology and cosmology. However, Rudolf’s evi-
dent interest in Copernicanism was not meant to legitimate the
Copernican world system but only the debate about it.62 Still, his
authority could also occasionally be used to legitimate epistemologi-
cal claims, as Tycho’s diploma of imperial copyright privilege shows.
The case of Galileo
Was there indeed some mystical relationship between observational

(and experimental) science and monarchic rule, as Bailly suggested?
Or was Toaldo more correct when he referred to Galileo in defense of
republican science?63 In order to fully understand why the approach
of both Bailly and Toaldo is misleading, we now need to reinvestigate
the case of Galileo.
Toaldo’s pro-Venetian arguments rested on the salary raises given
to Galileo, which were indeed because of the merit of his patrician
friends and the presentation of the telescope in 1609, just before his
departure.64 Galileo’s contacts with Venetian authorities had been the
subject of long-lasting legends in the hands of Venetian historians,
which Antonio Favaro long ago confuted.65 Galileo apparently pro-
vided no engineering services to Venice. His scientific consultations
(concerning the balance and force of the oar or a hydraulic elevator)
were performed on private commissions, without any consequences
at the level of state. Concerning Galileo’s rather negative teaching
experience in Padua, there is little that can be said in favor of Venetian
38 Gábor Almási
scientific politics either. As Toaldo also admitted (as opposed to the

claims of some later Venetian historians), it was not because of the
merit of Venice that Galileo was selected for the vacant professorship
of mathematics, but because of the few patrons Galileo enchanted
with his talents.66 While Venice had undeniably managed the Paduan
university well, by the turn of the seventeenth century this ancient
institution had apparently exhausted its dynamic potentials, and cer-
tainly represented no institute of research, surely not for Galileo, who
found hardly anything innovative in it.67
We are not better off when we consider the usual argument about
the intellectually inspiring setting of tolerant Venice. Although some
Venetian-Paduan private men might have been truly inspiring, most
remarkably Paolo Sarpi and Giovanfrancesco Sagredo (one of the
interlocutors of the Dialogues), their role in Galileo’s biography is not
straightforward. Sagredo came from one of the most powerful fami-
lies of the city and can be considered to be one of the reform-minded
giovani—led by Sarpi—eager to address the all-encompassing crisis
of the Venetian state in strikingly radical ways.68 While Sarpi’s origi-
nal and broad scientific thinking, including interests in magnetism
and “natural” motion (and the motion of the seas in a Copernican
interpretation), might have been deeply stimulating to Galileo,69
Sagredo, while similarly interested in the problem of motion and
sharing Sarpi’s anti-Aristotelian and anti-Jesuit feelings, was less of
a theoretical mind. As Pastore Stocchi described him, he was “suspi-
cious . . . of not target-oriented scientific curiosity.”70 His relationship
with Galileo was a typical patron-client relationship, where the cli-
ent mathematician was also expected to serve with occasional horo-
scopes and astrological information.71 In one of his letters Sagredo
claimed he was above all a gentleman, who neither cared about mak-
ing fame as a mathematician or philosopher nor was engaged in the
business of professionals, but desired most of all to honestly serve
the Republic. In the order of his priorities “philosophy” followed
God, patria, family, and friends.72 This was however already far too
much for his family. His brother Zaccaria Sagredo was worried that
Giovanfrancesco would distract his sons, and “stuff their heads with
things of no profit,” and upon his death he made sure to get rid of
his brother’s scientific devices (and maybe also letters).73 Although
Zaccaria may well represent the average patrician, this does not take
away from the significance of some reform-minded Venetians. In the
first decade of the seventeenth century the giovani were trying to save
Venice from decadence, replacing it onto the European stage with

complete civil-religious renovation, including independence from
the papacy and new commercial ties to Calvinist Holland.74 In view
of this historical background and the dramatic years of the Interdict
(1606–1607), it is not exaggerating to link Sarpi’s and Sagredo’s inter-
est in Galileo’s research—and the epistemological break it implied—to
their ideas about radical civil-religious reform.75 There seems to be
however one important difference: while Galileo was thinking within
the open paradigm of science as a shared knowledge eventually
legitimated by a broadly interpreted Republic of Letters, Sarpi and
Sagredo, leaving traces of their scientific curiosity only in letters and
manuscripts, lived in the secretive and elitist paradigm of the reason
of state. Hence, through leaving Venice, Galileo expressed eventually
this difference: he sought scientific legitimation outside the “protec-
tive belt” of Venice.
Whether Venice could indeed offer Galileo any protection against
persecution—another of Toaldo’s pro-Venetian arguments—is also
rather dubious.76 This long-lived myth was rooted in the republi-
can ideology of contemporary Venetian patricians, centered around
the concepts of equality, liberty, harmony, moderation, and toler-
ance. This republican myth was also shared by Galileo’s Venetian
friends such as Sagredo.77 Needless to say, this ideology principally
served the interest of the close aristocratic regime of selected patri-
cians who had control over the “empire” of Venice.78 In any case,
Giordano Bruno’s surrender to the Inquisition (1592) or the dis-
heartening experience of the Interdict—a failed test of Venice’s pos-
sible independence from Rome’s influence—made this myth rather
questionable. Galileo’s own “scientific Nicodemism” in the Venetian
period clearly indicates what he thought of the city’s liberty.79 We
have good reason to suppose—as, among others, his correspondence
with Kepler suggests—that Galileo’s ambition for an epistemological
reform, making public his cosmological and philosophical ideas, was
maturing all through the period he spent under Venetian rule.80 His
move back to his patria should be placed into the broad context of
his scientific and philosophical maturation. By 1609–1610 Galileo
must have realized that “his entering into a decisive alliance with
the Sarpian group would not help spread his science: such an alli-
ance would have confined him to a ‘factional’ ghetto.”81 Moreover,
he could rightly suppose that the Sarpian group did not share his
goal to reform cosmology.82 The grand duke of Tuscany obviously
40 Gábor Almási
offered Galileo greater autonomy and legitimacy, not mentioning

that apparently Galileo would eagerly use the Jesuits (expelled from
Venice during the Interdict) for making the Church legitimize his
discoveries.83
Nevertheless, there is also a plainer reading of Galileo’s move to
Florence: the Duke simply offered him “better working conditions,”
greater prestige, and legitimation, while counting with the Catholic
Church was absolutely normal in scholarly communities of confes-
sional Europe, even in its Protestant parts. The low respect tradition-
ally given to mathematics professors, engineers, and instrument
makers was nothing compared to the title of court mathematician and
philosopher (a title that still needed to be established at the Tuscan
court). These concerns were expressed in one of Galileo’s famous let-
ters, written in the middle of the Interdict, four years before his depar-
ture, and addressed to the grand duchess. Galileo wrote the letter on
behalf of his old colleague, Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente:
[The famous anatomist] finding it tedious to endure the continu-

ous duties he has accepted to satisfy . . . is very much looking for-
ward to some leisure both for the preservation of his health and
for the completion of some of his works. And all that he needs to
satisfy his ambition is to attain those titles and positions reached
by others in his profession, and those can be given to him only by
some great, absolute prince.84
In summary, Galileo’s experience in Venice can hardly support a

republican argument in the history of astronomy, as was suggested
by Toaldo. The Venice of the turn of the seventeenth century was not
supportive of mathematical sciences in the sense in which Galileo,
Tycho, and Kepler wanted to redefine them. It was a city of deep
economic-intellectual-political crisis, which the “republican” gov-
ernment was unable to overcome despite the recommendations of a
minor group of reformers, who understood that the different aspects
of the crisis were interrelated. In a way, the “egalitarian” constitu-
tion and the collectivist ideology, the famous homogeneity and col-
legiality of “virtuous” Venetian patricians, favored neither scientific
innovation nor conspicuous consumption in the form of scientific
patronage.85 The practical knowledge accumulated in the Arsenal
and in the workshops of Venetian instrument makers or lens grinders
was supposed to serve only Venetian goals. This knowledge was not
“science,” or at least not in the way it was being redefined by some

leading scholars of the age, people who became canonized partly
because of their novelty and success in establishing scholarly cred-
ibility. Although scholarly credibility was gained somewhat differ-
ently by Tycho and Galileo, there were also some striking similarities
in their relationship to princely patronage, which may allow us to
outline some common theoretical assumptions.
Conclusions
In the final analysis the cases of Tycho and Galileo may appear to
support Bailly’s theory of a positive relationship between science and
monarchic rule. Renaissance princes, especially when not being under
the influence of churches, tended to tap the legitimacy that the com-
monwealth of scholars could provide them in a greater degree than
republics. This conclusion disregards the fact that the world of the late
sixteenth century does not easily correspond to the conceptual uni-
verse of late eighteenth-century Bailly. Rather than stressing a clear-
cut relationship between science and princely patronage, the cases
of Tycho and Galileo suggest that the advance of natural sciences
should be viewed more as an autonomous process, in which different
kinds of authorities used each other to confirm or strengthen their
legitimacy and credibility. It was thus also in the scholarly commu-
nity’s interest to uphold the fiction of secular authoritative centers:
the pre-eminence of an emperor (or a prince) was shared by many
people, as the Venetian ambassador noted.86 The imperial and the
Medici courts were two of these centers, but their use in the benefit
of the scientific community depended on both parties, scholars and
princely courts alike.
The social-scientific field that Tycho and Galileo conquered—where
they established their credibility and authority—was multipolar. This
is not to claim that this “field” was divided between the Republic of
Letters and mundane authorities like the grand duke of Tuscany or
the emperor, which is a misleading image. Rather, we should imag-
ine an interconnected network of authorities of different kinds. In
the “strands” of this network, social and epistemological legitima-
tion was flowing in various directions, sometimes together in an
entangled way, sometimes separately. Apparently, Tycho and Galileo
were aware of the interrelated nature of the social-scientific field as
to the social and epistemological legitimation it provided them. This
42 Gábor Almási
awareness is also reflected in Tycho’s confessionally neutral attitude,

that is, his sincere friendship with Catholics and Protestants alike,
and in Galileo’s complex position on the Jesuits and the Catholic
Church. This awareness is also mirrored in their self-conscious stance
toward monarchic power. In other words, they understood they
needed multipolar legitimation, and they also realized that the kind
of science (scientific communication) to which they wanted to con-
tribute needed to fit as much as possible with the multipolar and
multiconfessional world in which they lived.
This interpretation might be influenced by notions of our
Information Age, still it hopefully represents a more balanced
approach to the history of early modern science than the one that
emerges from the debate between Jean-Sylvain Bailly and Giuseppe
Toaldo. In fact, the question whether monarchies were more favor-
able to sciences than republics hardly fits into this interpretative
framework. While histories of astronomy traditionally stressed the
good influence of a generous and learned monarch, the very question
of whether monarchies were more favorable to sciences or republics
was deeply embedded in the political-philosophical agenda of the
eighteenth century. In the form it was raised it is misleading; the
principal problem concerns the very concepts it uses—science, repub-
lics, and monarchies—which had all gone through radical changes by
the late eighteenth century, becoming heavily loaded with ideologi-
cal and political connotations.
These early modern changes in the concept of science might have
been sensed at one point also by Bailly, who (as cited at the beginning
of the chapter) admitted that Republican Romans could not right-
fully be reprehended for not having promoted sciences in general;
they cultivated eloquence, that is, litterae. What the Romans did not
cultivate as much as other civilizations were mathematical sciences.
Yet, he forgot to add that mathematical sciences (or “middle sci-
ences”) had not become the epitome of sciences until the eighteenth
century.87 Even then, they were subject to serious negotiations, and
Bailly and his generation took a constructive part in confirming the
Baconian paradigm of science as a sum of observational and experi-
mental practices. (It may be no coincidence that among representative
thinkers of the French Enlightenment we find several “philosophers”
engaged in mathematics, like Bailly’s academic colleagues Condorcet
and d’Alambert.) Still, in the Renaissance, the artes disciplinaeque
liberales, studies that were “reckoned worthy of a free man,” were
much more broadly interpreted than what sciences came to represent

later.88 When in the Renaissance the question about Florentine cul-
tural exceptionalism was raised, “sciences” (often described as litterae)
and the arts were still treated together.89 It was only in Tycho’s and
Galileo’s time that this broad image of “sciences” started changing.
By the eighteenth century in France the recognition of mathematical
sciences as the par excellence sciences became the interest of both
the state and intellectual elite of the academies and their coteries.
As Terry Shinn has noted, “In France, scientific knowledge came to
be regarded as intrinsic to the state, and henceforth authority and
legitimacy.”90 The thought and career of Bailly, as a member of three
academies, a popular figure of Parisian salons and free masons, and
a powerful politician of the Revolution, supports this claim well. In
the context of the late eighteenth-century Ancien Régime, Bailly’s nar-
rative of astronomy legitimated as much the current ideology about
good monarchy—enlightened absolutism—as the primacy of mathe-
matical knowledge and his own successful personal career as scientist-
politician. Eighteenth-century histories of sciences confirmed the
hopes of the learned elite in the coming of a scientific—progressive,
rational, and nondogmatic—age in Europe. There were hopes that
the problem of an unjust system of privileges and social inequalities,
which the Ancien Régime came to represent, could be circumvented on
the sure and tranquil path of sciences; hopes that astronomy’s con-
spicuous progress (which was for Bailly a monument to the triumph
of the European genius, and the victory over dogmas and supersti-
tions) could serve as a model for society. Bailly’s image of astronomy
as an edifice of knowledge built on the work of successive generations
of men of genius and patronized by European monarchs was already
conservative in its own time.91 It was even in disagreement with the
claim—sustained by Bailly—that republics provided better grounds
for the recognition of men of genius than monarchies.92 Bailly’s
image of astronomy as a highly elitist and exclusive discipline rep-
resented a monarchic image of science,93 which hardly corresponded
to the fact that science by the eighteenth century became more and
more inclusive, new achievements being made more and more as a
result of competition and cooperation.
There are similar problems with Bailly’s (and Toaldo’s) use of the
terms “monarchy” and “republic,” which were loaded with eigh-
teenth-century preconceptions. Most importantly, the debate in the
sixteenth century was not about republics versus monarchies, but
44 Gábor Almási
about court versus non-court, and the antique dilemmas about otium
and negotium, free time spent in learned leisure and public service.
This was also the conceptual dichotomy that informed Galileo’s
rhetoric when he was justifying his choice of the Medici court.94
The sharp contrast between republic and monarchy, emerging only
in the second part of the seventeenth century, hardly existed in the
Renaissance. Not even the concept of respublica was solid: it could
just as well refer to a constitutional monarchy as to the “mixed gov-
ernments” of Renaissance republics.95 It is not to claim that republi-
can ideology did not acquire importance in certain Italian city states
during the Renaissance, but to underline that republics had different
political connotations in the sixteenth than in the eighteenth cen-
tury, and that the contrast between monarchy and republic was not
sharp and far from “exclusivist,” as it developed later in the hands
of enlightened philosophers, when republican rule became the only
legitimate form of government.96
Jean-Sylvain Bailly was not one of the “exclusivist” republicans. For
him republican rule tended toward populism, while enlightened mon-
archy meant the best compromise that human wisdom had devised
between the excesses of liberty and despotism.97 While Bailly would
agree with most eighteenth-century historians of science that men of
genius needed most importantly a peaceful and durable political-reli-
gious climate, he apparently believed that it was best provided by mon-
archies.98 However, his concern for just monarchy was only an aspect
of his principal concern, which was the refusal of the “despotic Orient.”
This preoccupation fit into the context of the eighteenth-century con-
cern about contesting empires and civilizations.99 Bailly’s decidedly
Eurocentric position was mirrored in his criticism of oriental science.100
While Orientals were indolent, supported tyranny and ignorance alike,
and pursued sciences without method, Europeans, Bailly claimed, were
mobile and thus had a vivid and restless but rational mind. While in
Asia people acted en masse, in Europe great deeds were done individu-
ally. While admitting that science was an accumulative process, he also
believed that a single person could change it entirely.101
As we can see, the apparently innocent question—of whether mon-
archies are more favorable for sciences than republics—is full of traps
and highly misleading. Late sixteenth-century scientific practice and
communication, described in this chapter as an “autonomous pro-
cess” in need of multipolar legitimation, had little to do with this
eighteenth-century problem.
Notes
1. Research for this chapter was made possible with the support of
OTKA NK 81948 postdoctoral grant at the Eötvös Loránd University
(Budapest). I also wholeheartedly thank the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut
für Neulateinische Studien (Innsbruck) for its backing. On Toaldo, see
Giampiero Bozzolato, Giuseppe Toaldo. Uno scienziato europeo nel settecento
veneto (Padua: Ed. 1+1, 1984); and Luisa Pigatto, ed., Giuseppe Toaldo e il
suo tempo nel bicentenario della morte: Scienze e lumi tra Veneto e Europa.
Atti del convegno (Padova, 10–13 novembre 1997) (Cittadella: Bertoncello,
2000). On Bailly (with a bibliography of his works), see Edwin Burrows
Smith, “Jean-Sylvain Bailly: Astronomer, Mystic, Revolutionary, 1736–
1793,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 44 (1954):
427–538.
2. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Histoire de l’astronomie moderne, vol. 1 (Paris: de
Bure, 1785), 141. All translations in the chapter are mine unless stated
otherwise.
3. Ibid., 141–142.
4. Giuseppe Toaldo, “Del merito de’ Veneziani verso l’astronomia,” in Saggi
di studi Veneti, ed. Giuseppe Toaldo (Venice: G. Storti, 1782), 6–27.
5. Cf. the case of the botanist Prospero Alpino, mentioned as an example
by Toaldo. Prospero Alpino, Medicina Aegyptiorum (Leiden, 1745), *2r–4v.
Giuseppe Ongaro, “Contributi alla biografia di Prospero Alpini,” Acta
Medicae Historiae Patavina 8–9 (1961–62/1962–63): 79–168.
6. Toaldo, “Del merito de’ Veneziani,” 24.
7. Ibid., 27.
8. See Luisa Pigatto, “Tycho Brahe and the Republic of Venice: A Failed
Project,” in Tycho Brahe and Prague: Crossroads of European Science:
Proceedings of the International Symposium on the History of Science in
the Rudolphine Period, Prague, 22–25 October 2001, ed. John Robert
Christianson, Alena Hadravová, Petr Hadrava, and Martin Šolc (Frankfurt:
H. Deutsch, 2002), 187–202. Also, see Antonio Favaro, “Ticone Brahe
e la corte Toscana,” Archivio storico italiano, ser. 5, 3 (1889): 211–224;
Wilhelm Norlind, “A Hitherto Unpublished Letter from Tycho Brahe
to Christopher Clavius,” The Observatory 74 (1954): 20–23; Wilhelm
Norlind, “Tycho-Brahé et ses rapports avec l’Italie,” Scientia 90 (1955):
47–61; Carlo Triarico, “Tycho Brahe and Egnazio Danti: Observations
and Astronomical Research at Prague and Florence at the End of the 16th
Century,” in Tycho Brahe and Prague, ed. Christianson, 168–177.
9. Tycho Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae mechanica (Noribergae: Huls.,
1602), f. H3r.
10. Pigatto, “Tycho Brahe,” 196.
11. Tycho Brahe, De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis liber secun-
dus (Uraniborg: Tycho, 1588). For a recent analysis of Concerning
Recent Phenomena, see Steven Vanden Broecke, “Teratology and the
Publication of Tycho Brahe’s New World System (1588),” Journal for
the History of Astronomy 37 (2006): 1–17. On Tycho see J. L. E. Dreyer,
Tycho Brahe: A Picture of Scientific Life and Work in the Sixteenth Century
46 Gábor Almási
(Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1890); Wilhelm Norlind, Tycho Brahe. En

levnadsteckning med nya bidrag belysande hans liv och verk (Lund: C. W.
K. Gleerup, 1970); Victor E. Thoren, The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography
of Tycho Brahe; with Contributions by John R. Christianson (Cambridge:
Cambridge U. P., 1990); John Robert Christianson, On Tycho’s Island:
Tycho Brahe and His Assistants, 1570–1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.,
2000).
12. His Apologetica responsio ad Craigum Scotum, in Tychonis Brahe Dani Opera
omnia, 15 vols., ed. J. L. E. Dreyer (Copenhagen: Libraria Gyldendaliana,
1913–1929), vol. 4: 417–476 (henceforth TBOO), distributed among
friends, was meant to be attached to the still unpublished second vol-
ume of Concerning Recent Phenomena. Adam Mosley, “Tycho Brahe and
John Craig: The Dynamic of a Dispute,” in Tycho Brahe and Prague,
ed. Christianson, 70–83.
13. See TBOO, 5: 113 and 131; 7: 80 and 279–280; 8: 39–40. Cf. Pigatto,
“Tycho Brahe,” 191.
14. See more in Ann Blair, “Tycho Brahe’s Critique of Copernicus and the
Copernican System,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990): 355–377.
Cf. Gábor Almási, “Tycho Brahe and the Separation of Astronomy from
Astrology: The Making of a New Scientific Discourse,” Science in Context
26 (2013): 3–30, 17.
15. On the historical context, see Paul Douglas Lockhart, Frederik II and the
Protestant Cause: Denmark’s Role in the Wars of Religion (Leiden: Brill,
2004), 75–83.
16. See the letter to Magini of December 1, 1590, in TBOO, 7: 297–298.
Cf. Norlind, “Tycho-Brahé et ses rapports avec l’Italie”; and Triarico,
“Tycho Brahe and Egnazio Danti.”
17. See the extremely rare publication Relazione di Andrea Paruta, console per
la Repubblica Veneta in Alessandria . . . 16 decembre 1599 (Venice: Marco
Visentini, 1883).
18. Václav Brož, “O domě říšského místokancléře Jakuba Kurze ze Senftenavy
na Hradčanech a o zřízené při něm hvězdárně Tychona Braha” [On the
house of Imperial Vice-Chancellor Jakob Kurz of Senftenava in the Castle
of Hradčany and on the observatory of Tycho Brahe established at that
house], in Sborník příspěvků k dějinám král. hl. města Prahy [Collection
of contributions concerning the history of the royal capital of Prague],
ed. Jaromír Teige Čelakovský (Prague: Bastyr, 1907), 61–91. See Gábor
Almási, The Uses of Humanism: Johannes Sambucus (1531–1584), Andreas
Dudith (1533–1589), and the Republic of Letters in East Central Europe
(Leiden: Brill, 2009), 134–135.
19. Edward Fenton, ed., The Diaries of John Dee (Charlbury: Day Books, 1998),
146–165.
20. C. H. Josten, “An Unknown Chapter in the Life of John Dee,” Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 223–257, 236.
21. Fenton, The Diaries, 152.
22. Ibid., 165.
23. On Hájek, see Clarissa Doris Hellman, The Comet of 1577: Its Place in
the History of Astronomy (New York: Columbia U. P., 1944), 184–206;
Josef Smolka, “Briefwechsel zwischen Tycho Brahe und Thaddaeus
Hagecius—Anfänge,” in Tycho Brahe and Prague, ed. Christianson,

224–236.
24. TBOO, 7: 145. On withholding judgment as the patron’s strategy, see
Mario Bigioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of
Absolutism (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1993), 356.
25. TBOO, 7: 183.
26. TBOO, 7: 254.
27. TBOO, 7: 196–218.
28. Adam Mosley, Bearing the Heavens: Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical
Community of the Late Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.,
2007).
29. Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae mechanica, f. G4v.
30. The letter was included in the Astronomiae instauratae mechanica (1598).
Later Tycho would naively claim Kurz had sent him the privilege with-
out having asked for it; TBOO, 7: 331.
31. The original place of the diploma is in the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv,
Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (ÖStA, HHStA) Reichsregister, Kaiser Rudolf
II., Bd. 18. 311v–313r. Partly printed in Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen
Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses Wien 15 (1894), no. 11995
(dated June 13, 1590) (henceforth Jahrbuch).
32. Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae mechanica, f. G4r.
33. Ibid., f. G4v.
34. Ibid.
35. TBOO, 7: 259.
36. TBOO, 7: 287.
37. See ÖStA, HHStA, Dispacci di Germania 18, 137–140 (dated September
3, 1591). Partially published in Jahrbuch 15 (1894), no. 12031. Also see
Jahrbuch 15, nos. 12030 and 12032.
38. Jahrbuch 15, no. 12031, 139.
39. Cf. Pigatto, “Tycho Brahe.”
40. Luisa Pigatto, ed., Astronomy and Its Instruments before and after Galileo
(Padua: CLEUP, 2010), 20 (dated August 24, 1609).
41. Pierre Gassendi, Tychonis Brahei equitis Dani, astronomorum coryphaei, vita
(Paris: Adrianus Ulacq, 1654), 126.
42. Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae mechanica, f. H3r (translated by Pigatto,
“Tycho Brahe,” 191).
43. See Favaro, “Ticone Brahe e la corte Toscana”; and Triarico, “Tycho Brahe
and Egnazio Danti.”
44. Favaro, “Ticone Brahe e la corte Toscana,” 220–221; Norlind, “A Hitherto
Unpublished Letter,” 20–23.
45. However, whether the city had long-term strategic planning at this point
of its history is rather dubious. See the malfunctioning of the Arsenal, the
general refusal of commercial reforms, etc. Manfredo Tafuri, Venice and
the Renaissance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 191–196. Ennio Concina,
L’Arsenale della Repubblica di Venezia (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2006),
171–175. Paolo Sarpi complained to Christoph von Dohna in 1608
that “unless they see war up close, they have their minds elsewhere”;
Eileen Reeves, “Kingdoms of Heaven: Galileo and Sarpi on the Celestial,”
Representations 105 (2009): 61–84, 65.
48 Gábor Almási
46. Cf. Edward Rosen, Three Imperial Mathematicians: Kepler Trapped between
Tycho Brahe and Ursus (New York: Arabis Books, 1986), 266–278.
47. Thoren, The Lord of Uraniborg, 376–470; Christianson, On Tycho’s Island,
194–236.
48. Thoren, The Lord of Uraniborg, 315.
49. “Was? Sollte man ein Solches Man umb so ein geringes geldt auß dem
Land ziechenn lassen. Schande ist es”; TBOO, 8: 81.
50. Some astronomical manuscripts of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
(ÖNB), Vienna, are attributed to him: “Fragmenta astronomica et
mathematica partim latine partim italice a Corraduccio excepta,” and
“Fragmenta de caelo manu Corraduccii scripta,” in Cod. 10454, 13r–93v
and 121r–129v.
51. On Barvitius, see Felix Stieve, “Die Verhandlung über die Nachfolge
Kaiser Rudolfs II in den Jahren 1581–1602,” Abhandlungen der historischen
Classe der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 15 (1880):
1–160, 49. In some periods he was the only person the emperor had
personal contact with. Leopold von Ranke, Zur deutschen Geschichte:
Vom Religionsfrieden bis zum Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Leipzig: Duncker und
Humblot, 1868), 282.
52. Almási, “Tycho Brahe and the Separation of Astronomy from
Astrology.”
53. Ranke, Zur deutschen Geschichte, 282–287; Stieve, “Die Verhandlung,”
30–80. Unfortunately, this period of Rudolf’s rule painfully lacks mod-
ern archival research. Apparently, the fascination about his character is
inversely proportional with modern historical research about his politics
and court.
54. Ranke, Zur deutschen Geschichte, 285.
55. Ioannes Bodinus, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Heidelberg:
Jean Marschall, 1583), 301 (but also see entire Chapter 7).
56. Eugenio Albéri, ed., Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato, 15 vols.
(Florence: Tipografia all’insegna di Clio, 1839–1863), ser. 1, vol. 3: 244.
57. Ursus, De astronomicis hypothesibus.
58. Letter of September 8, 1599, in Jahrbuch 19 (1898), no. 16180.
59. For intimacy, see Tycho’s letter to Sophie Brahe of March 21, 1600.
Thoren, The Lord of Uraniborg, 507–511.
60. Nicholas Kollerstrom, “How Galileo Dedicated the Moons of Jupiter to
Cosimo II de Medici,” Culture and Cosmos 7 (2003): 37–48.
61. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the
Evolution of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899); Thomas DaCosta
Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in
the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1993), 174–194.
62. The key to Rudolf’s unusual cosmological openness lies probably in his
self-perception as an emperor staying above ideologies, untied by reli-
gious institutions and his related aversion to the Pope.
63. On the whole question of whether the culture of Venice was “indeed
compatible and in potential harmony—in its structures, ideologies, men-
tal attitudes—with the path that science was taking in modern Europe,
driven in the main by the Galilean epistemology and the new image of
the scholar that this epistemology established,” see the article by Manlio
Pastore Stocchi, “Il periodo Veneto di Galileo Galilei,” in vol. 4, bk. 2
of Storia della cultura veneta, ed. Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore
Stocchi (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1984), 37–66 (quotation on 42), giving an
absolutely negative answer.
64. On his financial situation and salary rises, see most recently David
Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2010),
67–69.
65. Antonio Favaro, “Galileo e Venice,” in vol. 2 of Galileo Galilei e lo studio di
Padova (Florence: Le Monnier, 1883), 69–102; Favaro, “Giovanfrancesco
Sagredo. (Venice, 1903),” in vol. 2 of Amici e corrispondenti di Galileo,
ed. Paolo Galluzzi (Florence: Salimbeni, 1983), 193–322. Cf. Wootton,
Galileo, 70–71.
66. Antonio Favaro, “La venuta di Galileo a Padova,” in vol. 1 of Galileo
Galilei e lo studio di Padova (Florence: Le Monnier, 1883), 36–50.
67. On Galileo’s university experience see Stocchi, “Il periodo Veneto,” 47–69.
Cf. Adriano Carugo, “L’insegnamento della matematica all’Universita di
Padova prima e dopo Galileo,” in vol. 4, bk. 2 of Storia della cultura ven-
eta, ed. Arnaldi and Pastore Stocchi, 151–199, 186–192.
68. Favaro, “Giovanfrancesco Sagredo.” For the giovani, Galileo, and the
Venetian crisis, see Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 103–196, esp. 191–
196. For Sarpi, see Gaetano Cozzi, Paolo Sarpi tra Venezia e l’Europa
(Turin: Einaudi, 1978); David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance
and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1983); and Corrado
Pin, ed., Ripensando Paolo Sarpi: atti del Convegno (Venice: Ateneo veneto,
2006).
69. Libero Sosio, “Paolo Sarpi, un frate nella rivoluzione scientifica,” in
Ripensando Paolo Sarpi, ed. Pin, 183–236.
70. Pastore Stocchi, “Il periodo Veneto,” 47.
71. Kollerstrom, “How Galileo Dedicated the Moons.”
72. Galileo Galilei, Le opere, 16 vols. (Florence: Societa editrice fiorentina,
1842–1856), 8: 315, cited by Favaro, “Galileo e Venezia,” 77.
73. Galilei, Le opere, 13: fn. 1472. See Favaro, “Giovanfrancesco Sagredo,”
71–73. Concerning Zaccaria, see Mario Biagioli, “Scientific Revolution,
Social Bricolage and Etiquette,” in The Scientific Revolution in National
Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.,
1992), fn. 15.
74. Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 192–193.
75. Ibid., 194.
76. This idea had an influence even on Favaro, Galileo Galilei e lo studio di
Padova, 1: 25; and William James Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of
Republican Liberty (Berkeley: U. of California P., 1968). See again Stocchi,
“Il periodo Veneto,” 41–42.
77. See his famous letter to Galileo reproaching him for having left Padua:
Galilei, Le opere, 11: 170–172.
78. For the republican myth of Venice, see Gaeta, “Venezia da ‘stato misto’”;
and Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton
U. P., 1981), 13–63.
50 Gábor Almási
79. The expression comes from Pastore Stocchi, who analyses Bruno’s case
but not the Interdict (“Il periodo Veneto”). On the latter, see Wootton,
Paolo Sarpi, 45–76.
80. See Stocchi, “Il periodo Veneto”; Wootton, Galileo; and John L. Heilbron,
Galileo (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2010), 64–164.
81. Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 194.
82. Cf. Heilbron, Galileo, 197–198.
83. Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 194. However, Tafuri’s conclusion—
“his cultural Machiavellianism refused to consider the already existing
and real divisions; in some way, it was antithetical to the spirit of the
paradigm he was defending”—appears to be a deterministic reading of
what finally happened. Also see Wootton, Galileo, 114–124.
84. Galilei, Le opere, 10: 165, cited by Biagioli, Galileo Courtier, 27. Cf. Pastore
Stocchi, “Il periodo Veneto,” 62.
85. Cf. James S. Grubb, “Memory and Identity: Why Venetians Didn’t Keep
Ricordanze,” Renaissance Studies 8 (1994): 375–387.
86. See fn. 56.
87. This is not to suggest that the premodern classification of disciplines was
not complex or that “pure mathematics” did not have a high prestige
during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (in fact, this prestige was
extensively tapped by sixteenth-century astronomers). See Daniel Špelda,
“Anachronisms in the History of Science: An Attempt at a Typology,”
Almagest, International Journal for the History of Scientific Ideas 3 (2012):
90–119, 95–96.
88. See Aurelio Lippo Brandolini, Republics and Kingdoms Compared, ed. and
transl. James Hankins (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 2009), 2.45–2.52 (esp.
p. 136).
89. Brandolini, Republics and Kingdoms; James Hankins, “Exclusivist
Republicanism and the Non-Monarchical Republic,” Political Theory
38 (2010): 452–482; John Clifton, “Vasari on Competition,” Sixteenth
Century Journal 17 (1996): 23–41.
90. Terry Shinn, “Science, Tocqueville, and the State: The Organization of
Knowledge in Modern France,” in The Politics of Western Science, 1640–
1990, ed. Margaret C. Jacob (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press,
1994), 47–101, 54. Cf. Dietrich von Engelhardt, Historisches Bewusstsein
in der Naturwissenschaft: von der Aufklärung bis zum Positivismus (Freiburg:
Alber, 1979), 58.
91. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Histoire de l’astronomie moderne, vol. 3 (Paris: de Bure,
1785), 319.
92. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Éloges de Charles V., de Moliere, de Corneille . . . (Paris:
Delalain, 1770), 39: “Corneille n’a point joui de ces honneurs qu’il aurait
mérités. Il en eût joui à Athènes, dans une république où les hommes nés
égaux ne sont distingués que par eux-mêmes; il ne les obtint pas dans
une Monarchie où les dignités font tout, où les hommes ne sont rien, &
où le génie seul n’a point de rang.”
93. Compare it, for example, to the image of knowledge-making in
Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain
(1795), with an emphasis on the public sphere and the printing media.
94. See Galileo to “S. Vesp,” in Galilei, Le opere, 10: 232–234. Cf. fn. 85.
95. Hankins, “Exclusivist Republicanism,” 453–457. Cf. Franco Gaeta,
“Venezia da ‘stato misto’ ad aristocrazia ‘esemplare,’” in vol. 4, bk. 2 of
Storia della cultura veneta, ed. Arnaldi and Pastore Stocchi, 437–494.
96. Cf. Hankins, “Exclusivist Republicanism.”
97. Bailly, Éloges de Charles V., de Moliere, de Corneille, 2–3: “Un Roi, disent—
ils, est la loi rendue vivante. Il règne avec elle, & cette union est le milieu
sage que la politique humaine a découvert entre les orages de la liberté
& les excès du despotisme: un Roi est le contre-poids d’une multitude
d’hommes.” This work of 1767 may have been a response to Gabriel
Bonnot de Mably’s Observations sur l’histoire de France (1765)—written
with the ideal of the restoration of a genuinely republican mixed gov-
ernment in France. See Johnson Kent Write, “The Idea of a Republican
Constitution in Old Régime France,” in vol. 1 of Republicanism: A
Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner
(Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2002), 289–306, 298.
98. Hume, for example, argued that republics were more favorable to sciences
and monarchies to the arts. David Hume, “Of the Rise and Progress of
the Arts and Sciences,” in vol. 2 of Essays, Moral and Political (Edinburgh:
R. Fleming and A. Alison, 1742).
99. Patricia Springborg, Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince (Austin:
U. of Texas P., 1992).
100. Bailly had a long debate with Voltaire on the signiﬁcance of oriental
astronomy for the early history of astronomy. See Dhruv Raina, “Betwixt
Jesuit and Enlightenment Historiography: The Context of Jean-Sylvain
Bailly’s History of Indian Astronomy,” Revue d’Histoire de mathématiques
9 (2003): 253–306.
101. Bailly, Histoire de l’astronomie moderne, vol. 3, 316–323, esp. 322.
2
The Jesuits’ Negotiation of
Science between France and
China (1685–1722): Knowledge
and Modes of Imperial
Expansion
Catherine Jami
Early modern empires: The view from East Asia
If one considers only Western Europe, the early modern age was a
period of maritime empires. However, if one takes into account the
whole of Eurasia, then it appears as predominantly an age of conti-
nental empires. As late as 1700, six powers—the Habsburg Monarchy,
the Ottoman Empire, Russia, the Safavid Empire, the Mughal Empire,
and the Qing Empire—still seemed to dwarf Western Europe in ter-
ritorial extent, so much so that it would be reasonable to ask how far
and in what ways the latter’s overseas expansion was shaped by the
overwhelming dominance of other empires on land. As suggested by
Subrahmanyam, broadening our spatial scope to encompass Eurasia
as a whole also leads to the extension of the chronological scope of
early modernity.1 Turning our attention to East Asia, this extended
scope would correspond to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and the
early and middle period of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). The Qing
is now increasingly envisioned as a time when China—the territories
previously ruled by the Ming—was conquered and then ruled by the
Manchus, who made it part of an expanding empire.2 From this per-
spective, the “first globalization” was a time of interactions between
empires on an unprecedented scale, rather than the rise of the impe-
rial phenomenon itself.
53
54 Catherine Jami
The construction of “the Chinese” as an ethnic group can be traced

back to the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368): its rulers used the
name of the dynasty that had reigned from 206 BCE to 220 CE, the
Han, to refer to what was by and large the population of the former
Song (960–1279) empire. The Ming dynasty arose from one of many
Chinese rebellions against the Mongols. In the seventeenth century,
the greatest imperial confrontation that took place in East Asia—and
perhaps anywhere in the world—opposed the Ming to the Qing. The
latter integrated Mongols and Chinese in the banners in which their
armies and society were structured. They took up the name used by
their Yuan predecessors for the Chinese, referring to them as “Han
people” (Hanren 漢人). From the 1680s, the Qing, having consoli-
dated their rule over China, which they saw as their “inner territo-
ries” (neidi 內地), went on to conquer large parts of Inner Eurasia. In
the course of the eighteenth century they annihilated the Zunghar
Khanate and conquered Turkestan and Tibet.3 The area of land con-
trolled by the Qing Empire doubled—but today all of it has become
subsumed under the term “China.”4
As is well known, during the last millennium of the imperial period,
a sophisticated civil service administered China: both the Mongols
and the Manchus relied on it after their respective conquests. The
path to an official career went through the imperial examination sys-
tem, and the classical texts that were on the curriculum formed the
core of elite culture.5 Knowledge and proper understanding of these
texts were supposed to be tokens of the moral character of the can-
didates. Notwithstanding this dominant ideology, technical knowl-
edge was also essential to the efficient management of the empire.
Subjects such as agriculture or water conservancy were of interest to a
significant number of literati; their expertise could be called upon by
the state when they were appointed to certain posts. In other cases,
perennial institutions enabled the state to have direct control over
knowledge and its uses, as was the case with astronomy. Even there,
over the centuries, the state repeatedly drew on knowledge and skills
cultivated privately by Chinese scholars.6 There is also evidence that,
during the millennium before European overseas expansion brought
missionaries to China, astronomical knowledge and experts circulated
within Asia on a significant scale. In China, these experts came from
India in the wake of the “Buddhist conquest of China,”7 and from
the Islamic world during Mongol rule.8 Such circulations have been
a feature of empires since antiquity. A question to consider, then, is
The Jesuits’ Negotiation of Science between France and China 55
in what ways did early modern globalization affect the circulation

of knowledge? This contribution aims to propose a tentative answer
by focusing on the cross-imperial circulation of knowledge between
France and China during the reigns of King Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715)
and of the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662–1722).
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the Ming and Qing
interacted with a number of Europe-centered powers whose empires
were already established or in the making: these included—in chron-
ological order—Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Russia, France, and
Britain. These interactions were not considered central by any of these
powers any more than they were by the court in Beijing. Only in two
cases did they take the form of armed conflict for the control of ter-
ritory. To the south, the Dutch arrived in Taiwan in 1623 and turned
it into a colony before being ousted by the Ming loyalist Koxinga
in 1662; the Qing only took control of the island in 1683. To the
north, after some decades of conflict, they agreed with the Russians
on their common border in 1689; this was confirmed in 1727. In the
other cases, the main stakes of inter-imperial confrontation related to
circulation—that of persons, goods, beliefs, and knowledge.
Despite its relatively peripheral character for both sides, the
“encounter between Europe and China” in the early modern age has
long fascinated historians. At both ends of the Eurasian continent, it
has been depicted as the confrontation between the “Same” and the
“Other,” in a way that has underplayed and sometimes ignored the
role of other Eurasian actors—in particular the other land empires
mentioned above.9 In recent decades, however, the increased under-
standing of the complex construction of both entities has led to more
nuanced pictures. The Jesuit missionary enterprise in China is now
analyzed in the context of European overseas expansion. Portugal,
which controlled the Asian seas, was the patron of all Catholic mis-
sions in Asia. During the first century of the Jesuit mission to China,
all its members belonged to the Portuguese Assistancy of the Society
of Jesus, and took an oath of allegiance to the king of Portugal, even
though they hailed from different parts of Europe.10
Since the late sixteenth century, these Jesuit missionaries were
the main mediators of the knowledge that China and Europe had
of each other. In Europe, travel accounts and descriptions of the
empire and of its inhabitants aroused increased interest. In China,
the Jesuits sought to be accepted by literati as members of their class.
For this purpose, while the majority of missionaries worked solely
56 Catherine Jami
on proselytizing, a few of them became “specialists” in technical

subjects; their fame has somewhat eclipsed the more obscure work
done by most of their confreres.11 Although the idea that the sciences
would lead the Chinese to God was repeatedly emphasized by these
specialists, it was controversial both within the Society of Jesus and
beyond. The function of these specialists came to be understood by
the Jesuit missionaries themselves as that of ensuring their protec-
tion, and that of the Catholics of China, by seeking patronage among
the literati elite of the empire, among whom officials were recruited.12
They taught “heavenly learning” (tianxue 天學), a body of knowledge
that included some elements of the Catholic religion and some ele-
ments of the mathematical sciences. These latter included Euclidean
and practical geometry, written arithmetic, and astronomy. Given
the crucial cosmological and political role played by this last field in
China, astronomy became a vital concern for the Jesuit mission of
China. It was indeed through astronomy that some Jesuits attained
posts in the imperial civil service.
The Chinese calendar was based on astronomical algorithms, with-
out reference to a geometric model of the universe; the Jesuits first
introduced the Ptolemaic model, and then the Tychonic model. The
latter was used for the astronomical reform on which the Jesuits
worked since 1629.13 This initiated the process of appropriation of
the mathematical sciences by the imperial state as a tool for statecraft.
The Jesuits’ teaching in these sciences came to be called “Western
learning” (xixue 西學) by Chinese scholars, who on the whole found
it more relevant to their concerns than what the Jesuits had to say
about Aristotelian philosophy or the Catholic religion.14 With the
advent of the Qing dynasty, the Jesuits obtained imperial patronage
not only as official astronomers, but also as court savants, artists, and
craftsmen. During the Kangxi reign, imperial cultural policy entailed
the extension of patronage of classical learning to technical matters,
which included Western learning.15
The French enterprise in China
As mentioned above, the Jesuit missions of Asia were originally under

Portuguese patronage. In the seventeenth century, however, other
religious orders, mainly the Franciscans and Dominicans, were also
present in China: they worked under Spanish patronage, arriving by
way of the Philippines. At the time, Portugal’s maritime power was
declining. Several other European nations challenged its monopoly

of Asian trade. Some of the Jesuits in China began to seek alterna-
tive patrons in Europe. In 1678, Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688),
then Administrator of the Calendar (zhili lifa 治理曆法) at the Qing
Astronomical Bureau (Qintianjian 欽天監), and a tutor to the emperor
in the sciences, wrote a letter calling for support for the China mis-
sion. This letter was circulated in Europe through the networks of the
Society of Jesus. Its arrival at the French court was timely, as interest
in Asia—mainly but not solely commercial—was mounting there.16
Overseas expansion and trade entailed the exploration of parts
of the world hitherto little known to Europeans. Systematizing this
exploration and centralizing the data it produced was one of the pur-
poses for which scientific academies were founded; the Paris Académie
royale des sciences is a case in point. In 1685, Louis XIV sent a mission
to China: its six members—only five of whom reached China—were
all Jesuits; they came to be known as “the King’s Mathematicians.”
This mission was to serve the commercial, diplomatic, and scientific
interests of France, while contributing to the missionary work of the
Society of Jesus. It marked a shift in the way the mission related to
scientific knowledge in East Asia. The sciences had hitherto been rep-
resented as a means to promote and protect the Catholic faith in
China; they now became an end in themselves, for which the mission
partly served as a means. It was the first time that a European state
launched a systematic inquiry concerning things Chinese.17 The five
Frenchmen who entered China from Ningbo 寧波 in 1687 had been
commissioned to investigate a large number of subjects that were of
interest to the Paris Académie. This institution then joined forces with
the Society of Jesus, in fact with the French component of the latter,
to undertake a systematic exploration of China. The first item on
the list of things that the King’s Mathematicians were to undertake,
prepared by academicians, was the investigation of Chinese chronol-
ogy; the next one was “observations of latitudes and longitudes.” The
academicians further wanted to know
About the sciences of the Chinese, and about the perfection and
defects of their mathematics, astrology, philosophy, music, medi-
cine, and pulse taking.
About tea, rhubarb, and their other drugs and curious plants
and whether China produces some kind of spices. Whether the
Chinese use tobacco.18
58 Catherine Jami
The inquiries requested here, which the King’s Mathematicians and

their successors of the French mission carried out during the follow-
ing century, were relevant to both knowledge and trade: the Académie
royale des sciences itself was expected to contribute to the advance-
ment of both. The various investigations to be conducted in China
entailed both direct observation of nature and society and the acquisi-
tion of the knowledge concerning them that the Chinese themselves
had accumulated. In an earlier study, focusing on Beijing as both an
imperial capital of knowledge and a satellite of Paris in the Académie’s
enterprise on data gathering, I have argued that the French Jesuits
successfully traded resources provided by this Académie—instruments,
publications of the Académie, and other books—against informa-
tion on China that they sent back to Europe. The Kangxi Emperor’s
patronage made this exchange possible, as it enabled the Jesuits to
collect these data; the Jesuits tutored him in the sciences.19 Joachim
Bouvet (1656–1730), one of the five French Jesuits, depicted the aim
of their enterprise as one of construction of relations between Louis
XIV and Kangxi:
If these two great monarchs knew each other, the mutual esteem
they would have for each other’s royal virtues could not but prompt
them to form a close friendship and demonstrate it to each other,
if only by an intercourse in matters of science and literature, by a
kind of exchange between the two crowns of everything that has
been invented until now in the way of arts and sciences in the
two most flourishing empires of the Universe. If Heaven graced
us with the achievement of this goal, we would feel we had made
no small contribution to the good of Religion which, under the
auspices and protection of two such powerful princes, could not
fail to progress considerably in this empire.20
Bouvet’s words echo those used by Louis XIV in a letter he wrote to

Kangxi in August 1688: he called the emperor—among many com-
plimentary phrases—“my very dear friend.”21 In fact the alliance that
Bouvet proposed to establish between France and China would result
in commercial exchange as well as the systematic circulation of what
pertained to the “arts and sciences” of which he spoke. Bouvet was
sent back to France in 1693 by the emperor as his envoy (qinchai 欽
差). He returned to China in 1698 with a new team of Jesuit mission-
aries, aboard the ship Amphitrite. The visit of this ship is nowadays
held to have initiated French trade with China; thus the King’s
Mathematicians served France’s interests in Asia well beyond religion
and science.22 At the Qing court, on the other hand, they were not
ambassadors, but merely some among “specialists” in various fields
who served the emperor directly within the Imperial Household
Department (Neiwufu 內務府)—rather than in the civil service.
The King’s Mathematicians’ engagement with the sciences in
China entailed the exploration of Qing territory. However, their trav-
els across it were shaped by parameters entirely alien to the French
Académie’s requests. In addressing this issue, two parts of the empire
will be discussed separately: the inner territories, the part of the Qing
Empire mainly populated by Han Chinese that the Manchus had con-
quered from the Ming; and the lands that lay beyond the Great Wall,
which the French called “Tartary,” the latter including the Manchu
homeland, but also territories inhabited by Mongols.23
The inner territories: Mapping the mission
From Ningbo, the five French Jesuits were summoned to the capital
at the emperor’s behest. Bouvet’s diary of this first journey within
China was published in Du Halde’s four-volume Description . . . of
China and of Chinese Tartary, the Jesuit account of the Qing Empire
published in Paris in 1735.24 In Beijing, two of them, Bouvet and
Jean-François Gerbillon (1654–1707), were selected for the emper-
or’s service. The three others, Jean de Fontaney (1643–1710, the
leader of the group), Louis Le Comte (1655–1728), and Claude de
Visdelou (1656–1737), left the capital with the best part of the astro-
nomical instruments that the five men had brought from France.
De Fontaney was the only one among them who had significant
experience in astronomical observation before leaving France. The
diary he kept during his travel from Beijing to Nanjing, published in
the Description just after the one by Bouvet mentioned above, reflects
his skill as an astronomer. It includes much quantitative informa-
tion: not only distances between places and orientation of his daily
journeys, but also assessments of the dimensions of cities, and of
the width and depth of rivers.25 According to Le Comte, their first
destination was chosen according to the needs of their work for the
Académie: they went to Jiangzhou 絳州 (Shanxi 山西 province) to
observe an eclipse that occurred at the end of April 1688.26 They
were hoping that the eclipse would be total in Jiangzhou, which
60 Catherine Jami
turned out not to be the case: this reflects their limited knowledge of
the latitude and longitude of Chinese cities at the time. The choice
of Jiangzhou was probably motivated by the fact that there had long
been a Jesuit residence there: Giulio Aleni (1582–1649) had founded
it in 1620. The missionaries who worked there knew the city well
enough to help them choose a good spot to observe the eclipse. Le
Comte mentions that “similar observations were made in Beijing,
Hangzhou, and several other cities of China.”27 In Beijing, besides
Gerbillon and Bouvet, Antoine Thomas (1644–1709), who was then
in charge of the Astronomical Bureau, must have done it as part of
his routine tasks. Elsewhere, on the other hand, there were no mem-
bers of the French mission, and no recognized “specialists in astron-
omy” among the Jesuits. Prospero Intorcetta (1626–1696), then the
vice-provincial of China, who was in Hangzhou, most likely took
part in the observation there: with all their up-to-date standards and
new instruments, the French still had to rely on what their confreres
could do with more modest means.
Le Comte further explains that they used the latest method for the
determination of longitude, namely the observation of Jupiter’s satel-
lites, for which Giandomenico Cassini (1625–1712), then director of
the Paris Observatory, had calculated tables.28 By measuring the local
time when immersions and emersions of the satellites were observed,
and comparing it with the time given in these tables, which corre-
sponded to the longitude of Paris, one could find the longitude of the
point from which one had made the observation:
Since Mr. Cassini has communicated the tables to observers, one

can easily and in very little time determine the longitude of the
world’s main cities.
We have observed the immersions and emersions of Jupiter’s
satellites in Siam, in Lopburi, in Pondicherry, at the Cape of Good
Hope, and in several cities of China. But the observations done
in Ningbo and Shanghai, which are its easternmost ones, have
reduced the great continent to its real boundaries, taking away
more than five hundred leagues that only ever existed in the imag-
ination of ancient geographers.29
Thus the French Jesuits’ mapping enterprise did not rely on the great
wealth of earlier eclipse observations done in China. On the contrary,
they aimed at improving on the data derived from these observations,
by following the methods and standards of the Académie royale des sci-
ences. Interestingly, the map of France presented to the Académie in
1684 by Philippe de la Hire (1640–1718), for which longitudes had
also been measured using Cassini’s tables, also “reduced” France com-
pared to earlier maps.30 One wonders whether de Fontaney, the most
skilled astronomer among the Frenchmen, made all the observations
of Jupiter’s satellites in person; they required the use of a telescope,
unlike eclipses that could be observed with the naked eye. As a sup-
plement to these stationary observations, journeys themselves were
recorded in texts as well as maps. Le Comte wrote:
I have an itinerary [routier] from Ningbo to Beijing, and from

Beijing to Jiangzhou, in which nothing that could contribute to
perfect knowledge of the country has been omitted. So that it is,
in my view, rather too detailed and perhaps even boring for those
who, in this kind of account, seek less usefulness than pleasure.31
After observing the eclipse in Jiangzhou, Visdelou and Le Comte

settled down separately in Shanxi and Shaanxi 陝西 for some time
to do missionary work. De Fontaney, for his part, left Jiangzhou in
May 1688 and headed for Nanjing. His motivations were twofold: he
went there to seek the support of two bishops for the French Jesuits’
request to be exempted from taking the oath of allegiance to the king
of Portugal, obligatory for all Jesuits in China;32 but he also hoped to
be able “to set up an observatory that [would] be in correspondence
with those of Beijing and Paris, it being expedient that observations
should be made in different places.”33 Nanjing, as the former second-
ary capital of the Ming dynasty, had an imperial observatory. The
evidence we have, however, suggests that de Fontaney did not have
access to it.34
In 1690, de Fontaney traveled with Le Comte to Guangzhou; the
latter was then on his way back to France as a procurator of the French
mission, to report on the difficulties they encountered with their
Portuguese confreres. On their way, the two men continued their work
for the Académie, the result of which Le Comte could later report:
I also have the course of the rivers that lead from Nanjing to
Guangzhou. It is the work of two or three months, and a very
tiring one when one wants to do things carefully. The map is eigh-
teen feet long, and each minute occupies more than four lines or
62 Catherine Jami
the third of an inch on it.35 Thus all the detours and the width of
rivers, the tiniest islands, and smallest villages are marked exactly
on it. We always had a compass in our hands, and on our way we
took care to observe the meridian height of a few stars from time
to time, in order to correct our estimation and determine the lati-
tudes of the main cities of the country as accurately as possible.36
Before parting company in Guangzhou, the two men observed

the transit of Mercury across the face of the sun that took place on
November 10, 1690. Le Comte then took the results of their work
for the Académie back to France, while de Fontaney went back to
Nanjing. In late 1692 de Fontaney and Visdelou took another trip
to Guangzhou; there they purchased a house, in preparation for
the arrival of some French confreres who, they hoped, would join
them as a result of Le Comte’s reports of their mission in France.
From Guangzhou they were summoned to Beijing by the emperor;
they resided in the capital for several years. During this time, there
is no evidence that they were allowed into the capital’s Imperial
Observatory to make observations.
Apart from Ningbo, the port of arrival for the King’s Mathematicians,
the cities from which they reported making observations were
those where there already was a Jesuit residence. Besides Jiangzhou
and Nanjing, this was also the case with Shanghai 上海, Xi’an 西安,
Nanchang 南昌 (Jiangxi), Chaozhou 潮州 (Guangdong), Guangzhou
廣州, and Beijing.37 Thus the first Chinese cities that could be put
onto the Paris Académie’s world map were those that had Catholic
communities. On the other hand, the French had no access to the
data that imperial astronomy could have provided: this was reserved
for their confreres in charge of the Astronomical Bureau. The fact that
the institutional dimension of de Fontaney’s ambition—to work as an
astronomer within Chinese imperial institutions—was never fulfilled
explains why the five French Jesuits’ exploration of China’s inner
territories retained the bias inherent to earlier Jesuit accounts. They
could describe only the areas where missionaries lived and worked
“for the greater glory of God.”
A French Jesuit in Tartary
While de Fontaney, Le Comte, and Visdelou traveled across China,

one of their Beijing confreres was exploring Tartary. Jean-François
Gerbillon has remained the most famous of the King’s Mathematicians
in France: a street is named after him in Paris, most likely in recog-

nition of the “Eight Journeys to Tartary” that he contributed to Du
Halde’s Description and the information that he collected there.38 His
travels were of a different nature from those of de Fontaney and oth-
ers: they all took place at the emperor’s behest. In three of them,
Gerbillon accompanied imperial envoys, while in the other five, he
was in the imperial retinue. In all trips he took part in significant
episodes of the Manchu expansion in Inner Eurasia. Comparing his
travel diaries to the one kept by de Fontaney when he traveled from
Beijing to Nanjing in 1688, Gerbillon provides even more quantita-
tive information: in particular, he often measured the height of the
North Pole—a way of assessing the latitude of the point from which
the measurement is made.
Gerbillon was not the first Jesuit to travel to Tartary. Verbiest’s
accounts of two journeys he made with Kangxi in 1682 and 1683
were included in Du Halde’s Description just before those of Gerbillon.
There Verbiest explained the purpose of his presence in the imperial
retinue:
[The emperor] wanted me to accompany him on this journey,

and to be always near him, so that I should make in his presence
the necessary observations of the sky’s layout, the height of the
pole, the [magnetic] declination in each land, and to measure with
mathematical instruments the height of mountains and the dis-
tances between places.39
Like Verbiest, Gerbillon made measurements in the emperor’s ser-

vice (even though his status at court was inferior to Verbiest’s), and it
is these measurements that are recorded in his travel diaries. During
his first two journeys, Gerbillon traveled with the Portuguese supe-
rior of the Beijing residence, Tomas Pereira (1646–1708). Both acted
as interpreters in connection with the negotiations between the Qing
and Russia. At the time, Russia was completing the conquest of Siberia;
this was one of the stages of the expansion that led Peter the Great to
take the title of emperor in 1721. Following these two journeys, the
latitudes and longitudes of Selengisk and Nerchinsk were published
in Paris in 1692.40 When Le Comte returned to France, he took back a
map that he deemed extremely “curious, and even unique”:
So far Europeans have had so little chance to travel in Great Tartary

that geographers have been obliged, in order to describe it, to rely
64 Catherine Jami
on who knows what accounts; these were so little in accordance

with reality that [it seemed] that one had deliberately held back
knowledge of it from us. But war having heated up between the
Emperor of China and the Duke of Muscovy, on all sides one has
carefully examined the limits of Kingdoms, the size of provinces,
the quality of the lands, the rivers, the mountains, the deserts, and
all that could enter into the interests of those princes and eventu-
ally serve to conclude a solid peace between them.
Besides these memoirs, which have fallen into Father Gerbillon’s
hands, this father has also done several excursions of two and three
hundred leagues41 into the heart of the country, going sometimes
west, sometimes north, and observing, as much as possible, the
latitude and longitude of the main places. So that the map he has
drawn now begins to give us quite a good idea of the real layout of
this vast country.42
Thus, French and then European knowledge of Tartary and the

ability to integrate it into a world-mapping enterprise resulted from
the work done by the Qing and the Russians in settling the dispute
over their common border. Access to these memoirs must have made
Gerbillon’s maps and descriptions qualitatively quite different from
those of his confreres in the inner territories, who did not mention
using local resources. On the other hand, Gerbillon’s first two trips and
the measurements he made served to turn earlier Qing maps into maps
that would come closer to the French Académie’s standards in cartog-
raphy, rather than to create the cartography of the region ex nihilo.43
Western European cartography benefited from a war that took place at
the other end of the Eurasian continent between two major continen-
tal empires. This exemplifies the way in which the simultaneous over-
seas and continental expansions of Eurasia-based empires increased
the range of knowledge circulation.
Once the border between the two empires was agreed upon, Kangxi
went on to conquer the Zunghar Khanate headed by Galdan (1644–
1697). Gerbillon’s third trip is related to this conquest: he followed
the emperor to a great hunt, and then to the Dolon Nor Assembly,
held from May 29 to June 3, 1691, where the Khalkha Khans gath-
ered to acknowledge Qing suzerainty; they were accordingly assigned
permanent territories, and given appropriate ranks in relation to the
organization of their respective tribes into banners.44 Gerbillon’s fifth,
sixth, and seventh trips correspond to Kangxi’s second (April to July
1696), third (October 1696 to January 1697), and fourth (February to

July 1697) military campaigns against Galdan.45 Antoine Thomas also
took part in the second and fourth campaigns.46 He wrote a lengthy
account titled On the Tartar War of the Emperor Kangxi: The Chinese
against the Oirat Tartars, Successfully Concluded in 1697 (De bello Cam-Hi
imperatoris tartarico: Sinici contra Tartaros Erutanos. Feliciter confecto
anno 1697); it was not published at the time, but was used extensively
by the Jesuit scholar Thomas Ignatius Dunyn-Szpot (1644–1713), who
worked in Rome, for his manuscript history of China. In his narra-
tive, Thomas sided with Kangxi against Galdan; in this respect his
account paralleled those of Chinese sources.47 It followed the thread
of events, providing a kind of historical chronicle.48 In contrast,
Gerbillon’s “Voyages” dwell on what he saw and measured—in other
words, on the physical features of the lands he visited, rather than on
the military situation; his account of the war was limited to what he
directly perceived while traveling in the emperor’s retinue. His travel
diaries supplemented d’Anville’s maps in the Description and provided
information for the New Atlas of China, of Chinese Tartary and of Tibet
published in 1737. D’Anville’s “General Map of Chinese Tartary” in
this atlas relied on both “the particular maps done on the spot by the
Jesuit FF and on the particular memoirs of Father Gerbillon.”49 When
the Description and the Atlas were published in the 1730s, the Qing
mastery of the territories earlier controlled by Galdan had been a fait
accompli for more than 30 years: Gerbillon’s geography added to the
knowledge of the current state of the Qing Empire, unlike Thomas’s
narrative, which recounted an episode in its making. Both contributed
to the representation of this empire as a single polity, which gradually
came to be perceived by Europeans as China rather than as the empire
conquered by the Tartars. Indeed, both the title of d’Anville’s atlas
and that of Du Halde’s work, in which the Qing Empire is referred
to as “China and Chinese Tartary,” suggest “China” had conquered
“Tartary” rather than being itself amongst the conquered.50
Gerbillon’s eighth and last journey, again taken with Antoine
Thomas, had a different purpose, as the French Jesuit himself wrote
shortly before leaving Beijing in May 1698:
Father Thomas and I will leave . . . for Tartary where the Emperor is
sending us with three great mandarins of this court to do the map
of the land of Khalkhas, his new subjects. This trip will take five
months; we have about 800 leagues to do in these deserts.51
66 Catherine Jami
To my knowledge, this was the first imperial commission for sur-

veying work received by a member of the French mission. In his diary,
Gerbillon described the commission of the three mandarins in whose
retinue they traveled:
All these Mandarins undertook this journey to preside over two

assemblies that were to be held in the states of Khalkha Tartary,
which have recently submitted to the Emperor, and to sort out all
affairs, establish laws, and determine the place where each of them
must reside, etc.52
This was a follow-up to the 1691 Dolon Nor Assembly: the organi-
zation of the Khalkhas into banners was now being settled in more
detail following Galdan’s defeat. Evidently, for the emperor, maps
were not a mere symbol of his control over these new territories
and their populations, but also an essential means of this control.
This survey prefigured the one carried out by imperial commission
during the years 1708 to 1718, which will be discussed below. Thus
Gerbillon’s travels in Tartary all correspond to empire-building mili-
tary or diplomatic expeditions. European knowledge of Inner Eurasia
followed in the footsteps of the Qing conquest.
Ferdinand Verbiest and Antoine Thomas, both well versed in the
mathematical sciences, had traveled to Tartary earlier than Gerbillon.
What made Gerbillon stand out as the initiator of European knowl-
edge of Tartary was the fact that he provided both written descriptions
and matching cartographical data. Moreover, Thomas’s no less pains-
taking and impressive contribution to the knowledge of these lands
was written in Latin and sent to Rome, where it remained in manu-
script form. The key difference between the two men lay not so much
in their skills as in the networks for which they produced knowledge
about Tartary. This not only explains the different circulations of the
knowledge they produced, but also shaped the knowledge itself.53
It was the combination of French and Qing patronage that enabled
Gerbillon’s travel notes to integrate Tartary not only into European
maps, but also into the increasing popular genre of travel diaries.
The Jesuits and imperial observation
Kangxi’s travels were not limited to his four military campaigns against
Galdan. Between the final suppression of the rebellion of the Three
Feudatories in 1681—that is, once the inner territories were finally
“pacified”—and his death in 1722, the emperor made no less than 128
journeys outside the capital. Mobility is a striking feature of his reign, a
feature that his grandson Qianlong (r. 1736–1795) emulated. Imperial
travels were traditionally divided according to the four directions; the
six Southern Inspection Tours are the best documented in the Chinese
language, and consequently the most studied.54 But most of his travels
took him beyond the Great Wall; since 1703 imperial hunts at Mulan
木蘭 and visits to Chengde 承德 (then called Jehol, in Chinese Rehe
熱河) took place annually.55 Imperial mobility was an essential ele-
ment in the simultaneous ruling of the inner territories and of Tartary.
During his many journeys, the emperor displayed an active interest in
various aspects of the regions that he visited. He made some notes of
his observations and of the reflections to which these gave rise. These
notes were included in a Collection of the Investigation of Things in Times
of Leisure (Jixia gewu bian 幾暇格物編), which includes 93 short jottings,
and published posthumously in the Imperial Prose of the Sagely Ancestor
and Humane Emperor56 (Shengzu renhuangdi yuzhi wenji 聖祖仁皇帝御製
文集, 1732). Among other things, he recorded his own exploration of
the Yellow River during his final campaign against Galdan:
When We personally led the army against the Oirats, on Our way
back to the Palace by way of Ningxia, We boarded a boat at the
port of the Hengcheng 橫城 Gate and sailed down the River for
twenty one days until the Hutan 湖灘 River, to places where no
one had been aboard a vessel before. The current carried us on the
immensity; the water’s colour was a muddy yellow; when the sun-
rays hit it, it sparkled like melted gold. Aboard, ruler and subjects,
all were dazzled.57
Kangxi was probably not the first person to navigate the part of
the Yellow River that lay north of the Great Wall, but he must indeed
have been the first ruler of China to do so. One may safely assume
that most of that section of the Yellow River was unknown to most,
if not all, intended readers of the Imperial Prose: Chinese scholar-of-
ficials were in general not allowed beyond the Great Wall. Gerbillon
was in the imperial retinue at the time of this exploration:
The 26th [of May 1697]. The Emperor left on a barge, going down
the Huang he (the Yellow River) with a small part of his retinue.
The larger part [of his retinue] went on land, following the river.
We were among the latter.58
68 Catherine Jami
Gerbillon goes on to describe the land itinerary along the river, with
the usual details concerning the distance in li and the orientation of
daily progress; however, he makes no comment on the appearance of
the river’s water.59 The larger part of the retinue reached the Hutan
River six days before the emperor: sailing down the Yellow River was
evidently slower than traveling by land. At other times, the emperor
in person made observations and measurements of the same kind as
Gerbillon’s:
The 21st [of November 1696] . . . The Emperor went to see the
[Yellow] River, shot arrows and had his people shoot some more;
almost all of them reached the other side. It is true that these arrows
were very slender, and designed especially to reach far . . . The 23rd
we remained in place. The emperor measured the width of the
river with his semi-circle, and he found that it was 108 Chinese
paces at its narrowest.60
The emperor had two ways to assess the river’s width; the first one
fit in with Manchu military culture, in which distance was assessed
in terms of the range of military arms. The second one involved
an instrument that the emperor had acquired from the Jesuits and
learned to use with them. The semicircle enabled him to show his
officers that he had other resources, unavailable to them, to obtain
knowledge of the territories already controlled as well as those to be
conquered. To my knowledge none of the Manchu officers in his reti-
nue shared the emperor’s expertise in the use of Western instruments.
Kangxi made similar displays in the inner territories for the benefit of
Chinese officials when inspecting water-conservancy works; to each
of the groups of subjects who served him, he demonstrated the rele-
vance of Western learning to the concerns and culture that he shared
with them.61
In his travel diaries, Gerbillon mentions three semicircles in the
emperor’s possession:62 one had been made for him under the super-
vision of Ferdinand Verbiest.63 Before setting out for the Dolon Nor
Assembly, Gerbillon presented Kangxi with the semicircle that the
King’s Mathematicians had received from the Duke of Maine (1670–
1736) back in France. Finally, after returning from Dolon Nor, the
emperor was presented with several instruments that de Fontaney and
Le Comte had sent to the capital for this purpose. Among these was
“a semi-circle whose radius was about half a foot, with its compass,
very neatly divided”; it was “by the hand of Mr. Buterfield [sic].”64
Presenting an instrument to Kangxi did not prevent Gerbillon from
continuing to use it while he traveled with the emperor. Although
he does not systematically specify which instrument he used for his
observation, the Jesuit did occasionally mention using the Duke of
Maine’s semicircle. Moreover, he recorded the result of the emperor’s
observation using this instrument without any further comment,
which put this particular figure on a par with all those he provided
himself. In other words, the two men’s observations are presented
as following the same observational standards—those set by the
Académie.
Gerbillon’s own observations and notes on the route they were
following, recorded in his diaries, were a part of the task charged
to him by the emperor, who ordered him to join his retinue. Maps
of the same type as the one brought back to France by Le Comte
were certainly produced for the emperor. In sum, during his trips to
Tartary, Gerbillon used instruments brought from France and most
likely conformed to the standard practice associated with these; the
data thus collected served to construct both French academic science
and imperial knowledge of Tartary.
The Collection of the Investigation of Things in Times of Leisure con-
tains other examples of the overlap of Jesuit and imperial exploration
of Qing territory. A jotting is devoted to the visibility of the Old Man
Star (Laorenxing 老人星, Canopus) made at various latitudes. When
Kangxi visited Nanjing in March 1689, during his second Southern
Inspection Tour, he went to the Imperial Observatory with his offi-
cials, in order, it seems, to give them a lecture on astronomy; in it he
mentioned the Old Man Star. For this he relied on an observation of
this star that he had earlier commissioned from the French Jesuit Jean
de Fontaney (who was, as mentioned above, residing in Nanjing at
the time).65 Another jotting in the Collection records that in January
1704, during a Western Inspection Tour (Xixun 西巡), Kangxi passed
by the “Three Gates and Pillar” (Sanmen dizhu三門砥柱), and discussed
the river works carried out there during the Tang dynasty (618–907),
when the capital Chang’an 長安 (present-day Xi’an 西安) was located
upstream.66 These river works are famous for the difficulties they
posed to successive dynasties.67 It seems, however, that the observa-
tion of the spot was not carried out by the emperor in person: instead
he sent his third son, Prince Yinzhi 胤祉 (1677–1732), who had been
trained in the mathematical sciences by Antoine Thomas, to go and
70 Catherine Jami
observe it; the prince then reported back to his father.68 Evidently the
Jesuits were not the only informants used by the emperor to estab-
lish his technical mastery of the imperial territory and to display it in
the form of scholarship in the Chinese fashion. A few years after this
Western Inspection Tour, the emperor sent the Jesuits who were sur-
veying this part of China as part of his commission to visit the “Three
Gates and Pillar.”69 Overlaps between imperial and Jesuit itineraries on
the imperial territory were never fortuitous.
Surveying the inner territories: Kangxi map or

Jesuit atlas?
During the decade 1708–1718, a survey of Qing territory was carried

out by imperial commission. It resulted in a Map of a Complete View of
the Imperial Territory (Huangyu quanlantu 皇輿全覽圖). Seven missionar-
ies worked in the teams of surveyors in charge of the various prov-
inces of the inner territories.70 The Jesuits claimed that it was one of
them, Dominique Parrenin (1665–1741), who gave Kangxi the idea
of having a map of his empire made.71 The wish to have a reliable
map of the Manchu homeland may have been an incentive for this
commission. In any case, a general map of all the territories under
his control, and of some others onto which Qing control could be
extended, was certainly of great use in strategic terms.72 Such a map
answered a long-term concern of the emperor: since the beginning of
his reign, there had been complaints from officials about the inaccu-
racy of maps. Local surveys were sometimes commissioned, not only
in “Tartary,” but also in areas that suffered from floods.73 In 1686, an
office in charge of compiling a Gazetteer of the Great Qing Unification
(Da Qing yitong zhi 大清一統志, 1746) was created. The work took
60 years to complete (this was not an unusual duration for imperi-
ally commissioned works of such magnitude). It was to include maps
as well as details of the physical geography of the empire. The deci-
sion made by the emperor in 1708 to employ some Jesuits to survey
the empire and draw a general map “using the surveying methods of
Western learning” (yong xixue liangfa 用西學量法) came after some tri-
als, including those carried out in Tartary. An Office for the Complete
View of the Imperial Territory (Huangyu quanlan guan 皇輿全覽館) was
created, which seems to have functioned independently from the one
in charge of the Gazetteer.74 Of the seven missionaries who worked on
the survey, one was a French Augustinian, three were French Jesuits,
and the three others were Jesuits working under Portuguese patron-
age. The teams of surveyors also included staff from the Astronomical
Bureau, officials, and Bannermen—that is, members of the military
elite whose ancestors had conquered China—some of whom worked
at the Imperial Household Department.75 They took part in what was
effectively a large-scale Qing state enterprise, in which the Jesuits par-
ticipated as experts in surveying techniques, particularly triangula-
tion. The map drew on earlier ones made locally, which it sought to
correct and homogenize. The final product was a gigantic map drawn
at a scale of 1:1,400,000, engraved on copper plates. It consisted of
41 sheets, each measuring 52.2 cm by 77 cm: if assembled, it would
cover an area of about four meters by six meters. This could certainly
be done in some of the halls of the Imperial Palace; the map was not
intended for public circulation. Significantly, place names were writ-
ten in Chinese for the inner territories, and in Manchu for the rest
of the map. There were also woodblock editions, which showed the
provinces separately.76 The Jesuits sent one of these woodblock edi-
tions to France, where Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville (1697–
1782), then the king’s geographer, used it to draw the maps intended
for Du Halde’s Description, which were published in the 1737 Atlas.77
The maps and atlases produced as a result of Kangxi’s commission
have been variously called “the Jesuit atlas of China,” the “Kangxi
atlas,” and “the Kangxi Jesuit atlas.” These expressions reflect debates
among historians as to whether this achievement was a “Chinese” or
a “European” product.78 The construction of the cartographic knowl-
edge of the Qing Empire, entailing the circulation of individuals and
the use of earlier maps and books in at least four different languages
(Chinese, Manchu, French, and Latin), is of such complexity that
attempting to ascribe or credit it to one of two entities—“China” or
“Europe”—hardly seems relevant. Rather, this complexity may well
characterize the early modern globalization process.
Concluding remarks
The French enterprise of collecting knowledge concerning China can-

not be understood if it is divorced from the concomitant Qing impe-
rial enterprise of knowledge gathering: the two processes are closely
intertwined. Without direct imperial patronage, the French Jesuits
could mainly collect data relevant to locations that were already
known to their confreres working under Portuguese patronage and
72 Catherine Jami
the missionaries of other religious orders, and on the routes that

linked these locations. Those serving at the Beijing court traded
Western learning against knowledge about China: they were the
agents of the circulation of both, in opposite directions. Each of their
two patrons gave them access to some information and knowledge
sources. What they could then gather was in turn offered to the other
patron in return for his continued support. In the process the Jesuits
constructed networks that spanned both ends of the Eurasian conti-
nent. The benefit that they drew from this trade was the possibility of
their continued presence in China, “for the greater glory of God.”
Beyond the Great Wall, and during the survey of the empire, the
deal was slightly different: both patrons were interested in collect-
ing the same information, for purposes that—at least at first glance—
appear similar: knowledge of a territory’s topography and resources
is a major concern of imperial science across times and places. So a
new pattern evolved there: the collection of one single set of data fed
in two different systems of territorial knowledge. This pattern func-
tioned first with Jesuit travels to Tartary, and then on a much wider
scale for the survey of the Qing Empire.
The French Jesuits’ negotiation of science did not form part of a for-
malized state-to-state relation. On the French side, it was understood
as contributing to a “friendship” linking the two monarchs; on the
Qing side, however, France was perceived as one of several European
states from which some resources could be drawn for the benefit of
statecraft. The construction and flow of knowledge involved in the
relationship was to the mutual benefit of both the states involved.
To the Qing, French patronage of the Jesuits and their science pro-
vided tools for territorial control and management. In return, France
became the center of European cartographic knowledge of East Asia.
Although the stakes of cartography were very different, the relation-
ship reinforced both states vis-à-vis their local rivals. Both benefited
from this long-distance interaction in their competition with other
empires closer to home. This kind of interplay between the local or
regional and the global scale in the construction of both empire and
science may well characterize the early modern world.
Notes
1. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a
Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31/3
(1997): 735–762, esp. 736–739.
2. See Joanna Waley-Cohen, “The New Qing History,” Radical History Review
88 (2004): 193–206.
3. Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard U. P., 2005).
4. The borders of the People’s Republic of China are almost identical to the
Qing borders of 1800, except that Outer Mongolia no longer belongs to it.
Laura Hostetler, “Contending Cartographic Claims? The Qing Empire in
Manchu, Chinese, and European Maps,” in The Imperial Map: Cartography
and the Mastery of Empire, ed. James R. Akerman (Chicago: U. of Chicago
P., 2009), 93–132.
5. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial
China (Berkeley: U. of California P., 2000).
6. Christopher Cullen, “Wu xing zhan 五星占 Prognostics of the Five Planets,”
SCIAMVS 12 (2011): 193–249, 194–195.
7. This phrase is borrowed from the title of Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist
Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval
China (Leiden: Brill, 1959).
8. See, for example, Yabuuti Kiyosi 薮内清, Chūgoku no tenmon rekihō 中国の天
文暦法 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1969), 177–191, and 202–234.
9. The titles of some recent publications still reflect this approach; see, for
example, Xiaoxin Wu, ed., Encounters and Dialogues: Changing Perspectives
on Chinese-Western Exchanges from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries
(Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 2005).
10. Liam M. Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard U. P., 2007).
11. Those few specialists occupy the front stage in traditional historiography,
for example, in George H. Dunne, Generation of Giants: The Story of the
Jesuits in China during the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty (Notre Dame:
U. of Notre Dame P., 1962).
12. See, among others, Antonella Romano, “Observer, vénérer, servir: Une
polémique jésuite autour du Tribunal des mathématiques de Pékin,”
Annales 59/4 (2004): 729–756; and Catherine Jami, “Representations
and Uses of ‘European Science’ in China (1582–1722),” Zeitschrift für
Historische Forschung 34 (2005): 197–213.
13. Keizo Hashimoto, Hsü Kuang-Ch’i and Astronomical Reform: The Process of
the Chinese Acceptance of Western Astronomy, 1629–1635 (Osaka: Kansai U.
P., 1988).
14. See, for example, Willard Peterson, “Learning from Heaven: The
Introduction of Christianity and Other Western Ideas into Late Ming
China,” in The Cambridge History of China: The Ming Dynasty 1368–1644,
ed. Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (Cambridge: Cambridge U.
P., 1998), 708–788; Catherine Jami, “Heavenly Learning, Statecraft and
Scholarship: The Jesuits and Their Mathematics in China,” in Oxford
Handbook of History of Mathematics, ed. Eleanor Robson and Jackie Stedall
(Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2008), 57–84.
15. Catherine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and
Imperial Authority during the Kangxi Reign (1662–1722) (Oxford: Oxford
U. P., 2012).
74 Catherine Jami
16. Noël Golvers, “La mission des jésuites en Chine en 1678: Un cri d’alarme!,”
pts. 1–2 Courrier Verbiest 5 (1993): 2–5, and 6 (1994): 4–9. Glenn Ames,
Colbert, Mercantilism and the French Quest of Asian Trade (DeKalb: Northern
Illinois U. P., 1996).
17. This is apparent in the way Jean-Baptiste Colbert, then controller gen-
eral, presented the project; see Jean de Fontaney, Letter to François de
La Chaize, February 15, 1703, in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des
Missions étrangères, par quelques missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus,
34 vols. (Paris: Nicolas Le Clerc, 1703–1776) 7: 65–66.
18. Other questions concerned weapons, fortifications, ships, soldiers, and
various aspects of geography, technology, and customs. Virgile Pinot,
Documents inédits relatifs à la connaissance de la Chine en France de 1685 à
1740 (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1932), 7–9.
19. Catherine Jami, “Pékin au début de la dynastie Qing: Capitale des savoirs
et relais de l’Académie royale des sciences de Paris,” Revue d’histoire mod-
erne et contemporaine 55/2 (2008): 43–69.
20. Archivum Romanum Societatits Iesu, Rome, Italy Jap. Sin. 165, f. 101 r.
21. Louis XIV, Letter to the emperor of China, dated August 7, 1688; Archives
du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et Européennes, Paris, France,
Mémoires et documents, Asie, vol. 2, 111–112.
22. Paul Pelliot, Le premier voyage de l’Amphitrite (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1930).
23. Here and in what follows, I use “Tartary” in this sense rather than in
the more restrictive one (the Manchu homeland) used in Mark C. Elliott,
“The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies,”
Journal of Asian Studies 59/3 (2000): 603–646.
24. Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Description geographique, historique, chronologique,
politique et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise, 4 vols.
(Paris: P. G. Lemercier, 1735) 1: 61–81.
25. Ibid., vol. 1: 81–94.
26. April 30.
27. Louis Lecomte [Le Comte], Un jésuite à Pékin: Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état
présent de la Chine, 1687–1692 (Paris: Phébus, 1990), 511–512.
28. These tables were not published; Cassini had given a copy to Jean de
Fontaney before the latter’s departure for China; Florence C. Hsia,
Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Mission in Late
Imperial China (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 2009), 56.
29. Louis Lecomte, Un jésuite à Pékin, 525.
30. Florence C. Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land, 86.
32. Isabelle Landry-Deron, “Les mathématiciens envoyés en Chine par Louis
XIV en 1685,” Archive for the History of Exact Science 55 (2001): 423–463,
445.
33. Catherine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics, 120–135, 117.
34. Ibid., 131–133.
35. There are 12 lines (lignes) in an inch (pouce).
37. Isabelle Landry-Deron, “Les mathématiciens envoyés en Chine,” 446.
38. Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Description, 4: 87–422.
39. Ibid., vol. 4: 74.

40. Thomas Goüye, Observations physiques et mathematiques, pour servir à
l’histoire naturelle & à la perfection de l’astronomie & de la geographie: Envoyées
des Indes et de la Chine à l’Academie royale des sciences à Paris, par les Peres
jesuites. Avec les reflexions de Mrs de l’Academie, & les notes du P. Goüye, de la
Compagnie de Jesus (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1692), 70–71.
41. A league is approximately 4 kilometers.
43. Chengzhi 承志 (Kicengge), “Manwen ‘Wula dengchu difang tu’ kao 滿文《
烏喇等處地方圖》 ,” Gugong xueshu jikan故宮學術季刊 26/4 (2009): 1–74.
44. Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West, 175–176. Banners were the military
units into which the Qing armies were organized; they also defined the
social structure of the conquest elite.
45. Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West, 182.
46. Pereira also took part in several of Gerbillon’s “voyages” (including the
first two, the fifth, and the seventh).
47. Borjigidai Oyunbilig, Zur Überlieferungsgeschichte des Berichts über den persön-
lichen Feldzug des Kangxi Kaisers gegen Galdan (1696–1697) (Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowitz, 1999); Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West, 190–193.
48. Davor Antonucci is preparing an annotated edition and a translation of
Thomas’s manuscript, based on his PhD dissertation, Università Roma 1
La Sapienza, 2006; see Davor Antonucci, “An Unpublished Manuscript by
Antoine Thomas: The ‘De bello Cam hi imperatoris tartaro: Sinici contra
Tartaros Erutanos. Feliciter Confecto anno 1697,’” in A Lifelong Dedication
to the China Mission: Essays Presented in Honor of Father Jeroom Heyndrickx,
CICM, on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday and the 25th Anniversary of the F.
Verbiest Institute K. U. Leuven, ed. Noël Golvers and Sara Lievens (Leuven:
Ferdinand Verbiest Institute, 2007), 15–28.
49. Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, “Carte générale de la Tartarie chi-
noise dressée sur les cartes particulières faites sur les lieux par les RR PP
jésuites et sur les mémoires particuliers du P. Gerbillon,” in Nouvel atlas
de la Chine, de la Tartarie chinoise et du Thibet: Contenant les cartes générales
& particulieres de ces pays, ainsi que la carte du royaume de Corée; la plupart
levées sur les lieux par ordre de l’empereur Cang-Hi avec toute l’exactitude imag-
inable, soit par les PP. Jésuites missionnaires à la Chine, soit par les mêmes
peres: Rédigées par M. d’Anville. Précedé d’une description de la Boucharie par
un officier suedois qui a fait quelque sejour dans ce pays (La Haye: Scheurleer,
1737).
50. Laura Hostetler, “Contending Cartographic Claims?,” esp. 110.
51. Quoted in Mme Yves de Thomaz de Bossierre. Jean-François Gerbillon, S.
J. (1654–1707): Un des cinq mathématiciens envoyés en Chine par Louis XIV
(Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Foundation, 1994), 84, fn. 50.
52. Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Description, vol. 4: 483.
53. Catherine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics, 120–135, 180.
54. Michael G. Chang, A Court on Horseback: Imperial Touring and the
Construction of Qing Rule, 1680–1785 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia
Center, 2007); this book focuses mainly on Qianlong’s southern tours; its
title epitomizes well the general point I am making here; see esp. 73. See
76 Catherine Jami
also Jonathan Spence, Ts’ao Yin and the K’ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant and
Master (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1966), 124–157; Pierre Etienne Will, “Vu
de Shanghai,” in Kangxi: Empereur de Chine 1622–1722. La Cité Interdite
à Versailles: Catalogue de l’exposition au Musée national du Château de
Versailles (27 janvier–9 mai 2004) (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux,
2004), 29–41; Catherine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics, 120–135.
55. See James A. Millward, Ruth W. Dunnell, Mark C. Elliott, and Philippe
Forêt, eds., New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asia Empire at
Qing Chengde (London: Routledge Curzon, 2006), which again focuses on
the Qianlong Emperor.
56. Kangxi’s posthumous name.
57. Kangxi jixia gewubian 康熙幾暇格物編, Yingyin Wenyuange Siku quanshu景
印文淵閣四庫全書, 1500 vols. (Taipei: Taibei shangwu yinshuguan, 1986), vol.
1299: 567.
58. Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Description, vol. 4: 474; this date coincides with
that given in the Kangxi Chao Shilu康熙朝實錄 182, 康熙三十六年。丁丑。夏。
四月丙辰。上登舟起行。Accessed November 30, 2011, http://zh.wikisource.
org/wiki/康熙朝實錄/卷之一百八十二.
59. Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Description, vol. 4: 474–476.
60. Ibid., vol. 4: 435. A bu 步 was equivalent to 1.5 meters or a little more;
the Yellow River would be over 160 meters wide at that particular point
according to the emperor’s measurement.
61. Catherine Jami, “Western Learning and Imperial Control: The Kangxi
Emperor’s (r. 1662–1722) Performance,” Late Imperial China 23/1 (2002):
28–49, 32–33, and 35–37.
62. There were obviously many more; see Liu Lu 劉潞, ed., Qinggong xiyang yiqi
清宮西洋儀器 (Hong Kong: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1998), 124–132.
63. Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Description, vol. 4: 227–228.
64. Ibid., vol. 4: 286; this might be similar to the item described in Liu Lu
Qinggong xiyang yiqi, 111; however, the radius of the instrument pre-
served is 26 cm (half a foot would be closer to 15 cm). Michael Butterfield
(“Buterfield,” 1635–1724), an English instrument maker, worked in Paris;
Camille Frémontier, Les instruments de mathématiques XVIe–XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2002), 347.
65. Siku quanshu, 1299: 587; Catherine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics,
120–135.
66. Siku quanshu, 1299: 571.
67. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 23 vols. (Cambridge:
Cambridge U. P. 1954–), vol. 4, bk. 3: 273–279.
68. Shilu, 213, Kangxi 42/11/28 (January 4, 1704), accessed September 10,
2012, http://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/康熙朝實錄/卷之二百十三.
69. Mario Cams and Catherine Jami, “A Note on Visitors to the Three Gates
and Pillar,” forthcoming, 2015.
70. Mario Cams, “The Early Qing Geographical Surveys (1708–1716) as a
Case of Collaboration between the Jesuits and the Kangxi Court,” Sino-
Western Cultural Relations Journal 34 (2012): 1–20. See also Cordell D. K.
Yee, “Traditional Chinese Cartography and the Myth of Westernization,”
in Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, ed. J. B.
Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1994), 170–402,

180–185.
71. Antoine Gaubil, Correspondance de Pékin 1722–1759, ed. Renée Simon
(Genève: Droz, 1970), 541–542.
72. Mark C. Elliott, “The Limits of Tartary,” 621.
73. Theodore N. Foss, “A Western Interpretation of China: Jesuit Cartography,”
in East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582–1773, ed. Charles E. Ronan
and Bonnie B. C. Oh (Chicago: Loyola U. P., 1988), 209–251, 223.
74. Catherine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics, 255–257.
75. Mario Cams, “The Early Qing Geographical Surveys,” 20.
76. Cordell D. K. Yee, “Traditional Chinese Cartography,” 181–182.
77. Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, Nouvel atlas de la Chine.
78. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 3: 590; Cordell D. K. Yee,
“Chinese Cartography,” 184–185.
3
The Uses of Knowledge and the
Symbolic Map of the Enlightened
Monarchy of the Habsburgs:
Maximilian Hell as Imperial and
Royal Astronomer (1755–1792)*
László Kontler
Maximilian Hell (1720–1792) was one of the foremost Jesuit scholars

in eighteenth-century Central Europe.1 He is chiefly remembered on
account of his contribution to the 1769 Venus transit observations
at the helm of an expedition to the Arctic region, and his calcula-
tion of the solar parallax based on the collation of his own data with
others. He was also the éminence grise behind the other result of the
expedition, the Demonstratio. Idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem
esse, published in 1770 by his assistant János (Joannes) Sajnovics and
“demonstrating” on the basis of fieldwork among the Sámi the the-
ory of the kinship of the Hungarian and Sámi (Lappish) languages.2
Yet, in his own time Hell’s reputation was only further enhanced,
but not established by his role in that global enterprise of field
science.3 The invitation of King Christian VII of Denmark-Norway
to lead the famous expedition was itself issued thanks to the cul-
tural capital accumulated by Hell during the previous period of his
career, very largely through his editing of the annual Ephemerides
Astronomicae ad Meridianum Vindobonensem as imperial and royal
astronomer in Vienna. Below, I seek to explore the diverse ends
to which Hell turned his status and reputation during the various
stages of his career. Hell occupied his respectable position and took
care of the annual for over more than three and a half decades. The
Society of Jesus was suppressed at the middle of this period. What
79
80 László Kontler
support and information network underpinned the operation of the

Ephemerides, what were the channels of its distribution, what echo
did it receive beyond the boundaries of the Habsburg Monarchy,
and where can it be located on the map of contemporary astro-
nomical learning? What difference did the suppression of the order
make in terms of the leverage behind Hell’s work, both as regards
patronage and intellectual ambience? How did it affect the produc-
tion, the collection, and the uses of the knowledge reported in the
journal—the strategic options available to a famed and ambitious
ex-Jesuit scientist under a government aiming to implement poli-
cies styled “enlightened,” with a view to consolidating its diverse
possessions as a unitary state or “empire”? Tentative answers to such
questions may contribute to a more contextualized understanding
of the processes and stakes of the circulation of knowledge in and
from Central Europe in the Enlightenment.
Building renown: Hell’s network and

the Ephemerides Astronomicae
Maximilian Hell (born Höll, 1720–1792) was the scion of a fam-

ily of mining experts of German descent from Banská Štiavnica4
(Hun. Selmecbánya, Ger. Schemnitz), a prosperous mining town in
northern Hungary (now Slovakia). Having graduated from the Jesuit
gymnasium in nearby Banská Bystrica (Hun. Besztercebánya, Ger.
Neusohl), he joined the Society of Jesus in 1738, and was ordained
in 1751. Between these dates, he first studied philosophy, natural sci-
ences, and mathematics (a few years later also theology) in Vienna.
Subsequently, from 1745, while being a gymnasium teacher at Levoča
(Hun. Lőcse, Ger. Letschau) in northeastern Hungary and a college
professor at Cluj (Hun. Kolozsvár, Ger. Klausenburg) in Transylvania,
he participated in the planning or directed personally the construc-
tion and equipment of several observatories in the country. In 1755,
already a scholar of some reputation, Hell was appointed by Maria
Theresa as imperial and royal astronomer in Vienna.
The instruction, dated October 30, 1755, which Hell received on
his appointment,5 prescribed diverse activities, including among oth-
ers the creation, maintenance, and improvement of the equipment
of a new university observatory6 as well as the publication of the
astronomical tables for each year. The first volume of the Ephemerides
Astronomicae ad Meridianum Vindobonensem came out in 1757, and
Hell as Imperial and Royal Astronomer 81
it continued under Hell’s successor Franciscus de Paula Triesnecker

until 1806. It was not only the second of modern, regularly pub-
lished astronomical annuals after the Connoissance [sic] des Temps
of the Bureau des Longitudes (1679), but also preceded the Nautical
Almanac of the Commissioners of Longitudes (1767) as well as the
Berlin Astronomisches Jahrbuch (1774). It is also noteworthy in regard
to its difference in content and conception from its counterparts. Like
Hell, the editor of Astronomisches Jahrbuch, Johann Elert Bode, besides
publishing the astronomical tables for the given year and news and
treatises in the field, also aimed at reporting on astronomical observa-
tions made at various locations in and outside Germany.7 However,
the otherwise commendable decision to issue the annual in German
proved counterproductive from the point of view of the chances of
dissemination, if we are to judge from a comment on the first volume
in the Journal des Sçavans. The author rejoiced that the international
“taste” for calculating the astronomical tables resulted in a new pub-
lication, but at the end of a rather detailed account added that “we
regret to see it printed in a language so little known in France, in Italy,
in England, where astronomy is keenly cultivated.”8 The reviewer’s
words may well have been just one of the many eighteenth-century
instances of French condescension toward other languages and cul-
tures. Still, Bode’s decision to promote scientific culture in the ver-
nacular seems to have defeated the purpose of wide circulation. At the
same time, the seemingly obsolete Latin of the Viennese Ephemerides
was still eligible as a lingua franca in the respublica astronomica. Besides
expediency, Hell had other reasons for choosing Latin, and his being
a member of a Catholic religious order was only one of them. Hell
was a Hungarus: a member of a caste of learned men in the multi-
ethnic eastern half of the Habsburg Monarchy, who, regardless of
ethnic background harbored a strong sense of allegiance to the cul-
tural traditions of the old Kingdom of Hungary, and—especially in
the absence of improved vernacular languages—habitually resorted
to Latin as the preferred medium of communication.
On the other hand, the divergence between the Ephemerides and the
Connoissance des temps and Nautical Almanac was of a different nature.
The latter two confined themselves, besides astronomical tables and
their explanations, to additional miscellaneous material of astro-
nomical interest, and their maintaining institutions published local
observation results separately. By contrast, soon after its first appear-
ance, Hell’s Ephemerides grew into a switchboard for communicating
82 László Kontler
information on astronomical observations at an expanding—and

changing—range of locations in and around Vienna, the Habsburg
Monarchy, Europe, and the wider world. Observation reports were
already included in the second volume, published in 1758, still con-
fined to an account of Hell’s own activity at the Universitätssternwarte.
This remained the standard—but in an expanding number of entries
and at ever greater length—until 1761. By that year, when Hell also
published in the Ephemerides a detailed forecast of and instructions
for the “singular phenomenon” of the transit of Venus before the sun
expected for June 5, the size of the appendix containing the observa-
tion reports grew threefold (30 entries and 92 pages—compared to 10
entries and 28 pages in 1758). It also included accounts of work by
others in Vienna: the Abbé Lysogorski, and the amateur astronomer
“Mr. Caspar Scherer, a painter of this famous city” who carried out
observations (“instructed in my method, explained slightly earlier to
him”) in his own house in the suburb of Spittalberg.9 The real water-
shed was the 1762 volume, including a comprehensive “Elenchus
transitus Veneris per discum Solis Anni 1761. die 5ta Junii, Variis per
Europam locis, à Viris in observando exercitatis factarum.” Transit
observation data was included from France (the Paris observatories),
England (Greenwich), Spain (Madrid), Italy (Bologna, Rome, Padua,
Florence), Germany (Ingolstadt, Munich, Würzburg, Schwetzingen,
Dillingen, Göttingen, Dresden), the Habsburg Monarchy (Ljubljana
[Ger. Laibach], Trnava [Ger. Tyrnau, Hun. Nagyszombat]), Poland
(Poznan), Sweden (Stockholm), and “Muscovy” (St. Petersburg). The
data was followed by a summary table providing the names of the
observers and the instruments used by them, and finally a collation
of the data. Other astronomical observations were then reported
at some length, and besides places already mentioned above, from
Prague and Polling (Bavaria). The 1763 volume neglected observa-
tions, but in 1764 the picture about the transit enterprise was rounded
off by reports on the expeditions to the Isle of Rodrigues, Tranquebar,
the Cape of Good Hope, and Tobolsk.10 Hell also published, with his
own explanations, the Swedish astronomer Anders Planman’s tables
of the calculations of the solar parallax by various scholars on the
basis of the 1761 observations. In the subsequent years, additional
source locations appeared in the appendix of the Ephemerides con-
cerning astronomical observations: Uppsala, Lund, Pont-à-Mousson,
Naples, Milan, Nancy, Toulon, Auxerre, Brest, Hamburg, and Lviv
(Lemberg) (1765); Greifswald, Finnmarchia, Blekinge, Berlin, Leipzig,
Sagan, Altona, Wernigerode, Wrocław (Breslau), Elblag (Elbing),

and Frankfurt am Oder (1766); Kremsmünster and Graz (1767); and
Copenhagen, Warsaw, and Vilnius (1768). In the ten years from the
launch of the Ephemerides, its coverage of astronomical observation
activity reached continental dimensions, with a remarkable density
especially in regard to the German-speaking territories.
The way in which the information was collected is an interesting
and important question, but it is difficult to provide a conclusive
answer. As a broad generalization, one may safely point to the opera-
tion of the “Jesuit network”: out of the 53 locations from which data
was collected and published in the Ephemerides between 1758 and
1768, 19 were homes to Jesuit colleges with observatories,11 and the
sources of the information from more exotic places were also fellow
brethren. (It is worth mentioning, though, that on the testimony of
the annual Hell was unconnected with several Jesuit observatories of
the time, some of them important.12) More specifically, part of the
material that fed the appendices of the Ephemerides can be traced in
Hell’s extant personal correspondence with fellow astronomers. He
was especially well-connected in Paris (to Nicolas Louis de La Caille,
Charles Messier, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, and César François Cassini de
Thury), but his partners also included Leonardo Ximenes in Florence,
Eustachio Zanotti in Bologna, Abraham Gotthelf Kästner in Göttingen,
Christian Mayer in Heidelberg/Schwetzingen, Franz Weiss in Trnava,
Joseph Stepling in Prague, Anders Johann Lexell in St. Petersburg,
Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin in Stockholm, and several others.13 Vis-à-
vis some of these feeders of information, Hell—thanks to the means
at his disposal as imperial and royal astronomer—played a role not
merely as a recipient, but also as a generator of information by order-
ing instruments from Viennese instrument makers and distributing
them to colleagues at less affluent institutions (or even amateurs) in
preparation for the 1761 transit of Venus observations.14 At the same
time, given the time lag (in each volume, containing the astronomical
tables prepared at the end of any specific year for the following year,
observation reports covered the previous year), Hell may also have
been able to rely on published material he managed to obtain.
In other words, the publication activity and the maintenance of a
commercium litterarium was combined not only in the instructions Hell
received upon his appointment in 1755, but also in the execution of
his tasks as imperial and royal astronomer. Thanks to the Ephemerides,
within a decade or so of its launching, Vienna established itself as
84 László Kontler
a node of astronomical knowledge in Europe, with Hell as a nodal

astronomer. Besides his expertise and credentials as an outstanding
professional, his success was due to the coincidence of his being a
prominent Jesuit, his prestigious position in the imperial capital, the
complex character of the information contained in the publication
medium, and the universal accessibility of the language chosen for
its dissemination.
A change of profile
The profile of the Ephemerides changed in 1769, when as a conse-

quence of Hell’s departure for the Arctic expedition the editing of the
annual fell to one of his assistants, Anton Pilgram, who did not pub-
lish observation reports until 1771, and relatively few both in that
year and in 1772. By compensation, the 1771 volume included Hell’s
treatise on his observation of the transit of Venus (already published
separately in the previous year in Copenhagen), and the 1773 volume
included a collection of all the results of the 1769 transit observa-
tions, followed by another treatise by Hell on the solar parallax. The
trend continued for the following two years as well. Instead of obser-
vation reports, in 1774 we find supplements to Hell’s dissertation on
the solar parallax (a long letter by the Finnish astronomer Anders
Johann Lexell from St. Petersburg, and a shorter treatise by Hell’s col-
league Pilgram on the subject), and in 1775, two treatises by Hell (on
the calculation of latitudes, and on the diameter of the moon).
Reports on astronomical observations appear again in a respect-
able number in the Ephemerides from 1776 onward, but the cover-
age is conspicuously different from the pre-1768 period. It embraces
in an apparently haphazard manner locations from Central Europe,
broadly speaking (besides Vienna, only Kremsmünster, Ingolstadt,
Greifswald, and Copenhagen), and exotic ones: Beijing (observations
by the Jesuit fathers Ferdinand Augustin Hallerstein, José da Espinha,
and José Bernardo de Almeida15) and “Western Tartary” (Felix da
Rocha). The year 1777 was especially remarkable in the “regional
turn” of the Ephemerides. In that year, the only university operat-
ing in the Kingdom of Hungary was moved from Trnava to Buda,
where an astronomical observatory was also created, similar to the
town of Eger, where a new observatory was to be mounted in the
local lyceum. Hell was assigned to supervise and advise the building
and equipment of both of these new observatories. In the previous
year—as reported in the 1777 Ephemerides—Hell completed an “astro-

nomical journey” in Hungary. From this time, the yields of obser-
vation activity in the metropolitan centers of European science—in
France, England, and Italy (let us remember the comment on the
Berlin Jahrbuch in the Journal des Sçavans)—are, by and large, missing
from the Ephemerides. The space beyond the astronomical tables is
quite consistently and overwhelmingly filled, apart from the sporadic
appearance of Paris, Milan, and Greenwich in the observation reports,
with accounts from the northern, eastern, and central crescent around
the European core, as well as contributions of Hell’s colleagues and
Hell himself. Besides this geographic reorientation, the attempt at
organizing the material collected during the Arctic expedition con-
tinued with a “new theory of the aurora borealis” (1777), a treatise on
the latitude and longitude of certain locations in the region (1791),
and meteorological observations (posthumously, 1793). As regards
the observation data, one obvious development is the proliferation
of material from Scandinavia: besides Copenhagen, we find Lund,
Roskilde, Trondheim, Iceland, and Greenland as new source locations.
In lack of explicit references, one may attribute this to Hell’s long stay
in Denmark-Norway. But most importantly, astronomical activity in
Germany and the Habsburg Monarchy was vigorously promoted in
the appendices of the Ephemerides during the last 15 years of Hell’s life.
Besides German venues, the most striking presences are—naturally—
Vienna, Prague, and Kremsmünster. Above all, however, Hell was care-
ful to extol the achievements of Trnava, Buda, and Eger.
“Quonam autem fructu?” Taking stock
From the map of contemporary European astronomy as reflected in

the pages of the Ephemerides, let us now turn to the question of the
place of the Ephemerides on that map. It is helpful to start by recalling
the balance struck by Hell about the annual’s impact in the preface to
its twentieth volume (1776), on the eve of the “regional turn” of the
contents of the reports published in it.
The present, 1776 year [volume] of these Ephemerides is the twen-

tieth in an uninterrupted series published since 1757 for the use of
the public by the Imperial and Royal Observatory of the University
of Vienna. But what are the fruits? This whoever wishes to know,
may understand from reading the famous periodicals of France,
86 László Kontler
the Journal des Sçavans, Journal Etrangers [sic] or Ephem. Astronomicae

Parisinis [sic; i.e., the Connoissance] as well as of Germany, the
Göttingische Anzeigen, and other astronomical books.16
Hell’s satisfaction was not unfounded. From 1758, the Journal

des Sçavans reported on the appearance and the contents of the
Ephemerides each year, at varying length, but usually in substantial
detail. The beginnings of the awakening of French interest in the
Ephemerides can be ascribed to the operation of the “Jesuit network”:
the first volume was brought to the attention of the Paris astrono-
mers by two of Hell’s German Jesuit contacts, Christian Mayer of
Heidelberg and Franz Huberti of Würzburg, during a visit in 1757
to the observatories of the French capital.17 Given the fact that
the number of astronomical works reported and reviewed in this
most widely circulated French review journal was a maximum of
about half a dozen every year, this level of attention is notewor-
thy. The Journal des Sçavans was, on several occasions, also a venue
for French astronomers to engage positions expressed by Hell in
the Ephemerides. One case in question is the “Lettre à Messieurs les
Auteurs de Journal des Sçavans” in October 1766, by a certain M.
Trébuchet. Introduced as “ancien serviteur de la Reine” from the
town of Auxerre, Claude-Étienne Trébuchet was in fact a calcula-
teur employed at the Connoissance des Temps by the most renowned
of contemporary French astronomers, Joseph Jérme de Lalande.
Trébuchet concurred with the editors of the Journal des Sçavans in
the praises for the 1765 issue of the Ephemerides, but disagreed with
some of Hell’s points regarding the 1761 transit of Venus, the calcu-
lation of the solar parallax, and the visibility of Venus during future
transits—ultimately because of differing estimates of the orbit of
Venus. A summary of Hell’s reply was also published in the Journal
des Sçavans in August 1767; Trébuchet’s rejoinder was also printed
separately and sent by the author to Hell in 1770.18 Another case
is the critical letters of Lalande himself in February 1773 concern-
ing the parallax calculations of both Hell and Lexell from the 1769
Venus transit.19 Being regularly reported in the Journal des Sçavans,
evoking—however polemical—responses from reputed figures of the
French academic public, the Ephemerides and Hell earned as much
notice among that public as was possible.
As the role of the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, in
which the Ephemerides was also mentioned frequently, was similar on
the German scene to the Journal des Sçavans on the French one, the
same assumption probably holds for Germany, too. The Ephemerides
was first reported in the Göttingische Anzeigen in 1764, and was com-
mended on account of the lasting value of the materials published in
it besides the astronomical tables for the year.20 Thereafter, the “excel-
lent annual,” in which the material is “very conveniently arranged,”21
was reviewed regularly. The special attention given to the appendices
demonstrates that its distinctiveness did not escape the attention
of the reviewer, the Göttingen mathematician and professor of geo-
metrics and physics (and enlightened polymath), Abraham Gotthelf
Kästner.22 Kästner also expressed his concern in commenting on the
1776 volume that the Ephemerides—which in regard to the “accuracy of
its calculations, its richness of detail, and its serviceableness has been
superior to all others”—might be discontinued, since Hell’s efforts to
replace the leverage of the Society of Jesus through the foundation of
a scientific society (academy) by the monarch were thwarted.23 One
might also add that today copies of the Ephemerides (mostly the entire
series) are available in at least 15 libraries in Germany—another indi-
cator of wide dissemination. As for the avenues of this dissemination,
little conclusive evidence exists. Documents on the trade of the impe-
rial printing house Trattner, the publisher of the Ephemerides, seem
to have been lost. Hell’s correspondence is a testimony to the fact
that he was highly active in the circulation of the annual: in several
of his letters we find the clause “herewith I am sending a copy of my
latest Ephemerides.”24 Hell was a well-organized and systematic man.
We may assume that each of his correspondents regularly received
copies. Some of them, like Kästner, were not content just using the
Ephemerides in their work, but reported on each volume at important
venues, contributing to the journal’s reputation.
In contrast to the impressive coverage of the achievements of the
Ephemerides in the French and the German scientific public sphere,
there is virtually no trace of its awareness in Britain. Given the char-
acter of the Nautical Almanac, it is little surprise that it makes no
reference at all to the Viennese annual (nor does it pay attention
to any astronomical work elsewhere than Greenwich). However,
the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society regularly published
texts by astronomers or accounts of their work, including numerous
non-British figures with whom Hell maintained contact, but scarcely
any work by Hell himself.25 As the work of Neville Maskelyne and
other English astronomers was extensively reported and used in the
88 László Kontler
Ephemerides, and the 1769 transit of Venus was a central concern for
both journals, this lack of reciprocity is a puzzle and needs further
attention. Some British awareness of Hell’s work, though, is evident
from Maskelyne’s account books for 1773–1785. These demonstrate
that throughout 1776 and 1777 Maskelyne had astronomical equip-
ment manufactured by London instrument makers upon the orders
of Count Károly Eszterházy, bishop of Eger, for the new observatory,
in the creation of which Hell was the chief advisor.26 In any case,
even if British lack of interest was real, Hell successfully carved out
an international presence for the Ephemerides just by consolidating its
status in the French and the German academic scene.
Habsburg centralization and the decentering of Hell
This was an achievement undoubtedly attained thanks to a strategy

carefully planned and realized through strenuous work by Hell and
his associates. At the heart of this strategy was the endeavor to answer
the professional and ethical requirements of sound research: regular-
ity, accuracy, commitment, and service. However, scientific adeptness
and the cultivation of values associated with the dominant scientific
ethos, while of paramount importance, were by themselves no guar-
antee of success. That depended on the confluence of several other
factors, some of them outside the realm of the pursuit of knowledge.
In the given case, these included a powerful and well-networked reli-
gious order with a tradition of promoting science (a “science-friendly”
Society of Jesus); the patronage of a Catholic-friendly dynasty and
government; and the choice of a universally accessible language for
the dissemination of the information assembled. Hell’s dedication to
the Hungarus tradition could also be smoothly reconciled with each
of these factors. The harmony among the elements of this combina-
tion, however, became subverted shortly after Hell’s Arctic expedi-
tion and its outcomes marked the zenith of his career and reputation.
The uses to which Hell attempted to turn the stock of international
recognition embodied in the Ephemerides during the later 1770s and
the 1780s may be helpful to interpret as responses to the new condi-
tion in which a Jesuit scientist in the Habsburg capital found him-
self after the suppression of the order in 1773; more broadly, to the
shifting relationship between the Viennese government and the vari-
ous religious and secular groups and organizations that constituted a
challenge to its increasing efforts at consolidating the monarchy as a
quasi-imperial Gesamtstaat.
There is neither space nor need here to enter into the details of
these changes—a broad outline should suffice.27 In its eighteenth-
century shape, the Habsburg Monarchy was the product of the dynas-
ty’s “Danubian turn” in the last decades of the previous century.
After the frustration of its ambition to assert universal monarchy in
the Holy Roman Empire, the successful anti-Ottoman wars of the
1680s and 1690s presented an opportunity to expand the boundar-
ies of the Kingdom of Hungary, the throne of which the Habsburgs
had possessed since 1526, and to augment their influence in a vast
geographic expanse to the southeast of their traditional sphere of
interest. The incorporation of the lands of the Hungarian crown
remained a central issue for successive generations of Habsburg rul-
ers and administrators, with serious implications for the governance
of the monarchy as a whole. The initial plan was the integration
of Hungary by analogy with post-1621 Bohemia: legal and fiscal
reform and social realignment without much heed to local consti-
tutional structures and traditions, but with substantial leverage from
Catholic Counter-Reformation ideology. This was quickly shown to
be impracticable by the 1703–1711 rebellion led by Ferenc Rákóczi,
which expressed both the resentment of the noble estates and popu-
lar discontent, and ended in a compromise of two exhausted sides:
the Habsburgs achieved the announcement (in the 1723 Pragmatic
Sanction) of the “indivisible and inseparable unity” of the monarchy,
but the integrity of the “customs and statutes” of Hungary—chiefly,
the privileges of the nobility in matters of taxation and the running
of the political institutions of the country—was to be maintained.
Efforts at enhancing devotion to the dynasty through the propaga-
tion of Catholic cults and Baroque sensibilities associated with them
(and concomitant measures to suppress Protestantism) continued to
evoke complaint; so did the practice of indigenizing Austrians into
the Hungarian nobility, with appropriate political rights and property
in land. But the introduction of bureaucratic absolutism on cameral-
ist grounds, which was central to the projects conceived during the
late seventeenth-century conquest, was to be deferred.
That agenda was resumed, in a substantially altered format, after
1740, when according to many historians “modern Habsburg history
began.” The governmental, administrative, and economic reforms
adumbrated in the monarchy under Maria Theresa were closely tied
to the lessons drawn from the wars it fought in the first half of her
reign. International competitiveness depended on a better align-
ment, mobilization, and utilization of internal resources, which at
90 László Kontler
the same time could be associated with unfolding ideals of the state’s
commitment to the public weal. The instruments to the attainment
of such ends—administrative streamlining, economic protectionism,
customs regulations, the suppression of tax exemptions, and a gen-
eral endeavor on the part of the state bureaucracy to reach directly
to the subject over the heads of privileged “intermediary powers”—
were already being tested on Austrian and Bohemian grounds from
the 1740s onward. This further opened the gap between these areas
and Hungary as far as their integration in the structures of the mon-
archy was concerned. On one hand, historical experience warned
that Hungary would remain “different” (in spite of the political and
military support that the Habsburgs drew from the Hungarian nobil-
ity throughout the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’
War). On the other hand, it was clear that the monarchy could not
afford the luxury of dispensing with the resources of its potentially
rich eastern half. While keeping up the momentum of reform in the
western provinces, it was crucial to generate a similar process in the
east, too. By the 1760s, a full-fledged know-how of the operation of
the reform-minded, bureaucratic, enlightened state was in place in
Vienna: Polizeywissenschaft, the university-based discipline commit-
ted to exploring and inculcating the requirements of the “safety and
convenience” of the citizens and thereby achieving the higher ends
of the state.28
Central to this administrative vision of the state was the idea that
the existence of all exceptions and exemptions, together with the
social groups whose status is defined in terms of special privileges, is
in principle antithetical to the attainment of the above-mentioned
goals; that all citizens are to be regarded, and bound to the state, as
individuals, not as members of any legally distinct group or estate.
One of the natural targets of policies based on these principles was the
Catholic Church. Catholicism as a moral cement and force connect-
ing subjects with their ruler in a shared spiritual experience was still
important. However, patriotic loyalty elicited by the state’s compe-
tence in providing, through good laws and their rigorous execution,
for the “safety and convenience” of its citizens, came to be understood
as important by the architects of the Viennese reforms as the quasi-
religious devotion to the dynasty. At the same time, Catholicism as
an organized hierarchy with a separate structure of allegiances and
patronage (which nevertheless deeply infiltrated domains of secular
administration), especially the existence of religious orders, seemed
to them a detrimental anomaly. Besides the increasing suspicion

toward, and the ultimate abolition of these orders, steps toward lim-
ited religious tolerance also followed from these principles. So did the
elimination of church control over censorship, to be assumed by the
state. The noble estate was also strongly exposed to the offensive of
enlightened government. The nobility’s traditions of social and politi-
cal leadership were welcome by the state, insofar as they could be har-
nessed into the service of its redefined goals. However, to the extent
that these traditions were intertwined with a system of constitutional
and economic privilege, they were seen as constituting a threat. Any
intention of social leveling was far from Viennese policy-makers and
the administrative rank and file, but the political influence of the
nobility was to be counterbalanced by the perpetual creation of new
offices and the reorganizing of old ones. Simultaneously, every effort
was made to squeeze out of the nobles—by constitutional bullying,
blackmail, or other means—some contribution to the financial bur-
den of efficient governance. A policy line that, however, did smack
of an endeavor at homogenization, was the propagation of the use
of the German language for an expanding range of public purposes,
beginning with university instruction, then other levels of educa-
tion, and finally in administration all over the monarchy. Latin (the
official administrative language of Hungary) could be dismissed as a
“dead language,” while the vernaculars were all confined to a minor-
ity of speakers, who moreover had hardly even embarked on stan-
dardizing their grammar and improving their vocabulary. There were
thus apparently sound reasons that favored “Germanization”—yet,
precisely because of its being understood as “Germanization,” the ini-
tiative was destined to meet resistance.
Each of these developments affected the predicament in which
Hell found himself after 1773. The changes brought about in his per-
sonal circumstances by these broader processes of transformation in
the Habsburg Monarchy compelled him to resituate himself on the
Central European map of learning, and the “regional turn” of the
Ephemerides may be an indication and instrument of this response.
Prior to 1773, it was relatively easy for Hell to reconcile his loyal-
ties to the Habsburg dynasty and the ruler, to the Catholic Church
and his order, to the Kingdom of Hungary, and to the international
republic of learning (together with the Latinate culture that marked
each of the latter three). His position as imperial and royal astrono-
mer (thus, a state servant) proved to be unassailable. However, the
92 László Kontler
suppression of the Jesuits and the context of reform in the monarchy

meant the breakdown of the harmony that had existed among these
various loyalties, with the consequence that he felt a need to cre-
ate new institutional leverages, to forge new social alliances, and to
develop new intellectual allegiances in order to maintain the status
of authority he had attained.
The suppression of the Jesuit order was not merely an affair of the
Viennese government but that of international Catholicism. Still, and
in spite of several weeks of procrastination before the measure was
implemented in the Habsburg realms, it was also a signal that enlight-
ened reason of state set limits to the pro-Catholic disposition of the
Habsburg government (and after the succession of Joseph II in 1780,
this turned into little less than direct hostility). Hell seems to have been
optimistic to the very last minute that the calamity could be averted: a
mere three months before Clemens XIV’s brevet, he concluded a letter
by informing the addressee, Weiss, that “things with our Society are
going optimally,” with the Habsburg and the French court both mak-
ing efforts to dissuade Rome from taking the fatal step.29
This was in spite of ominous developments in the preceding
decades.30 The criticism of Jesuit educational practices led to the
piecemeal limitation of the role of the society in Austrian school-
ing from the 1740s on. In the late 1760s, influential voices in the
Viennese government, including Chancellor Kaunitz, the jurist Karl
Anton von Martini, and Maria Theresa’s educational advisor and
personal physician Gerhard van Swieten, spoke out in favor of fol-
lowing the example of the Bourbon monarchies in suppressing the
order (though Kaunitz also emphasized that the target should be not
individuals but the institution, and that the Portuguese, Spanish,
and French practices of incarcerating or expelling members ought
to be avoided as inhuman).31 Anti-Jesuitic sentiment was thus cer-
tainly not a marginal and isolated phenomenon within the politi-
cal establishment. As for the empress herself, though she is said to
have assured the society of her lifelong support, in 1767 she replaced
her Jesuit confessor Ignaz Kampmiller with the Jansenist, anti-Jesuit
Ignaz Müller, and finally—reluctantly, as the last European ruler—
agreed to the suppression of the order as well.
Hell’s response (1): Redefining the center?
If Hell was unable to read the signs before the summer of 1773, he
made the first steps of adjustment quickly: half a year later we find
him drafting plans for an Austrian Academy of Sciences, to be estab-

lished in Vienna.32 The initiative actually came from the government,
so Hell’s invitation to participate in the project can be understood
as a token of the measured disposition towards ex-Jesuits as indi-
viduals, urged by Kaunitz.33 The modest plan worked out by Hell,
confining the scope of the future academy’s pursuits to the “physical-
mathematical sciences,” was preferred by the Studien-Hof-Commission
to another (far more ambitious) one requested from the young pro-
fessor of universal and literary history, Ignaz Mathes von Hess. There
were to be only six permanent, salaried members at Hell’s academy,
half of them ex-Jesuits: besides himself, the German mathematician
Karl Schärffer, and the Hungarian physicist Pál Makó. Hell proposed
a complex financial model to maintain the academy: some money
was to emerge from the “Jesuit fund” created from the income of
confiscated Jesuit property, and some of the profit from the sales
of the newspaper Wiener Diarium was also to serve the noble end.
However, Hell hoped to raise the bulk of the funding from a reform
of the production and dissemination of calendars: he proposed the
elimination of the existing system of freely granting privileges of
printing and selling calendars, and the establishment of a Kalender-
Administrations-Collegium from the members of the academy, himself
being Director des Kalender-Wesens. This would have ensured expert
oversight of the content of the calendars, and through the collection
of a “calendar tariff” in exchange for this service, a hefty income for
the academy.34
The Studien-Hof-Commission discussed the matter on November
14, 1774, and four days later a calendar privilege was issued for the
academy.35 Also on the basis of the favorable reception of the first
“academic calendar” that Hell published in the same year, hopes were
high that the proposed scheme would be adopted. One of the reasons
why it failed was a conflict of interest between Hell as future “director
of calendar issues” and the man on whom the continuous publication
of the Ephemerides depended, the court publisher and printer Johann
Thomas von Trattner, who made fortunes on the lucrative trade in
calendars. Trattner spared no effort to ruin the financial scheme, and
by implication the academy project. He annoyed Hell by delaying the
delivery of the 1775 volume of Ephemerides,36 and during an audience
“moaned and begged” the empress to revise the plans, unless she
wanted to send him and his creditors to bankruptcy.37 Throughout
the autumn of 1775, Hell kept bombarding the chancellery with
memoranda on the subject of the calendar. The plan of setting up
94 László Kontler
the Kalender-Administrations-Collegium was still on the agenda of the

Studien-Hof-Commission in April 1776—but to no avail. In a note on a
memorandum of the committee of November 25, 1775, Maria Theresa
had already made up her mind. A reference to the “poor bookkeepers
and bookbinders” and the stress of the need to raise funds “without
oppressing the citizens” makes an impression as if her heart had been
softened by Trattner’s pleas. However, she also added that she “could
not possibly decide to launch an accademie des scienses [sic] with 3 ex-
Jesuits and a professor of chemistry, however worthy, we should be
a laughingstock in the world . . . The accademie [sic] . . . should present
a regular plan on how, and what subjects and objects, this accademie
would treat with benefit and honor. I find the Abbé Hell not strong
enough, an accademie which is worse than the already existing ones
would be worth neither the costs nor the effort.”38
Thus, besides the embitterment of a representative of powerful
commercial interests in the realm, the ruler’s decision to abandon
the project of the academy was also motivated by considerations of
the substance of the enterprise. The failure of Hell to salvage for him-
self and fellow ex-Jesuits influential positions through his plan for
an Austrian Academy of Sciences suggests that his chances to expand
his academic influence through government-sponsored initiatives
in the imperial center narrowed. But there still remained substantial
assets for him to preserve a scope of maneuver in the new status quo,
thanks to his long-standing commitments to supra-imperial and sub-
imperial cultural spaces. From this angle, the decision to concentrate
on regional sources in the Ephemerides, and especially extolling the
achievements of the sites in the Hungarian half of the realm—as we
shall see, under the patronage of local Catholic magnate-prelates—
seems to be a response to the pressures exerted by a bureaucratic cen-
ter consolidating the Habsburg composite monarchy as an “empire.”
At this point, the cultural credit accumulated by Hell in the interna-
tional republic of learning through the building of the Ephemerides
assumed greater importance than ever. The annual had become an
indispensable source of up-to-date astronomical knowledge by virtue
of its continent-wide and partially global collection, publication, and
interpretation of data. Hell had become one of the foremost nodal
astronomers of the period and was difficult to evade both in terms of
accessing astronomical knowledge through perusing his annual and
in authenticating such knowledge through its publication there. Being
confronted with new realities at the imperial center—still possessing
a prestigious position as a state servant, but deprived of the institu-

tional (and spiritual) leverage of his order and finding that avenues of
government patronage had become blocked before him—he turned
to the corners of the realm he had learned to appreciate during his
early career, and began internationally extolling their virtues through
the tool that still remained in his hands: the Ephemerides.
Hell’s response (2): Decentering the realm?
The astronomical journey of 1776 was in a sense a revisiting of these

roots in Hungary, combined with the pleasing awareness—amply
expressed in the report published in the Ephemerides—that the cre-
ation of new observatory towers there, together with the already
existing ones, might elevate the status of these parts as a power to
reckon with in the discipline. Hell’s companion on this journey was
János (Joannes) Madarassy (1743–1814), sent to study with him in
Vienna by the bishop of Eger, Count Károly Eszterházy (1725–1799).
In Eszterházy, perhaps the most erudite churchman of eighteenth-
century Hungary, Hell recognized a potential champion of Catholic
learning who might restore its glory after the demise of his order.
Educated by Jesuits in Bratislava (Hun. Pozsony, Ger. Pressburg),
Trnava, and the Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum in Rome,
Eszterházy was a devoted adherent of Pope Benedict XIV and shared
his appreciation of experimental science, even the work of the phi-
losophes. He nevertheless remained a convinced Tridentine Catholic,
opposed from the outset to Habsburg ecclesiastical reforms, espe-
cially in their Josephian guise.39 Upon his accession to Eger in 1762,
Eszterházy embraced the plans of his predecessor Ferenc Barkóczy
(1710–1765, and from 1762 archbishop of Esztergom) to develop
the local seminary into a university. Construction activity promptly
began; in 1769 a medical academy was opened, and the new observa-
tory tower was ready for use by 1776. However, as early as 1763 Maria
Theresa denied the authorization of a new university, and by the time
the building was complete in 1785, clause 14 of the general law of
education for the Kingdom of Hungary (Ratio Educationis, 1777) had
stipulated that there was to be one single university in the whole of
the kingdom: “the one splendidly located in the very midst of the
country [Buda], endowed with rich funds and teaching personnel
well trained in all manner of sciences.”40 The school at Eger remained
a lyceum, not even allowed (as Eszterházy requested in 1784) to be a
96 László Kontler
temporary host to the university evacuated from Trnava but not yet
possible to accommodate conveniently in the Hungarian capital.
Hell’s detailed report in the Ephemerides about the five-week jour-
ney with Madarassy from Vienna to Eger and back is a remarkable
document. Besides recording the data of observations carried out at
each station—aimed chiefly at a more accurate determination of the
geographic latitude of several locations in Hungary, thus correcting
the “grave errors” contained in Ignaz Müller’s Mappa geographica
novissima regni Hungariae (Vienna, 1769)41—the account provides
a wealth of insights into the cultural environment where the jour-
ney took place. Praises lavished by Hell on the benevolent bishop of
Eger, characterized as a munificent patron of learning, are a recur-
rent theme. But the territory is densely populated with further men
of eminent learning. They include more than the old friends and
associates, such as Weiss at Trnava and Sajnovics, now professor of
mathematics at the university recently moved to the “metropolis
of Hungary.” Mention is also made of Máté Balajthi, Eszterházy’s
first protégé to have studied with Hell at the Universitätssternwarte
in 1762 (now vicar at the nearby town of Kunszentmárton), and the
former archivist of the episcopal collections, Mátyás Kotuts, who
had just succeeded Balajthi as professor of mathematics at the gym-
nasium of Eger. Further, we meet the illustrious prior of Eger, Count
Ignác Batthyány (1741–1798; formerly the erudite librarian of the
Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum in Rome, and later bishop of
Alba Iulia [Hun. Gyulafehérvár, Ger. Weissenburg] in Transylvania),
and on the return journey the prior of the Cathedral of Veszprém, Pál
Kiss. In this country swarming with men of superior learning (invari-
ably good Catholics, several of them former Jesuits), even the com-
mon man is distinguished by a keen “interest in mathematics”—like
the innkeeper of the village of Szered, who watches in admiration
Hell drawing a meridian line with a stick on the floor of his house.42
At the end of the account, Hell sighs in relief: “Thus my tour of
Hungary for the improvement of astronomy and geography . . . and
for the greater glory of God is completed.”43 The fact that the latter
phrase was also the motto of the temporarily defunct Society of Jesus
could be of significance. Decision-makers in the imperial center may
have turned hostile to the tradition of science represented by Hell
and his attempts to find new institutional bulwarks for it. But these
traditions seemed—or at least were represented by him—to flourish
in the province of the realm that he called his “fatherland,”44 with
a powerful and generous patron, and a substantial rank and file of

dedicated scholars.
Over the subsequent years Hell made efforts to support these pro-
vincial initiatives with all the weight of his scientific expertise and
the institutional means still available to him. His correspondence is
replete with advice and instructions to Weiss concerning the con-
struction of the university observatory in Buda.45 The 1780 and 1781
volumes of the Ephemerides gave generous space to reporting the astro-
nomical activity carried out at the new observatories of the Kingdom
of Hungary, the “most splendid new observatory of Eger” being espe-
cially commended.46 Thus, the reputation of the Ephemerides, once
established in cosmopolitan contexts and by cosmopolitan means,
was put into the service of a patriotic project of promoting scientific
knowledge produced in local, Hungarus spaces. In his correspondence
Hell was quite explicit that this was in defiance of unpleasant devel-
opments in the metropolitan center. As he wrote to the Berlin royal
astronomer Johann (Jean) Bernoulli III, “enemies of the Society [of
Jesus] and the solid sciences,” guided by a narrow view of science
obsessed with sheer utility, had been persuading the empress that
“enough worthless funds were already being spent . . . for the sole pur-
pose of retaining reputation abroad.” He came to the conclusion that
“my Hungary (for I am myself an Ungarus) has a sounder attitude to
astronomy, which is held in high esteem among the Ungari,” add-
ing as a demonstration data from the recently published compen-
dium of the statistician Ignaz de Luca on “Austrian” men of learning,
Das gelehrte Österreich (2 vols., 1776–1778): “among these prominent
authors, Ungari make up the largest proportion . . . this demonstrates
that Hungary has flourished, and still flourishes, more than the rest
of the hereditary kingdoms with respect to the cultivation of all kinds
of sciences.”47 With the help of the Ephemerides, Hell was offering a
map of “learned Austria” that recorded the changes explained to his
esteemed colleague, another influential voice in the respublica astro-
nomicae: a shift of the center of gravity to the east.48
Neither, it might be added, did Hell remain content extolling the
virtues of his “fatherland” in terms of its current merits in the field
of science. Several years earlier he had begun displaying an acute
interest in the historical formation of the political entity that corre-
sponded to this territory, whose integrity was now being challenged
by enlightened centralization. Soon after his return from the north
in 1770, he collected, annotated, and discussed materials pertaining
98 László Kontler
to the history of Hungarians during the later stages of the steppe

migrations, the conquest and settlement in the Carpathian basin,
and the early period of the Christian monarchy. He studied primary
sources, such as the tenth-century Byzantine emperor Constantine
Porphyrogenitus’s De administrando imperii and the twelfth-century
Hungarian royal clerk Anonymus’s Gesta Hungarorum; brooded over
questions like the “original homes” of the Magyar tribes, the date
of birth of the founder of the state, King Stephen I, and the later
immigration of further nomadic groups like the Jazigs and Cumans;
and corresponded about them with fellow (ex-)Jesuit historians
István (Stephanus) Kaprinai, István (Stephanus) Katona, and Georg
(Georgius/György) Pray.49 At the time of their conception these stud-
ies were intended as contextual explorations for the Expeditio litter-
aria, the never accomplished summa of the 1769 journey.50 In the
post-1773 status quo, when circumstances favored the amplification
of Hell’s Hungarus commitments, these studies, which were devoted
to central issues of the genesis of the Hungarian “patria,” smoothly
dovetailed with his efforts to promote the progress of science in
the realm and could have served to consolidate his credentials as a
“patriot.”
This was an ingenious and promising combination of flexibility
in intellectual endeavors,51 and adaptability in social brokerage. Still,
Hell was fighting an uphill battle. His old-new Hungarus patriotism,
expressed by his adulation of recent achievements in scientific prog-
ress in the country and his immersion in ancient Magyar history,
sounded insincere to an influential group of the Hungarian elite.
These political men of letters, while urging economic improvement
and cultural refinement, and emphasizing the need for the embel-
lishment of the vernacular as a means of achieving this end, still
insisted on the social preeminence of the nobility, derived from its
supposed descent from a steppe warrior aristocracy associated with
the “Scythians.” Kinship with the “fish-smelly” Lappians, as pro-
posed, with Hell’s sponsorship, in Sajnovics’s Demonstratio, was from
their perspective not merely undignified and unwholesome, but also
treacherous and hostile. They were convinced that such a denigration
of the Magyar stock received intellectual ammunition from German
academic circles, where ideas of enlightened bureaucratic central-
ization were also promoted, and was encouraged by the Habsburg
government, which implemented such ideas to the detriment of the
ancient privileges of Hungary.52 After support for him in the imperial
center had become lukewarm, whatever hopes Hell entertained of

reconstituting himself as a spiritus movens of a scientifically thriving,
Hungarus counterweight to Vienna, the alienation of this group of the
nobility limited his possibilities to seeking the favors of conservative
Catholic lords like Eszterházy. While the latter possessed the means to
invest in developing the infrastructure of learning, this was still insuf-
ficient leverage to negotiate the recognition of the Eger lyceum as a
university, which was a political matter. After medicine, the instruc-
tion of law and philosophy was stopped in Eger in 1784, and though
these were revived in 1791 (when Eszterházy played a leading role in
the Catholic magnate party at the Hungarian diet), the status of the
school remained unaltered in the new reign.53
The figure of Hell connected the local, imperial, and cosmopoli-
tan spaces—real as well as symbolic ones—of producing scientific
knowledge in eighteenth-century Europe. He moved with facility in
and between “life worlds” of different scales, from the small town
environments of the Central European periphery in north and east
Hungary, through the Catholic-Jesuit hierarchy, the courtly atmo-
sphere of the Habsburg capital (and its Copenhagen counterpart),
and the international republic of learning, to the icy wilderness of
the Arctic.54 Everywhere, he managed to exploit the range of oppor-
tunities presented for “success.” When the apparent continuity estab-
lished through his person among these scenes became fragmented, it
seemed a realistic hope that he would be able to play out the capital
raised at some of them against the ones where a deficit had suddenly
accumulated. In the interest of maintaining his positions it might
even be said that he was negotiating knowledge across the boundaries
of distinct scientific fields. In the end, what appears to be his attempt
to “decenter” the realm that had once bred him but then abandoned
him, turns out to have failed. Yet, his story is no less instructive for
the fact that it was a failure: it reveals something about what scientists
operating at multiple scales may—or may not—achieve by “negotiat-
ing knowledge” at times of imperial consolidation.
Notes
* I am grateful to Per Pippin Aspaas for his comments.
1. Sándor Hadobás’s bibliography on Hell and his fellow Jesuit Venus-observer
János (Joannes) Sajnovics lists over 600 titles, but these include only two
monographic studies on Hell: a helpful though dated and “hagiographic”
work by Ferenc Pinzger S. J., Hell Miksa emlékezete [Remembrance of Miksa
100 László Kontler
Hell], 2 vols. (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1920–1927); and

Elena Ferencová’s biography, Maximilián Hell významná osobnosť slovenskej
vedy a techniky [Maximilián Hell, an important figure of Slovak science and
technology] (Bratislava: Asklepios, 1995). Both make available a respect-
able number of sources. The rest of the literature includes many contribu-
tions to “popular science” and relatively few scholarly articles. Two recent
dissertations must be mentioned. One of them explores Hell’s scientific
milieu in Vienna, while the other focuses on the 1768–70 Venus tran-
sit expedition, but examines it in the context of Hell’s entire career. See
Nora Pärr, “Maximilian Hell und sein wissenschaftliches Umfeld im Wien
des 18. Jahrhunderts” (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 2011; published,
Nordhausen: Bautz Verlag, 2013); and Per Pippin Aspaas, “Maximilianus
Hell (1720–1792) and the Eighteenth-Century Transits of Venus: A Study
of Jesuit Science in Nordic and Central European Contexts” (PhD diss.,
University of Tromsø, 2012), accessed July 12, 2013, http://hdl.handle
.net/10037/4178
2. “Lappish” is regarded derogatory today. The theory had been entertained
by several scholars over the previous century and a half. For a recent sum-
mary, see László Kontler, “Distances Celestial and Terrestrial: Maximilian
Hell’s Arctic Expedition, 1768–1769. Contexts and Responses,” in The
Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century, ed.
André Holenstein, Hubert Steinke, and Martin Stuber (Leiden: Brill,
2013), 721–750. For Hell’s role behind Sajnovics’s authorship, see Aspaas,
“Maximilian Hell,” 117–119. The material published in the Demonstratio
would have formed part of the Tomus historicus in a multivolume Expeditio
litteraria ad Polum Arcticum, which Hell planned but never realized.
3. The standard work is Harry Woolf, The Transits of Venus: A Study of
Eighteenth-Century Science (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1959). See also
more recent surveys: Eli Maor, Venus in Transit (Princeton: Princeton
U. P., 2004); William Sheehan and John Westfall, The Transits of Venus
(Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2004); and Christophe Marlot, Les Passages
de Vénus: Histoire et observation d’un phénoméne astronomique (Paris: Vuibert/
Adept, 2004); Andrea Wulf, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens
(London: William Heinemann, 2012); Christiaan Sterken and Per Pippin
Aspaas, eds., Meeting Venus (Brussels: Vrije Universiteit Brussels, 2013).
4. Place names from the old Kingdom of Hungary and elsewhere in Central
Europe are given as they now appear on the map. Alternatives are pro-
vided on first occurrence in brackets.
5. “Instruction. Für dem Kaiser. Königl. Astronomen Maximilianum Hell S.
J.,” Universitätsarchiv Wien, Universitätskonsistorium, Fasc. I. No. 2. Reg.
101. Cf. Pinzger, Hell emlékezete, 16–17 (in Hungarian translation); Aspaas,
“Maximilianus Hell,” 64–74 (German text, with English translation).
6. The first astronomical observatory in Vienna was created by court math-
ematician Johann Jakob (Giovanni Iacopo) Marinoni (1676–1755) on the
top of his own house in 1730; the “tower” of the Jesuit College followed in
1733 (directed by Father Josef Franz, one of Hell’s teachers and patrons).
After Marinoni’s death his equipment was bequeathed to the empress,
who donated it to the university, marking the beginning of the university
observatory. On the history of the latter, see Jürgen Hamel, Isolde Müller,
and Thomas Posch, eds., Die Geschichte der Universitätssternwarte Wien.
Dargestellt anhand ihrer Instrumente und eines Typoskripts von Johann
Steinmayr, Acta Historica Astronomiae, vol. 37 (Frankfurt: Harri Deutsch
Verlag, 2010).
7. Jürgen Hamel, “Ephemeriden und Informationen: Inhaltliche
Untersuchung Berliner Kalender bis zu Bodes Astronomischen Jahrbuch,”
in 300 Jahre Astronomie in Berlin und Potsdam (= Acta Historica Astronomiae,
vol. 8. Frankfurt: Harri Deutsch Verlag, 2000), 49–68; Cornelia Maria
Schörg, “Die Präsenz der Wiener Universitätssternwarte und ihrer
Forschungen in den deutschsprachigen astronomischen Jahrbüchern und
Fachzeitschriften 1755–1830,” unpublished Mag. Phil. thesis, University
of Vienna (2009), 31–37.
8. Journal des Sçavans (1775), 173—Translations into English of excerpts orig-
inally in French, Latin, and German are mine.
9. Ephemerides Anni 1761 ad meridianum Vindobonensem jussu Augustorum cal-
culis definitae a Maximilian Hell, è S.J. caesaro-regio astronomo, et mechanices
experiment. prof. public. et ordin. Vindobonae, typis et sumtibus Joannis
Thomae Trattner, caes. reg. aulae typographi et bibliop. 178. The annals
will be referred to hereafter as Hell, Ephemerides (year).
10. Hell, Ephemerides (1764): 221.
11. Paris, Pont-à-Mousson, Rome, Bologna, Florence, Milan, Naples, Madrid,
Ingolstadt, Schwetzingen, Würzburg, Trnava, Graz, Vienna, Prague,
Wrocław, Poznan, Lviv, and Vilnius. To this number, one may add places
with Jesuit colleges that had no observatories but supplied Hell with data
(such as Dillingen and Ljubljana), and two observatories maintained by
other prestigious Catholic orders (Benedictines at Kremsmünster and
Augustinians at Sagan). The identification of Jesuit observatories in this
note and the next one is based on Augustín Udías, Searching the Heavens
and the Earth: The History of Jesuit Observatories (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003),
21–22.
12. These include Lisbon, Coimbra, Lyon, Avignon, Marseille, Parma, Brescia,
Siena, Palermo, Mannheim, Augsburg, and Olomouc (Olmütz).
13. Universitätssternwarte Wien, Institut für Astronomie, Manuscripte von
Hell (hereafter: USW MS Hell), vol. 3.
14. Ibid.; see in particular the following letters: Hell to Ch. Mayer, February
9, March 12, and April 10, 1761; Hell to Ximenes, February 18, 1761;
Freyherr Ehrmans zum Schlug (a noble Liebhaber der Astronomie in Lower
Austria) to Hell, May 8, 1761. On Hell’s supplying the latter a telescope,
see also Maximilian Hell, “Observatio Transitus Veneris ante discum Solis
die 5ta Junii 1761,” Ephemerides (1762): 62–67. Cf. Aspaas, “Maximilianus
Hell,” 100, 205–206.
15. Hell also mentions in their company a certain “Cibolla,” whom I have
been unable to identify.
16. Hell, Ephemerides (1776): 2 (Monitum). To the titles mentioned Hell could
have added the Leipzig-based Nova Acta Eruditorum, which also published
reviews of Ephemerides from 1762 on.
17. Huberti to Hell, October 3, 1757. USW MS Hell, vol. 3.
18. Journal des Sçavans (1766): 644–657; (1767): 614–616; USW MS Hell,
vol. 3. Trébuchet’s initiative might have been motivated by the implicit
rivalry between the Connoissance and the Ephemerides and the increas-
ingly explicit one between their moving spirits, Lalande and Hell; Aspaas,
“Maximilianus Hell,” 210.
19. Journal des Sçavans (1773): 90–93, 113–115. On the relationship of Hell
and Lalande, see Per Pippin Aspaas, “Le Père Jesuit Maximilien Hell et
ses relations avec Lalande,” in Jerôme Lalande (1732–1807). Une trajectoire
scientifique, ed. Guy Boistel, Jerôme Lamy, and Colette Le Lay (Rennes:
Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 129–148.
20. Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, no. 98 (July 30, 1764):
788–790.
21. Ibid., no. 134 (November 3, 1772): 1138; no. 97, (August 14, 1769): 879.
22. On the highly complex character and activities of Kästner, see Rainer
Baasner, Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, Aufklärer (1719–1800) (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 1991)
23. Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, no. 3 (January 6, 1777): 24.
24. On March 18, 1761, Hell explicitly requested the editors of the Journal des
Sçavans to review the Ephemerides. USW MS Hell, vol. 3. See further, Hell
to Weiss, January 11, 1783. Pinzger, Hell emlékezete, 2: 137; Hell to Kästner,
March 6, 1785; Hell to Kästner, January 26, 1788. György Gábor Csaba,
ed., A csillagász Hell Miksa írásaiból [From the writings of the astronomer
Miksa Hell] (Budapest: Magyar Csillagászati Egyesület, 1997), 58.
25. The only exception is a reference to the Ephemerides of 1765 and Hell’s
calculation of the longitude of Vienna by the Swedish astronomer Pehr
Wilhelm Wargentin. “A Letter from Mr. Wargentin, F.R.S. and Secretary at
the Royal Academy of Sciences at Stockholm, to the Rev. Mr. Maskelyne,
M.A. F.R.S. and Royal Astronomer at Greenwich containing an Essay of a
new Method of determining the Longitude of Places, from Observations
of the Eclipses of Jupiter’s Satellites,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society (1766): 280, 284.
26. For details, see below. I had access to copies of Maskelyne’s accounts (held
at the archive of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, RGO 35/134) in the
private collection of the late Magda Vargha at the Konkoly-Thege Institute
for Astronomy in Budapest. Cf. also Ottó Kelényi B., Az egri érseki líceum
csillagvizsgálójának története [The history of the astronomical observatory
at the lycée of the Eger bishopric] (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1930), 6.
27. For more details in English, see Robert J. W. Evans, Austria, Hungary and
the Habsburgs: Central Europe c. 1683–1867 (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2006),
especially chaps. 1–4, 6–8, and 11. Useful surveys also include Domokos
Kosáry, Culture and Society in Eighteenth-Century Hungary (Budapest:
Corvina, 1987); Éva H. Balázs, Hungary and the Habsburgs. An Experiment
in Enlightened Absolutism (Budapest: Central European U. P., 1997).
28. See László Kontler, “Polizey and Patriotism: Joseph von Sonnenfels and the
Legitimacy of Enlightened Monarchy in the Gaze of Eighteenth-Century
State Sciences,” in Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe, ed.
Cesare Cuttica and Glenn Burgess (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012),
75–91, 232–236 (footnotes).
29. Hell to Weiss, April 6, 1773, in Pinzger, Hell emlékezete, 2: 116–117.

30. Winfried Müller, “Der Jesuitenorden und die Aufklärung im süddeutsch-
österreichischen Raum,” in Katholische Aufklärung—Aufklärung im
katholischen Deutschland, ed. Harm Klueting, with Norbert Hinske and
Karl Hengst (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1993), 225–245. See also Helmut
Kröll, “Die Auswirkungen der Aufhebung des Jesuitenordens in Wien
und Niederösterreich: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Josephinismus in
Österreich,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 34 (1971): 547–617;
on the consequences of the suppression to the members of the order,
Hermann Haberzettl, Die Stellung der Exjesuiten in Politik und Kulturleben
Österreichs zu Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Verband der wissen-
schaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs, 1973); Antonio Trampus, I gesuiti
e l’Illuminismo. Politica e religione in Austria e in Europa centrale (1773–1798)
(Florence: Olschki, 2000).
31. Ferdinand Maas, “Die österreichischen Jesuiten zwischen Josephinismus
und Liberalismus,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 80 (1958): 66–100,
here 66–67.
32. A project for an academy drafted by Leibniz and supported by the impe-
rial general and statesman Eugene of Savoy sank into oblivion after 1716;
later plans inspired by the famous writer and language reformer Johann
Christoph Gottsched and pursued by the founder, Freiherr Josef von
Petrasch, of the first German scientific society in the Habsburg lands (at
Olmütz in 1746) also came to nothing. In 1764 Hell himself failed in
reviving the idea of an academy of sciences. See Joseph Feil, Versuche zur
Gründung einer Akademie der Wissenschaften unter Maria Theresia (Vienna:
Gerold, 1860). According to the report of a Danish visitor of Hell’s, the
1764 initiative was thwarted because Hell rejected an (unnamed) minis-
ter’s insistence that members of the academy should be appointed by the
government; Aspaas, “Maximilianus Hell,” 145–146.
33. There were limits and exceptions to this moderation. Several prominent
Jesuit professors were evicted from university positions, and quite a few
left the lands of the monarchy (mainly to Russia and Prussia).
34. Many documents are held in the Österreichisches Haus-, Hof-, und
Staatsarchiv. Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv (hereafter: HHStA AVA).
Studienhofkommission. 75: Wien Akademie der Wissenschaften (Sig. 15);
132: Protokolle der Studienhofkommission (Sig. 28.)
35. For the protocols, HHStA AVA Studienhofkommission, 132. Sig. 28. fols.
724–725; 75, for the privilege, Sig. 15. Akademie. Kalenderwesen 1774–
1776: 1775. No. 2. fols. 1–2. Privilegium impressorium privativum für
die . . . Akademie der Wissenschaften auf alle Kalender.
36. Hell complained to Weiss that in spite of repeated requests, he had not
received the Ephemerides from Trattner, and suspected that this was retal-
iation for the plan regarding the calendars; Hell to Weiss, January 27,
1775, in Pinzger, Hell emlékezete, 2: 118.
37. Feil, Versuche, 65.
38. HHStA AVA Studienhofkommission, 75. Sig. 15. Akad. d. bildenden
Künste. 1775: 3007. fol. 10v. Cf. Feil, Versuche, 64; Aspaas, “Maximilianus
Hell,” 144; and Evans, Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs, 50.
39. László Kádár, “Eszterházy Károly racionalizmusa” [The rationalism of

Károly Eszterházy], Vigilia 64/6 (1999): 443–444. See further Béla Kovács,
ed., Eszterházy Károly emlékkönyv [Memory book of Károly Eszterházy]
(Eger: Érseki Gyűjteményi Központ, 1999); and especially the chapter of
István Bitskey, “‘Püspökünk, példánk és tükörünk volt.’ Eszterházy Károly
életpályája és egyénisége” [“He was our bishop, example, and mirror.”
Károly Eszterházy’s career and personality], 7–22.
40. Az 1777-iki Ratio Educationis, trans. and ed. Aladár Friml (Budapest:
Katholikus Középiskolai Tanáregyesület, 1913), 50.
41. An army officer, Müller (c. 1727–1804) was only a namesake of Maria
Theresa’s above-mentioned Jansenist confessor. The map project was
supervised by the president of the Viennese military court council
(Hofkriegsrat), the famous general Count Franz Moritz Lacy (1725–1801),
the future initiator of the land survey of Joseph II.
42. Hell, “Observationes Astronomicae Latitudinum Geographicarum
sive Elevationum Poli, Locorum quorundam Ungariae, factae 1776,”
Ephemerides (1777): 167 (flawed pagination: correctly 276).
43. Ibid., 289.
44. Ibid., 278.
45. Hell to Weiss on February 16, 1779; on April 14, 1779 (twice); on June 9,
1780. In Pinzger, Hell emlékezete, vol. 2: 128–134.
46. “Observationes Astronomicae Agriae in Ungaria in Observatorio Novo
Excellentissimi, Illustrissimi ac Reverendissimi Episcopi Agriensis D. D.
Caroli, e Comitibus Eszterhazi,” Ephemerides (1780): 32–33; “Observationes
Astronomicae in Novo Observatorio Universitatis Regiae Buda in Ungaria,
a Cel. D. Francisco Weiss Astronomo Regio Universitatis,” Ephemerides
(1781): 28–29.
47. In the same letter, Hell elaborated in considerable detail the merits of the
bishop of Eger in promoting the sciences, astronomy in particular, as well as
the spectacular development of the observatories of Trnava and Buda. Hell
to Johann (Jean) Bernoulli III, February 15, 1777 (Universitätsbibliothek
Basel). I am grateful to Per Pippin Aspaas for having shared with me cop-
ies of the Hell-Bernoulli correspondence. Cf. Aspaas, “Maximilianus Hell,”
177, 179–180.
48. There is no scope here to compare Hell’s judgment of the policies of
Vienna with those it actually pursued in the matter, or the amount of
wishful thinking at the bottom of the proposed “shift.”
49. USW MS Hell, vol. 4, nos. 26, 36, 40, 41, 58, 85, and 97 are just a few of
the materials relevant to this concern. The manuscripts are not dated, but
most of the correspondence in which their topics are addressed is from
the early 1770s. For example, Hell to Pray, April 14, 1770 and January 10,
1771 (in Pinzger, Hell emlékezete, 2: 202–204, 206–208); Kaprinai to Hell,
February 15, 1771 (USW MS Hell, vol. 4. no. 47); Katona to Hell, November
2, 1776 (USW MS Hell, vol. 4, no. 53). Further relevant holdings in the
Library of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest include fragments by
Hell (“Observationes historicae et ethimologicae . . . ”), with commentary
by Pray, Coll. Prayana, Tom. XVIII, nos. 23–25; letters from Hell to Pray
on the same subjects from 1771–72, MS G 119, nos. 161–169, 191; and
correspondence between Hell and Kaprinai in 1771–72 on “Anonymus,”

Coll. Kaprinayana. Tom. LXIV, nos. 2–3.
50. Cf. endnote 2 above.
51. The decades of Hell’s life as a man of science saw the gradual lapse of the
mechanical-mathematical sciences in the face of the rise of the study of
animate nature and humanity, including the study of man as a histori-
cal creature. One can only speculate on the extent to which he saw this
happening. If he did, he may have realized the political benefits of going
along.
52. For details, see Kontler, “Distances celestial and terrestrial,” 744–750. It
has, however, also been emphasized that hostility to “Finno-(Lappo)-
Ugrianism” was confined to a minority, and the dominant feeling was per-
plexity (resulting in hybrid theories). See László Szörényi, “Nyelvrokonság,
őstörténet és epika a 18. századi magyarországi jezsuita latin irodalomban”
[Language kinship, ancient history, and epic in the 18th-century
Hungarian Jesuit Latin literature], Irodalomtörténeti közlemények 101/1–2
(1997): 16–24; István Margócsy, “A tiszta magyar. Nemzetkarakterológia
és nemzeti történelem összefüggései Bessenyei és kortársai nyelvrokon-
ság-felfogásában” [The pure Hungarian. The correlations of national char-
acterology and national history in the language kinship conceptions of
Bessenyei and his contemporaries], in A szétszórt rendszer. Tanulmányok
Bessenyei György életművéről [The dispersed system. Studies on the oeuvre
of György Bessenyei], ed. Csaba Csorba and Klára Margócsy (Nyíregyháza:
Bessenyei Kiadó, 1998), 131–140.
53. As late as in 1790, Hell was expressing his hope that university status could
be achieved for Eger. Hell to Eszterházy, October 30, 1790, Archiepiscopal
Archives, Eger, Archivum vetus 2629.
54. Hell’s movement in these spaces has been explored in unequal breadth and
depth. The “Introduction and Biographical Essay” in Aspaas, “Maximilian
Hell,” is a remarkable effort to develop a balanced assessment.
Part II
Competition of Empires: A
Motor of Change in Knowledge
Acquisition and Authentication
4
Capitalizing Manuscripts,
Confronting Empires: Anquetil-
Duperron and the Economy
of Oriental Knowledge in the
Context of the Seven
Years’ War*
Stéphane Van Damme
The celebrated French traveler in India, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-

Duperron (1731–1805), was regarded by the Orientalist tradition as
one of the first “field Indianists.” In Paris, he was part of the first
Orientalist circle around the Royal College and the King’s library, rub-
bing shoulders with the Hebrew scholar Abbé Sallier (1685–1761),
the curator of antiquities and medals Abbé Barthélemy (1716–1792),
and the antiquarian Comte de Caylus. His religious education as a
Jansenist led him to develop an interest in the theology and civili-
zations of the East in the wake of studies concerning primitivism,
notably Zoroastrianism. This ancient religion played a huge role in
the study of comparative religion during the eighteenth century. In
1755, Anquetil-Duperron decided to go to India to seek out manu-
scripts and learn languages in situ. He spent the period 1755–1763
traveling in south India and discovering texts in Parsi communities.
He published a French translation of the Zend-Avesta in 1771 based
on a modern Persian language translation provided by a Parsi priest
in Surat. This discovery led to a large mobilization of the European
scholarly world, including the British Orientalist William Jones and
the Dane Ramus Christian Rask, who, in 1820, collected several more
Avesta manuscripts. For the Orientalist tradition, Anquetil-Duperron
109
110 Stéphane Van Damme
was therefore considered a heroic figure.1 In the last decades, histori-

ography has surpassed this hagiographic framework, paying attention
to the contextualization of his work. Some intellectual historians2
have characterized Anquetil-Duperron as one of the forerunners of
the human sciences; others have seen his career as a social and cul-
tural failure: in spite of his self-fashioning, Anquetil-Duperron was
incapable of being accepted by the Enlightenment philosophes.3 For
Urs App, he is one representative of Catholic Orientalism in India.4
In the wake of recent studies on Enlightenment imperialism, Siep
Stuurman argues that Anquetil-Duperron played a central role in the
critique of Eurocentrism, because he attempted to establish the ratio-
nality of the sociopolitical systems of India, Persia, and the Ottoman
Empire in his book Législation orientale (1778) and pleaded for a global
history of civilizations at the end of his life in 1805.5
This chapter calls for moving away from this intellectual history
to restore Anquetil-Duperron to his scientific and political context.
Recently, in the colonial contexts of the history of science, insistence
on go-betweens, circulation of information, and encounters have
pointed out the importance of orders of information. Christopher
Bayly was one of the first historians to attempt to link the birth of
Orientalism with a broader enterprise of intelligence gathering and
information ordering. Regarding the beginning of the eighteenth cen-
tury, he stressed the stagnation of European knowledge about India.6
Similarly, Simon Schaffer has argued that Newtonian astronomy was
increasingly related to a new global order of information that bound
together scientific accounts, observations, social credit, and imperial
economy.7 This chapter, therefore, will come back to the practice of
collecting manuscripts in the specific context of the Seven Years’ War.
The Seven Years’ War, I will argue, opened in India a period of uncer-
tainty and disrupted the ancient order of information established
between foreign companies and local empires. It gave an opportunity
for the learned adventurer to renegotiate the boundaries of oriental
knowledge and to reshape the hierarchy among centers of knowledge
in Europe. As recent works on science and empire point out, wartime
is a moment of predicament for the pursuit of science, but for his-
torians, it also aids in opening the blackbox of entangled practices.
Collecting manuscripts, in this context, was not a harmless intellec-
tual or bibliophilic practice, but took part in a more global reflection
about information and mediation at the crossroads of political econ-
omy, commercial networks, and learned practices.8 Such collecting
Anquetil-Duperron and the Economy of Oriental Knowledge 111
was not anecdotal, but took place among a new set of tools created
by the Royal State in France to manage intelligence and information
gathering, such as bookkeeping, inventorying, and archiving.9 I will
see how this quest for manuscripts of ancient Asian religions fits into
a political economy of oriental knowledge. Thinking about this case
in the global context of the Seven Years’ War helps us to understand
the relationship between the learned practices of collecting manu-
scripts and the capitalization of knowledge.10 I argue that the practice
of manuscript gathering was linked to a skeptical tradition using ori-
ental religion to criticize orthodox Catholicism; second, that it mir-
rored a strategy of writing history during the Seven Years’ War; and
finally, that through the quarrel that involved Anquetil-Duperron, it
offered a way of denouncing mediation and interaction as a legiti-
mate process of oriental knowledge production.
Chasing Oriental manuscripts: Religious

science or skeptical journey?
Educated at the University of Paris where he began to learn Hebrew,

Anquetil-Duperron also studied at the seminary of Auxerre on the
recommendation of the Jansenist bishop Caylus, who sent him to
Holland, where he lived between October 1751 and January 1752,
first in Amersfoort and then in Rhynwijk. It was at the King’s library,
back in Paris, that he was noticed by the Abbé Sallier, guard of the
Department of Printed Books, who introduced him to the schol-
arly community of Orientalism in 1754. Between 1755 and 1763,
Anquetil-Duperron left France for India, with no other luggage than
a “case of mathematics, the Hebrew Bible of Leusden, the books
of Montaigne and Charron.” In the catalogue of his library books
from this skeptical tradition were found: Charron, Dellon, Thévenot,
and others.11 These elements noted in passing in the account are all
signs of rallying the Jansenist to the skeptical cause. Alongside the
Bible that J. Leusden published in 1705 in Amsterdam, we find ref-
erence to Montaigne and Charron’s De la sagesse. More than a ref-
erence to humanism, they are connected to the skeptical tradition.
Like his distant predecessors, Anquetil-Duperron is a remote legacy
of missionaries.12 This tradition of the demystification of Jesuit travel
accounts is based on a true economy of proof and a new epistemol-
ogy of testimony that gained recognition in the second half of the
seventeenth century. Thévenot, for instance, published his collection
of travels in order to make comparisons, and Dr. C. Dellon published

the “curious” pieces in 1709 following his account.13 However, in
1786, Anquetil-Duperron defended a third way between skepticism
and religious credulity.14 Moreover, the starting point of the so-called
“Duperron’s vocation” is also linked to the Arabic specialist Leroux
Deshauterayes (1724–1795), who showed him several pages from
Oxford manuscripts about books of the Zends and Pehlvis. This epi-
sode underlined the rivalries with English erudition. Oxford scholars
remained fascinated by the ancient books of the Persians.15
The unusual undertaking of Anquetil-Duperron has to be situated
within the successive trips to India, starting from the late seventeenth
century, led by erudite libertines such as François Bernier in 1670,16
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1679,17 Melchésidech Thévenot in 1681,18
and Jean Chardin in 1686.19 It is also associated with the reinforce-
ment of French Orientalism through the Academy of Inscriptions
and Belles Lettres during the first decades of the eighteenth century
and the constitution of Oriental antiquaries.
His journey could be seen as part of the tradition of “strange and
curious” travels, putting remote political, religious, and cultural sensi-
tivities in India in the mirror of European absolutism.20 Recent works
have traced the origins of French Orientalism, such as the book of
Nicholas Dew,21 which attempts to describe and understand Baroque
Orientalism, or, alternatively, that of Urs App, which amounts to an
intellectual history of Enlightenment Orientalism.22 Urs App studies
the great figures of Voltaire, Diderot, and Volney, focusing particularly
on the religious question: “The present book does not claim to furnish
a history of Orientalism as a whole. Its much more modest aim is to
elucidate through relatively extensive case studies a crucial phase of
the European encounter with Asia: the century of Enlightenment.”23
In this perspective, we can interpret Anquetil-Duperron’s attempt to
deepen knowledge about early Christian communities on the Malabar
Coast, especially about the Christians of St. Thomas.24 The emancipa-
tion of Orientalism from a theological agenda came late, in the early
nineteenth century.25
Gathering manuscripts, a political economy
Anquetil-Duperron exploited the practice of research on manuscripts

and medals, which began in the late seventeenth century and repre-
sented the legitimate objects of antiquarian Orientalist pursuit since
then. With Antoine Galland, an association was set up among the

commercial world through mercantilist companies, diplomatic net-
works, and antiquarian research, already during the reign of Louis
XIV. Jacob Soll in his book on Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683)
shows that Colbert was the real master of knowledge and informa-
tion during the reign of Louis XIV.26 The nerve center of the system
lies in the Colbert library, which Soll describes as “an encyclopedia
of the state,”27 and which is described by Baluze as housing state
papers, those of the administration of Cardinal Mazarin, and its own
accounts. It is the integration of this library of administrative knowl-
edge to the traditional library that defines Colbert’s originality. Like
Bacon, Colbert believed that knowledge has a practical value for pol-
icy. This proximity helped merge the learned book culture with the
archival management of state action.
In his book on Baroque Orientalism under the reign of Louis XIV,
Nicholas Dew underlines the weight of the correspondence networks
surrounding François Bernier. His friends, Thévenot, Chapelain,
and La Mothe Le Vayer, urged him to publish his travel writings
about the Mughal Empire in April 1662.28 Relying on colonial
archives, Dew showed the importance of the Chapelain circle in the
East India Company and in the colonial administration. In India,
Bernier could rely upon the Company’s representative, François
Caron, whom he met several times and who invited him to pro-
duce a report in March 1668.29 In his travel account, the description
of metal circulation within Hindustan is important. When Bernier
decided to come back, Chapelain advised him to introduce himself
as a collector of medals and manuscripts for the King’s library.30 New
research on the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres clearly
demonstrated the connections between the learned pursuit, the
diplomatic network, and the Royal Mint.31 In the case of Anquetil-
Duperron, we found the same ties between science, commerce, and
politics. Like in Bernier’s travel account, astronomical observations
are used to dismiss superstition. Anquetil-Duperron was asked by
Caylus and Lamoignon de Malesherbes to observe the transit of
Venus in 1761 and received from Abbé Barthélémy a box of books
and instruments.32 Those instruments were sent through the East
India Company, and Anquetil-Duperron had a correspondence with
the director of the Company as well.33
From the beginning of the eighteenth century, especially under the
guidance of Abbé Bignon, the King’s library was the nerve center of
this economy of knowledge. Gifts, collections of books and manu-

scripts, and medals were boosted by the royal power. Through the
efforts of Abbé Bignon, the practice of the collection of oriental man-
uscripts developed between 1720 and 1730. The result was the cata-
logue of oriental manuscripts established in 1739. We are indebted
to Henri Omont for having published most of the documents from
the Bibliothèque Nationale de France about the “archaeological mis-
sions in the East.” The first volume of records indicates a shift in
the geography of research on manuscripts in reshaping “oriental”
between 1620 and 1720. Thus Abbé Bignon sets up a real policy of
increased funding, first to Greece, Constantinople, and Egypt, then
from 1684 on, to China, and finally from 1720, to India. In 1727, a
memorandum was sent to the attention of missionaries and of East
India Company merchants in order to guide their research: “The
acquisition of Persian manuscripts, to suit the King’s library, must
be [found] in the city where the Great Moghul is ordinarily resident;
those who will be responsible for their research must not only read
the Persian language but also must consult local scholars about their
learned choice.”34
This memorandum is interesting because it expresses the prin-
ciples of collection and draws an intellectual horizon. Here, man-
uscript research is clearly similar to a mercantilist conception of
knowledge based on the desire to enrich the state, to feed the
prosperity of the nation. This mercantilism is according to Jean-
Yves Grenier, “a political economy at the service of absolutism.”35
Transferring this conception to the field of knowledge: the rare
book, the manuscript, became the equivalent of precious metals
that would allow the growth of the stock that represents the King’s
library. The abundance of manuscripts is the counterpart of an
abundance of money in the discourse of librarians. The focus on
quantity of manuscripts rather than quality, but also to the mate-
riality of books (binders, pictures, etc.), fits into this symbolic and
bibliophilic dimension: “These manuscripts should be of a beau-
tiful handwriting and accurate, their bindings should be beauti-
ful and good, and if the binding is damaged or completely bad, it
will be necessary to repair or renew it in its own country of origin,
before sending it to France. It is required to see if the manuscript
is complete, if there is no shortage of pages, and to pay attention
to the beginning and the end of the manuscripts, and to be careful
not to take odd volumes.”36
This intellectual mercantilism was based on a distinction between

two economic circuits: international trade and domestic trade. The
establishment of such a network had to face the constraints of manu-
script circulation within the Company: the Jesuits were constantly
complaining about the action of the French East India Company
or the lieutenant of police in France about the boxes that remained
blocked in customs as any other imported goods.37 Finally, the eco-
nomic value of these exchanges was constantly present in the cor-
respondence. Political prestige has a cost, sometimes considered as
exorbitant.38 But the stakes involved in this circulation are also cogni-
tive, as shown in the letters of intermediaries to collect or order these
manuscripts. Officers of the East India Company or the Jesuits, such
as Father Le Gac, raised the question about the capacity of reading
these books in Paris,39 and therefore that of their use, both scholarly
and bibliophilic. This ambivalence of the manuscripts reflected this
vision of accumulation of the stock. By 1739, the number of volumes
that successfully reached Paris was 287.
Between empires: Collecting, translating and

spying in Surat
As Raymond Schwab showed in his 1934 biography, the publication

in 1771 of Anquetil-Duperron’s travel account in India followed a
publication strategy that aimed to stage the young scientist as an
adventurer. Anquetil-Duperron began the second part of his book
by stating: “The first two years of my travels were a mix of races,
hazards, disasters, and resources, the cause of which must be sought
in the enchanting pleasures of colonies, in my youth, in the heat
of passion and in the state our institutions were in the Coromandel
coast and in Bengal.”40 The first of three volumes of the Zend-Avesta is
thus entirely devoted to his journey’s account. Using a long account
in the place of a preliminary methodological discourse is a part of
this self-construction. The collection of manuscripts is particularly
attached to his stay in Surat where he was initiated by two religious
chiefs, the destours Darab and Kaous.41 When Anquetil-Duperron
arrived in Surat in December 1758, the city was caught in consider-
able tensions between the Moors and the English, as well as between
the Dutch and the French, with each nation, not to mention the
East India Company, defending its own privileges. The English came
to expel the Nawab of Surat, and they held the Moors under their
control, so that every European should go through them: “Anquetil

maneuvers between factions, Parsi are framed by a tangled struggle
between Parsi, Mohammedans, English, Dutch, and French,” wrote
Schwab.42 The quest for manuscripts obliged Anquetil-Duperron to
address the Dutch allies, the party hostile to the French in February
1759.43 Anquetil-Duperron therefore came under British protection.
He moved from one European community to another, generating ten-
sions and rejections. Raymond Schwab has discussed the duel with
another Frenchman, which took place during Anquetil-Duperron’s
stay at Surat. The latter was badly injured.44 In any case, his gathering
of manuscripts could be seen as a way of circulating among local com-
munities that were divided: a religious schism was taking place in this
period between the Parsi community and the Muslims. According to
his travel account, it took several months for Anquetil-Duperron to
gain access to manuscripts through the destours, or religious chiefs,
who guarded them. The destours were priests from the Mazdean reli-
gion. For them, these manuscripts had sacred value and were kept in
the temple.45 Kaous and Darab initiated Anquetil-Duperron into the
rudimentary understanding of the Zend through the apprenticeship
of modern Persian. Darab, an old master, was the main instructor.
A mentoring relationship was thus established, which unveiled the
secrets of language based on memorization and oral transmission.
But Anquetil-Duperron insisted on learning through writing, in the
manner in which he had learned Hebrew in his youth.46 The destours,
according to him, were constantly trying to hide things. Deprived of
the support of the head of the French trade post, Anquetil-Duperron
relied on his friendship with Taillefert, the head of the Dutch comp-
toire. During this period, Duperron was not isolated, but in contact
with Jesuit missionaries in China, such as Tieffenthaler and Gaubil,47
who were interested in Chinese antiquaries, as well as with Caylus,
who was in Paris.48 Anquetil-Duperron seemed to be at the center
of a different network of information that played at different scales.
Locally, he used his skills and connections to collect manuscripts and
translations. Globally, he had a clear idea of the interest his discover-
ies in Paris and in Asia would have back in Europe.
On the other hand, on several occasions, Anquetil-Duperron was
accused of being a spy during the Seven Years’ War.49 Indeed, this
collusion between intelligence, trade networks, and Orientalism is
not new. One can cite the case of merchants such as Paul Lucas and
his trip to the Middle East at the end of the seventeenth century.50
Paul Lucas was sent in 1699 as “antiquarian of the King,” and his
discoveries enriched the cabinets of the king. Anquetil-Duperron, like
Lucas, was close to the state; he was in contact with Vergennes and
Sartine, the French secretaries of state for foreign affairs. He was also
close to the East India Company. His travel account repeatedly men-
tions these collaborations and the predicament of the French trad-
ing posts.51 First of all, Anquetil-Duperron left France because he was
enrolled by the East India Company, and on his arrival at Pondicherry,
he was received by the French governor, Duval de Leyrit, who started
by increasing the pension allocated by the king. His travel is linked
to the geography of the French trading posts and to the presence of
the Company state in Pondicherry, and in Chandernagore. Wanting
to study the Sanskrit language in February 1756, he fell ill and had to
return to Pondicherry before going back to Chandernagore in April
1756. A year later, now recovered, he decided to go to Benares to
learn Sanskrit as the Seven Years’ War was declared. First hosted by
the English, Anquetil-Duperron had to flee when they discovered
his notes. After joining his brother in Pondicherry, he went to Surat
in 1758 after many adventures. He arrived in the middle of a war
between two claimants to the estate of the Mughal supported by the
English representative, Spencer. It was in March 1759 that he began
his studies on Parsis with destours Darab and Kaous. In March 1761,
he left Surat on an English ship in the company of French prisoners.52
The emphasis placed on spying in the circulation of information in
the travel account underlined the lack of trust and credit of European
adventurers in the circuit of gathering artifacts and texts. Far from
occupying high and legitimate positions, European scholars needed
to gain authority.
Restaging the French empire of science:

Paris as a center of Orientalism
Relating this episode in 1771, seven years after the end of the Franco-
British war, is to write history in a context where it is mainly the British
who imposed the grand narrative of the fall of the French empire in
India, as underlined by the books of Robert Orme and Richard Owen
Cambridge.53 The setting of the story of the French defeat invites a
political perspective. At the same time, the publication of Anquetil-
Duperron’s narrative tells us about the way that scholars returning
from expeditions set about ensuring the circulation of their works
and organized comparisons of texts across Europe. His travel account

thus contributed to justifying global pillage by establishing a new
hierarchy among Orientalist centers of knowledge.
Anquetil-Duperron returned from India as a prisoner of the British
and went to Oxford, where he sought to validate and authenticate
his manuscripts. After making contact with the principal specialists
in Oxford, he took his manuscripts to various libraries: “The desire
to compare my manuscripts with those of that university made no
small contribution to the reasons that had seemingly forced me to
take a detour via England on my return to Europe.” He visited the
Bodleian library, “after confirming that the finest of my manuscripts
was the same as the Zend manuscript in the Bodleian library, I told
Dr Swinton of my desire to see the manuscripts of Mr Hyde and Mr
Fraser.” Anquetil-Duperron portrays Oxford as a closed world of cold,
dark libraries: “We drank to the success of the works of Zoroaster,
and I strongly encouraged these gentlemen to revive the links that
the scholars of England once had with those of France. These words
pleased them; they told me I was the first Frenchman they recalled
seeing in Oxford for a reason related purely to the advance of human
knowledge.”
Anquetil-Duperron’s desire to compare manuscripts in order to
establish the validity of the copies he had amassed was overlaid by
a desire to expand awareness of his work. His visit to England, pri-
marily Oxford and London, gave him an opportunity to confirm the
hierarchical relationship between the capitals of Indianist knowledge
and to assert the new supremacy of Paris. The travel narrative surrep-
titiously develops into a discussion of national character:
The sciences in England are on a different footing from those in

France. Paris is the center of knowledge and the reciprocal rela-
tionships between all estates in this great city strip people of let-
ters of that bluntness and starchiness that are born of dry, sombre
work in the study. In England the title Doctor given to all scholars
makes them a body apart, with all the pedantry of the school.
Most reside in Oxford or Cambridge, cities whose air, for a mile
around, seems imbued with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Sometimes
they travel to London, where the inhabitants, mainly merchants,
shopkeepers and sailors, look on them with amusement and think
to pay them well in giving them a good meal. It is inventions that
are useful, in other words related to commerce or the navy, or
else entirely unusual, that bring consideration to a scholar in that

city. And even then, we must ask what kind of consideration? The
True Englishman says: “I have wealth and I spend it as I wish, the
soldiers and sailors are decent servants in my employ, made to
increase this wealth and ensure that I may enjoy it, the scholars
and artists amuse me.” In England also, the literary titles that are
much talked about in the other European states matter very little,
outside the two universities.
His visit to the British Museum, his conversation with Dr. Morton,
and his description of the poverty of the institution were intended to
devalue this recognized establishment and to contrast with his recep-
tion in Paris; between the one and the other, the vision of the capital
changes. His arrival in Paris on March 14, 1762 emphasizes this dif-
ference by portraying active research, groups of amateurs, and politi-
cal support from the government:
The next day, March 15, I deposited at the King’s library the works
of Zoroaster and the other manuscripts that I had intended for that
precious treasury. Gratitude then led me to visit the people who
had taken an interest in my travels and encouraged them. I found
the Abbé Barthélemy to be an obliging scholar and, most mov-
ingly to me, a friend . . . The scholars I had known in Paris before
my departure and those to whom I was introduced by the Abbé
Barthélemy were keen to impress upon me the joy that my return
had brought them. Soon the news of my travels and the impor-
tance of the manuscripts that I had lodged at the King’s library
brought me the attention of persons of the first rank: the Duc de
Choiseul, the Comte de Guiche, and M. de Saint-Simon, Bishop of
Agde, gave me a most favourable reception. Encouraged by these
flattering marks of general approval and giving way to pressure
from the public and even from foreigners, whose curiosity had
been aroused by the announcement of the works I had brought
back, I decided to organize the translations and literary research
that had occupied me during my travels.
The writing published by Anquetil-Duperron cannot however be

seen as a simple travel narrative, nor as the pure reflection of intel-
lectual life in the two capitals. His Discours préliminaire to the Zend-
Avesta, an account of his travels, is unusual in many ways. The original
edition, published in 1771, is dedicated “to the nations that possess

the original text of the books of Zoroaster,” in other words, the French
and the British, reflecting a project for the international organization
of erudite research. In this dedication, Anquetil-Duperron sets out a
defense of philosophical exchange: “Now that your reconciled inter-
ests return fugitive Indians to their homes and restore to souls that
calm and serenity required by the culture of Letters, may you join
forces to enrich Europe with a wealth that will not cost more tears to
the Lands that produce it!” Rather than missionaries,
What is needed are professional Scholars and traveling Scholars.

But will they travel? We know that enlightenment is increased by
communication and that need in distant countries calls for cer-
tain, prompt assistance. The approach that could furnish both
advantages would be to establish what I shall call peripatetic
Academies. This idea came to me in Surat in 1760 . . . I suppose this
Body of traveling scholars to be composed of eighty Academicians.
Starting with the Americas, two would settle in the Magellan Straits
or in Chile; two in Mexico; two in Quito, in Peru . . . It would be
good if every four years, two young Academicians for Africa, two
for America, and four for Asia would go and visit the Traveling
Scholars in their retreats, to collect their Books and take them any
assistance they might need. In Paris, having spent twelve years on
their mission, the scholars, along with several scholars of the City
adept in the knowledge of Languages and Peoples, would form a
special Body charged with revising, clarifying, and printing the
curious productions sent back from the three greatest parts of the
World.
While it may not have been unique, this type of project had the merit
of drawing attention to both the importance of the new paradigm of
mobility and the weight of the corporative academic model.
Disputed Asian antiquaries: Go-betweens

called into question
Between 1763 and 1787, Anquetil-Duperron published 15 disserta-

tions in the Recueils de l’Académie des inscriptions et Belles Lettres and
9 articles in the Journal des savants.54 In reality his Orientalist pursuit
must be seen in the context of an attempt to decode the “Persepolitan
inscriptions” that the traveler Cornelius de Bruin had helped publi-

cize through a collection published in Amsterdam in 1714. In 1752
the Comte de Caylus began working on decoding an inscription on
a vase. On March 15, 1762 he deposited 18 manuscripts at the King’s
library. A year later he became an associate member of the Academy
of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres. Despite its imperfections, Anquetil-
Duperron’s work provides one of the first decipherments by present-
ing a table of the two most ancient states of the Persian language,
Pehlvi and Zend. It was this data that enabled Silvestre de Sacy to
read the Pehlvi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings in 1793. In 1756
the Academy of Inscriptions granted Anquetil-Duperron the title of
“correspondent,” and throughout his travels his letters were read at
the Academy’s meetings. On his return he gave no fewer than 18 lec-
tures on Zoroaster, the Avesta, and the ancient languages of Persia. In
1763 he was appointed an associate of the Academy, then a pensioner
in 1785. On his side, Abbé Barthélemy attempted to decipher the
Palmyrian and Phoenician.55
But this reception cannot conceal the quarrel over the authentic-
ity of his manuscripts, which forms the background to his justifying
narrative. From 1760, some scholars, such as Abbé Ladvocat, denied
the importance of these manuscripts, judging them as too similar to
legends and fables to have any historical value.56 In March 1762 his
supporters, Caylus and Maurepas, publicized this view. From 1762 to
February 1769, Anquetil-Duperron strove to establish the authentic-
ity of the manuscripts in the King’s library. On April 26, 1770, two
curators of the oriental manuscripts published a further certification
in Anquetil-Duperron’s favor.
The quarrel did not remain confined to Paris, but crossed the
Channel. In 1771 in London a young English student, William Jones,
published a short work in French in which he accused Anquetil-
Duperron’s publication of being apocryphal. These strong accusa-
tions continued in both England and Germany until 1789. Between
the publication of the Traité in 1770 and his departure for India in
April 1783, Jones published several pamphlets against Anquetil-
Duperron among his first four major works (Grammar of the Persian
Language in 1771). Jones began securing his reputation as an elegant
writer on the occasion of his election to Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Literary
Club in 1773.57 In Samuel Johnson’s cenacle, Jones frequently talked
about languages.58 In 1771, the date of publication of the Lettre à
Monsieur A, Jones published his Dissertation sur la littérature orientale
and Grammar of the Persian Language. His trajectory was ascendant,

and his reputation as an Orientalist was growing. In his pamphlet,59
Jones mobilized three different arguments: the dubious translation,
the use of local intermediaries, and the lack of politeness and disre-
spect of the rules of hospitality. Jones started his pamphlet with a
paradoxical eulogy comparing Anquetil-Duperron to Columbus, and
pointing out his ambition to become a member of the Académie des
Inscriptions.60 But, he denounced also the impostor who pretended
to discover two new languages,61 disqualifying Anquetil-Duperron’s
travel practices as proper and legitimate sources of knowledge. He
mocked Anquetil-Duperron’s willingness to learn rare languages.62
And finally, he blamed Anquetil-Duperron for his use of local media-
tion. These criticisms were part of a larger critique against the corrup-
tion of empire and the danger of following the local go-betweens.63
In his response, Anquetil-Duperron proceeded along two lines of
defense. First, he defended his Orientalism as a field science. Refuting
Jones’s criticism, Anquetil-Duperron advocated the need for practi-
cal field trips in order to gain the knowledge of local languages. In
1786, in a book published in Berlin, he explained his epistemological
position:
Did I tell you that before writing on the Indians, we ought at least
to learn any of their languages and read some of their books? This
morality should not prevail. Travelers who go by land in this coun-
try, went through Greece, Syria, and Arabia, Persia. The books of
the Greeks, Arabs, Persians conveyed to us as well in this portion
of the Indian literature which dealt with history and sciences. The
immortal writings of the learned men from the seventeenth cen-
tury would flatten the difficulties of travel. But then it would be
necessary to travel or read. The love of truth is less enlightened,
less active than gold, precious stones and precious fabric, etc. Thus
we found it more convenient to build systems without departing
from the study.64
Anquetil-Duperron believed that a Europe-based science cabinet

was not sufficient for gaining credible knowledge about the rest of
the world. However, charges against him would remain strong until
1789 in England and in Germany, where his works were translated
in part. Scholars accused the Zend-Avesta of being a work of fiction.
Moreover, Anquetil-Duperron made the point that the denunciation
was another way to replicate or to displace the American quarrel by

replacing America with India. From 1778, he was involved in the
dissemination of knowledge about India through a series of books in
which he defended the “dignity of India compared to Europe” (1798).
He began a book on America from the same perspective, where he
made an interesting defense of the Arctic peoples (Eskimos).65
By situating debates over Orientalist manuscripts in the context of
war and global struggles between empires, we can better appreciate the
moral and political economic dimensions of Orientalist knowledge pro-
duction. The invention of the “Orient” occurred through accumulating
Asian written sources and transforming them into Asian monuments.
Tracing the itineraries of their capture, understanding the mobility of
oriental knowledge, prompts us to turn away from Orientalist genealogy
in favor of exploring the many surprising mediations, ramifications, and
connections at work in the mercantilist economy of knowledge. The
publication of the Zend-Avesta in 1771 could therefore be interpreted
as a strategy of rewriting the history of the Seven Years’ War in India
from the French point of view, as a way of restaging French Orientalism
and Paris as a new center of oriental knowledge. The famous quarrel
of authenticity launched by William Jones could be seen as a way of
denouncing field science and local mediations against the purity of
“armchair science” conducted far from imperial locales and isolated
from imperialist interests.66 Far from representing a morally and politi-
cally neutral process of antiquarian or erudite accumulation, the gath-
ering of oriental manuscripts in the context of competition and warfare
among Europeans nations was deeply politicized.
Notes
* I would like to express my deep gratitude to the first readers of this chap-
ter: Paul Cohen, Charles Walton, Simon Schaffer, Antonella Romano, Silvia
Sebastiani, Luca Mola, and Antoine Lilti.
1. Raymond Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-Duperron, Suivie des Usages civils et
religieux des Parsis (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1934).
2. Henry Laurens, Les origines intellectuelles de l’Expédition d’Egypte.
L’orientalisme islamisant en France, 1698–1798 (Paris and Istanbul: Institut
d’études anatoliennes, 1987).
3. Lucette Valensi, “Eloge de l’orient, éloge de l’orientalisme. Le jeu d’échecs
d’Anquetil-Duperron,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 212/4 (1995):
419–452.
4. Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania
P., 2010).
5. Siep Stuurman, “Cosmopolitan Egalitarianism in the Enlightenment:

Anquetil-Duperron on India and America,” Journal of the History of Ideas
68/2 (April 2007): 255–278.
6. Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and
Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.,
1996), 49–54.
7. Simon Schaffer, “Newton on the Beach: The Information Order of Principia
mathematica,” History of Science 47 (2009): 243–276.
8. Insistence is put in recent historiography on go-betweens, circulations
of information in colonial context: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways
to Be Alien: Travels and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham,
MA: Brandeis U. P., 2011); Joan-Pau Rubies, Travel and Ethnology in the
Renaissance: South India through European Eyes (Cambridge: Cambridge U.
P., 2000); Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo,
eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820
(Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009).
9. Jacob Soll, “Colbert, Louis XIV and the Golden Notebooks: What a King
Needs to Know to Rule,” in Exploring Cultural History: Essays in Honour of
Peter Burke, ed. Melissa Calaresu, Filippo De Vivo, and Joan-Pau Rubiés
(Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 151–168.
10. Global pillage is a reference to Larry Stewart, “Global Pillage: Science,
Commerce, and Empire,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4:
Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.,
2003), 825–844.
11. Catalogue des livres de M. A. H. Anquetil-Duperron . . . Dont la vente se fera en
l’une des salles de la rue de Bons-Enfans, n°. 12, le mardi 2 vendémiaire an 14
(24 septembre 1805), et jours suivans (Paris: Veuve Tillard, 1805).
12. Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, in Voyage en Inde 1754–1762.
Relation de voyage en préliminaire à la traduction du Zend-Avesta, ed. Jean
Deloche, Manonmani Filliozat, and Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat (Paris: École
française d’Extrême-Orient, Maisonneuve et Larose, 1997), 66: “Il est vrai
que plusieurs missionnaires ont déjà donné sur l’Asie des ouvrages impor-
tants, essentiels même en leur genre. . . . Des sçavans en Europe ont aussi
étendu dans le même plan la sphère de nos connaissances, mais d’un côté
les occupations attachées à l’état de missionnaire, de l’autre la privation
du commerce des Orientaux, de l’avantage de prendre chez eux ce tour
qui leur est propre, de voir les choses de ses yeux, ces inconvéniens (du
moins c’est mon opinion) empêcheront toujours, si l’on ne tente pas une
autre voie, d’avoir sur ces contrées des notions entièrement satisfaisantes
et jamais ce vuide ne sera rempli par les relations des voyageurs simple-
ment militaires, marins ou marchands.”
13. Charles Dellon, Voyages de M. Dellon aux Indes orientales avec sa relation de
l’inquisition de Goa augmentée de diverses pièces curieuses et de l’histoire des
dieux qu’adorent les gentils (Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1709).
14. Anquetil-Duperron writes in his book, Recherches historiques et géographiques
sur l’Inde, 2 vols. (Berlin: Pierre Bourdeaux, 1786), vol. 1: i: “Vous me priez,
Monsieur, de vous communiquer ce que mes lectures ont pu fournir sur
les Anciennes Epoques des Indiens. Egalement en garde contre la crédulité
qui reçoit tout, et le pyrrhonisme qui rejete tout, vous souhaiteriez d’avoir
un fil qui pût vous conduire dans ce dédale de siècles, de milliers, de mil-
lions d’années, que l’on suppose entrer dans l’histoire de ce peuple.”
15. “En 1754, j’eus l’occasion de voir à Paris quatre feuillets zends calqués
sur le Vendidad Sadé qui est à Oxford. Sur le champ je résolus d’enrichir
ma patrie de ce singulier ouvrage. J’osai former le dessein de le traduire et
d’aller dans cette vue apprendre l’ancien persan dans le Guzarate ou dans
le Kirman. Ce travail pouvoit étendre les idées que je m’étois faites sur
l’origine des langues et sur les changemens auxquels elles sont sujettes. Il
était encore très propre à répandre sur l’antiquité orientale des lumières
qu’on chercheroit vainement chez les Grecs ou chez les Latins”; Anquetil-
Duperron, Voyage en Inde 1754–1762, 18.
16. François Bernier, Histoire de la dernière révolution des états du grand Mogol
(Paris: Claude Barbin, 1670).
17. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Nouvelle relation de l’intérieur du sérail du Grand
Seigneur, contenant plusieurs singularitez qui jusqu’icy n’ont point esté mises
en lumière (Paris: G. Clouzier, 1675); Tavernier, Recueil de plusieurs relations
et traitez singuliers et curieux de J.-B. Tavernier . . . qui n’ont point esté mis dans
ses Six premiers voyages. Divisé en cinq parties: 1° une Relation du Japon et de
la cause de la persécution des chrestiens dans ses isles . . . 2° Relation de ce qui
s’est passé dans la négociation des députez qui ont esté en Perse et aux Indes,
tant de la part du Roy que de la Compagnie françoise pour l’establissement du
commerce, 3° Observations sur le commerce des Indes orientales . . . 4° Relation
nouvelle et singulière du royaume de Tunquin . . . 5° Histoire de la conduite des
Hollandois en Asie (Paris: G. Clouzier, 1679).
18. Melchésidech Thévenot, Recueil de voyages de Mr Thevenot (Paris: Estienne
Michallet, 1681); Thévenot, Relation de divers voyages curieux, qui n’ont
point esté publiées ou qui ont esté traduites d’Hacluyt, de Purchas et d’autres
voyageurs anglois, hollandois, portugais, allemands, espagnols et de quelques
persans, arabes et autres auteurs orientaux . . . (Paris, 1663–1696).
19. Jean Chardin, Journal du voyage du chevalier Chardin en Perse et aux Indes
orientales par la mer Noire et par la Colchide (London: M. Pitt, 1686).
20. New perspectives in the history of libertinism have been recently pro-
posed; see Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, Dis/simulations. Jules-César Vanini, François
La Mothe Le Vayer, Gabriel Naudé, Louis Machon et Torquetto Accetto. Religion,
morale et politique au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002); Didier
Foucault, Histoire du libertinage des goliards au marquis de Sade (Paris:
Perrin, 2007); and Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, “Libérer le libertinage. Une caté-
gorie à l’épreuve des sources,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales, no. 1
(January–February 2009): 45–81. On skepticism, see Richard H. Popkin,
The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford U.
P., 2003). José R. Maia Neto and Richard H. Popkin, eds., Skepticism in
Renaissance and Post-Renaissance Thought: New Interpretations (Amherst,
NY: Humanity Books, 2004). Frédéric Brahami, Le travail du scepticisme,
Montaigne, Bayle, Hume (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001).
21. Nicholas Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford: Oxford U. P.,
2009) on Bernier, chap. 3.
22. Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism.
23. Ibid., xi.
24. Voyage d’Anquetil-Duperron, 209–212.
25. App, The Birth of Orientalism, 4.

26. Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Bapiste Colbert’s Secret State
Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). See
in other contexts, Mary Elisabeth Berry, Japan in Print: Information and
Nation in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006), in particular chap. 2, “The Library of Public Information”; Filippo
de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern
Politics (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2007). Archives, library, and cabinet are a
part of a system of information.
27. Soll, The Information Master, 2.
28. Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France, 160.
29. Ibid., 161.
30. Ibid., 163.
31. Fabrice Charton, “Vetat Mori.” Une institution au service du prince de la Petite
académie à l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres (1663–1742),
PhD diss., École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, 2011.
32. Anquetil-Duperron, Voyage en Inde 1754–1762, 341.
33. Ibid., 341.
34. “Mémoire concernant l’acquisition des manuscrits persiens, qu’il con-
viendroit de faire aux Indes pour la bibliothèque du Roy,” Bibliothèque
Nationale de France (BnF), archives du département des Manuscrits, Ms.
Nouvelles acquisitions françaises, 5441, fol. 362–365, reproduced in Henri
Omont, Missions archéologiques en Orient aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols.
(Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), vol. 2: 829–832, citation on 829.
Gérard Colas, “Les manuscrits envoyés de l’Inde par les jésuites français
entre 1729 et 1735,” in Scribes et manuscrits du Moyen-Orient, ed. François
Déroche and Francis Richard (Paris: BnF, 1997), 345–362.
35. Jean-Yves Grenier, Histoire de la pensée économique et politique de la France
d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Hachette, 2007), 116.
36. “Mémoire concernant l’acquisition des manuscrits persiens, qu’il con-
viendroit de faire aux Indes pour la bibliothèque du Roy,” in Omont,
Missions archéologiques, vol. 2: 830.
37. See, for example, the letter written by Father Fouquet to Abbé Bignon,
August 28, 1722, in Omont, Missions archéologiques, vol. 2: 811.
38. Letter from Bignon to Le Gac, January 20, 1732, in Omont, Missions
archéologiques, vol. 2: 846–848.
39. Letter from F. Le Gac to Fourmont, Pondicherry, February 20, 1732:
“J’envoye cette année bien des livres à Mrs de la Compagnie pour la
Bibliothèque royalle; j’en envoye le catalogue à Mr l’abbé Bignon et à Mr
l’abbé Raguet. Il y en a en langue smouscroutam, en bengali, en malabare,
en thangou et en persan. J’espère que nous trouverons ce qu’il y a de plus
curieux dans ce genre parmy les Indiens. Il faut à présent avoir des gens
qui les entendent, ce qui ne me paroît pas si facile. Car pour ce qui est
des Védams, dont j’en ay déjà envoyé deux, il y a peu de Brames, même
parmi ceux qui passent pour chastri, c’est à dire pour gens habiles, qui les
puissent bien entendre”; Omont, Missions archéologiques, vol. 2: 845.
41. Ibid., 339–340.
42. Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-Duperron, 64.

44. Ibid., 357.
45. Ibid., 28.
46. Ibid., 29.
47. Ibid., 353, 356.
48. Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-Duperron, 60. BnF, Ms. Nouvelles acquisitions fran-
çaises, 20507, f. 13, quoted in Voyage d’Anquetil-Duperron, 353, fn. 1.
49. “On leur demanda d’abord qui j’étois et où j’allois. Leur réponse fut que
j’étois François et que j’allois à Mangalor. Mais, ajouta-t-on, pourquoi n’a-
t-il pas continué sa route et pourqui examine-t-il le pays avec une lunette?
Ces deux points prouvent que c’est un espion”; Anquetil-Duperron,
Voyage en Inde 1754–1762, 184.
50. Numa Broc, La géographie des philosophes. Géographes et voyageurs français
au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Ophrys, 1975), 55. François Moureau, “Voyages
manuscrits de l’Age classique: Nointel, Caylus, Fourmont ou le Retour aux
sources,” Vers l’Orient par la Grèce avec Nerval et d’autres voyageurs (Paris:
Klincksieck, 1993), 21–27. There are two documents that belong to a col-
lection of essays published in 1905 by Henri Omont in, “Missions de Paul
Lucas en Orient et en Egypte (1699–1725),” in Missions archéologiques fran-
çaises en Orient, vol. 2: 317–382.
51. During the same period, the Comte de Modave was in charge of writing a
report about the French trading post in south India; Bibliothèque Centrale
du Muséum National d’Histoire naturelle (Paris), Ms. 575, “Mémoire
sur les établissements de la côté de Coromandel présenté par le duc de
Choiseul en 1760 par M. de Maudave,” 48. Maudave was an informer for
Voltaire and Raynal. See Voyage en Inde du comte de Modave, 1773–1776
(Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état actuel du Bengale et de l’Indoustan), ed. Jean
Deloche (Paris: EFEO, 1971), 9. On the company-state, see Philip J. Stern,
The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations
of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2011).
52. Anquetil-Duperron, Voyage en Inde 1754–1762, 12–13.
53. Robert Orme, Histoire des guerres de l’Inde ou des événemens militaires arrivés
dans l’Indoustan depuis 1745 (Amsterdam and Paris: C. J. Panckouke,
1765). Richard Owen Cambridge, Mémoires du colonel Lawrence, contenant
l’histoire de la guerre dans l’Inde entre les Anglois et les François, sur la Côte
de Coromandel, depuis 1750 jusqu’en 1761 (Amsterdam and Paris: Boudet,
1766).
54. Anquetil-Duperron, Voyage en Inde 1754–1762, 49–50.
55. Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet, “L’abbé Barthélemy, déchiffreur du palmyré-
nien et du phénicien,” in Histoires de déchiffrements. Les écritures du Proche-
Orient à l’Egée, ed. Brigitte Lion and Cécile Michel (Paris: Editions de
l’errance, 2009), 173–186.
56. Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-Duperron, 87.
57. Janardan Prasad Singh, Sir William Jones: His Mind and Art (New Delhi:
S. Chand, 1982), 35.
58. The Collected Works of Sir William Jones, vol. 1, ed. Garland Cannon (New
York: New York U. P., 1993), xvii.
59. William Jones, Lettre à Monsieur A*** du P***. dans laquelle est compris
l’examen de sa traduction des livres attribués à Zoroastre (London: P. Elmsly,
1771).
60. “Vous avez appris deux langues anciennes, que l’Europe entière ignorait;
vous avez rapporté en France le fruit de vos travaux, les livres du célèbre
Zoroastre; vous avez charmé le public par votre agréable traduction de cet
ouvrage; et vous avez atteint le comble de votre ambition, ou plutôt l’objet
de vos ardens désirs; vous êtes Membre de l’Académie des Inscriptions”;
ibid., 2.
61. “On ignore Monsieur, ce que l’on pouvait penser à Pondicheri, sur la
beauté, ou sur l’importance de l’objet qui vous y amenait, mais on peut
vous assurer, qu’en Europe, on ne vous prend pas au moins pour un joli
imposteur”; William Jones, Lettre à Monsieur A*** du P***, 6.
62. “On veut même croire que vous avez dans la tête plus de mots Zendes, c’est
à dire, plus de mots durs, trainans, barbares, que tous les savans de l’Europe.
Ne savez-vous pas que les langues n’ont aucune valeur intrinsèque? Et
qu’un érudit pourrait savoir par coeur tous les dictionnaires qui ont jamais
été compilés, et pourrait bien n’être à la fin du compte que le plus ignorant
des mortels?”; William Jones, Lettre à Monsieur A*** du P***, 11.
63. We followed here the general interpretation proposed in Schaffer, Roberts,
Raj, and Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World.
64. Anquetil-Duperron, “Lettre de M. Anquetil du Perron sur les Antiquités de
l’Inde,” in Recherches historiques et géographiques sur l’Inde, vol. 1 (Berlin:
Pierre Bourdeaux, 1786), ii.
65. See Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Considérations philosophiques,
historiques et géographiques sur les deux mondes (1780–1804), ed. Guido
Abbattista (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 1993). In the catalogue of
his library, one notices the presence of a rich collection of histories of
America, such as Lafiteau, Robertson, and De Paw; Catalogue des livres de
M. A. H. Anquetil-Duperron, 208–209. See Silvia Sebastiani, “L’Amérique
des Lumières et la hiérarchie des races. Disputes sur l’écriture de l’histoire
dans l’Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–1788),” Annales: Histoire, Sciences
sociales, no. 2 (April–June 2012): 391–416.
66. On “armchair explorers,” see Neil Safier, Measuring the New World:
Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: Chicago U. P., 2008),
chap. 3.
5
Contested Locations of
Knowledge: The Malaspina
Expedition along the Eastern
Coast of Patagonia (1789)*
Marcelo Fabián Figueroa
In contrast to Cook’s and La Pérouse’s explorations, the expedition

undertaken by Alejandro Malaspina (1789–1794) has been described
as an “imperial inspection”1 on account of its thorough inspection of
the Spanish overseas territories. This included reports on their politi-
cal and economic conditions, recommendations on how to improve
their situation, and access to files, maps, and local informants, in addi-
tion to Malaspina’s position as commander “explorer-inspector.”
There are, nonetheless, two issues underlying this description.
First, Spanish political and territorial dominion on the borderlands
of the empire was contested by non-subjected native communi-
ties as well as by the incursions of other colonial powers, affecting
the development of the “imperial inspection,” which incidentally
passed almost unnoticed. Second, the production of knowledge in
the context of the “imperial inspection” was considered an activ-
ity that bore greater connection with domestic issues related to the
assessment of the empire than to those of the international scientific
community.2
In relation to the two issues pointed out above, this chapter will
deal with the inspection by the Malaspina expedition of the east-
ern coast of Patagonia, the first borderland visited by the mission. In
addition, the manner in which naturalist knowledge was produced in
this territory will be scrutinized. On one hand, our analysis holds that
the condition of the territories inspected by the Spanish expedition
129
130 Marcelo Fabián Figueroa
(viceroyalties, borderlands, overseas colonies, etc.) determined the

different forms adopted for their inspection, and, on the other hand,
that the production of scientific knowledge was associated with the
assessment of the empire in relation to the issues dealt with by the
international community. In fact, the manners of inspection as well
as the scientific knowledge thus produced seem to be related to the
condition of the eastern shore of Patagonia within the context of
the Spanish empire, that is, a politically and scientifically contested
ground that was occupied by native peoples and that had been sur-
veyed by other European naval powers in the preceding years.3
The scientific voyages of the second half of the eighteenth century
constitute a manner of production of overseas knowledge developed
on the territory of natural locations beyond metropolitan settings
such as museums or botanical gardens. These expeditions highlight
what some historians call the contingencies of the production of
knowledge in relation to the locations of manufacturing.4
As geographers, historians, and sociologists have remarked in recent
decades, the material settings of science must be considered a basic
dimension in the process of the production of knowledge.5 Other
more recent contributions have highlighted the natural locations
where a substantial part of the research of disciplines, such as natural
history, was developed. That is why the material, social, political, and
geographical dimensions of the production of knowledge concerning
the territory became crucial factors in the understanding of scientific
research.6 Consequently, the locations of the production of knowl-
edge are currently considered in a geographical or material sense as a
socially diverse space that is geographically located and historically
contextualized.7
In this context, fieldwork practices—collecting, observing, noting,
packaging, etc.—have been considered as practices founded upon
the power relations that affected the explorers and inhabitants of the
inspected territories.8 Similarly, the restrictions imposed upon the
research of scientists in the imperial borderlands have also been speci-
fied. The structure of the colonial administration was blurred in these
territories, and the norms regulating the contacts among explorers
and natives remained censured.9 Furthermore, the inspection of the
eastern coast of Patagonia by the Malaspina expedition in 1789, espe-
cially the stop in Puerto Deseado, is considered a key case that illus-
trates a manner of production of overseas knowledge based on the
tension between the political and scientific components of Spanish
The Malaspina Expedition along Eastern Patagonia 131
voyages. This production of knowledge carried out in imperial terri-

tories entailed the decentralization of imperial power and the circula-
tion of knowledge as consequences of the contacts starring Spanish
travelers, colonial pilots, and native peoples of the land.
This chapter focuses on the fieldwork practices deployed by the
Malaspina expedition in a contested colonial ground. The produc-
tion of knowledge and the fieldwork practices encouraged by the
Malaspina expedition are thus understood as a form of exercising
colonial power in connection with a territory where the status of
Spain as a colonial power was challenged by the indigenous peoples
and by other European colonial powers. The expedition attempted to
exert its power by inspecting the eastern shore of Patagonia to assess
the convenience of keeping this area under Spanish influence, as well
as producing naturalist knowledge in a territory that had already
been inspected by rival colonial powers. The documentary corpus
upon which this research is based is made up of travel logs, reports,
and administrative documents in connection with the organization
and development of the Patagonian itinerary, such as the naturalists’
fieldwork logs and Malaspina’s instructions. These documents may
allow us to argue that the fieldwork practices developed by the expe-
dition intended to define a field for political and scientific inspec-
tion; as a consequence, Malaspina’s instructions could be understood
as a tool used to administer a territory that had challenged Spanish
colonial power for centuries.
Production of knowledge and colonial struggle

along the eastern Patagonian coast
In September 1788, Alejandro Malaspina and José Bustamante y

Guerra presented a travel project to King Charles III. The main tasks
to be accomplished throughout their journey were natural history
research, the production of hydrographical maps, and the political
assessment of Spanish overseas possessions. However, there was an
overt hierarchy among these endeavors: while the first was accessory,
the other two were primary.10
The assessment of the empire was undoubtedly the most important
aspect of the Spanish voyage that impelled the production of knowl-
edge of the inspected overseas territories.11 However, the condition
of the visited territories influenced the kind of political appropria-
tion that science was subject to. The inspection of the eastern coast of
Patagonia demonstrates that the production of knowledge in this bor-

derland went beyond the aim of assessing it politically: the produc-
tion of knowledge on the eastern shore of Patagonia was related to the
domestic issues of the empire, as well as to issues of the international
scientific community. In fact, this territory was a contested ground
that challenged Spain’s status as a colonial power in both the political
and the scientific spheres.
Politically, the eastern coast of Patagonia was a nominal territory of
the Spanish empire, which had been incorporated in the jurisdiction
of Río de la Plata in 1569, when Philip II granted the administration
of the land to the adelantado Juan Ortíz de Zárate.12 By the end of the
eighteenth century, the southernmost area of South America was still
unconquered.
The English and French inspection of the eastern coast of Patagonia
in the eighteenth century was supplementary to the exploration of
the southern hemisphere in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Such
is the case of George Anson (1741–1744), John Byron (1764–1766),
Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret (1766–1769), Louis Antoine de
Bougainville (1766–1769), James Cook (1768–1771/1772–1775), and
others, who explored the coast in search of ports and islands that
would be suitable as areas for replenishment, to resupply the crew
and repair the vessels on their journey toward the Pacific Ocean.
England was particularly opposed to the Spanish claim of exclu-
sive right upon the southern coasts and seas according to the legal
framework granted by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, to a
certain extent, had been endorsed by the eighth article of the Treaty
of Utrecht (1713).13 The English voyages show the changes in the
notion of space of the European empires and the entailing opposition
to Spanish exclusive right.
The sea routes and insular and continental enclaves were such
important points for replenishment that the English and the French
promoted the geographical inspection of the southern coasts and seas.
In addition, the English laid claim to free navigation and access to these
points. The seas and coasts were considered two crucial and necessary
components for the development of commercial exchanges. Initially,
Spain considered the English claim as an offence to their jurisdiction
in those territories, but later on it was deemed as an affront to their
rights of possession. According to the Spanish legal perspective, the
effective occupation of the southern territories was not a criterion that
would necessarily involve the claim to the possession thereof. To the
contrary, according to the English perspective, all territories that were

not occupied in a permanent way were res nullius. In fact, throughout
the eighteenth century, England argued that the effective occupation
of the territories granted rights of possession. Consequently, together
with discovery and symbolic possession, effective occupation became
a third condition to support English territorial claims at the expense
of the Spanish colonial empire.14
In 1756, Charles de Brosses wrote his Histoire des Navigations Aux
terres Australes to enlighten his “nation” in relation to the commer-
cial and geostrategical advantages of this “monde inconnu.”15 In his
view, the occupation of an enclave in the southern Atlantic involved,
just as the English had demonstrated through their voyages, a funda-
mental step in the domination of the two seas.16 Thus, the deserted
eastern coast of Patagonia was, from his perspective, a suitable terri-
tory for the establishment of a colony, given the wealth of hunting
and fishing.17
In effect, the eastern coast of Patagonia was in this sense a con-
tested ground where the status as a potential Spanish colony was
challenged by English voyagers who inspected the area throughout
the eighteenth century. According to Anson, for instance, the coast
was a marginal territory in relation to the Spanish empire.18 The east-
ern coast of Patagonia had been defined in the same terms by John
Narborough in the seventeenth century when he traveled along it on
his voyage.19
Anson’s voyage (1740–1744) was crucial for the later development
of the colonial struggle in the Pacific and for English expeditionary
politics throughout the southern Atlantic and Pacific.20 Anson pri-
marily established an English enclave on the Malvinas Islands, on the
eastern access to the Strait of Magellan, which was supposed to func-
tion as a port of call before reaching the access to the Pacific, with
a similar purpose as the colony of the Cape of Good Hope in South
Africa for the Dutch on their way to the East Indies.
After the Seven Years’ War (1757–1763), Byron, Wallis, Carteret,
Bougainville, and others resumed their expeditions to explore the
Pacific, upholding Anson’s idea about the importance of keeping an
enclave for replenishment on the Malvinas Islands and on the eastern
coast of Patagonia, according to Bougainville’s account of 1763.21 For
the English in particular, the south Atlantic continued to be important
for geostrategical and economic reasons—even though the project of
colonizing Malvinas had been abandoned in the 1780s—despite the
foundation of the colony of New South Wales (1788) and the siege of
Cape Town (1795).22
The Treaty of Escorial (1790), signed by England and Spain to put
an end to the Nootka Crisis, implied a severe setback to the pre-
tended Spanish exclusive right on the coasts and seas of the Atlantic
and Pacific Oceans. This treaty conveyed the condition of contested
ground of the eastern coast of Patagonia. The sixth article as well as
the secret clause is explicit on this point. The former established that
the English could only navigate, fish, and set up temporary establish-
ments ten leagues away from the coasts and adjacent islands occupied
by Spain, whereas the latter established that the limitations accepted
by Spain in relation to the coasts and adjacent islands of South
America would be kept only until a third colonial power intended to
settle in those territories.23 The Treaty of Escorial was considered an
offence to the Spanish jurisdictional power in America, which had
been boosted by a defensive urge for the sake of stopping the English
incursions in the southernmost region of South America.24
However, the presence of the English expeditions and whalers on
the eastern coast of Patagonia—in addition to the Spanish suspicions
about English intentions to occupy it after the commotion of the
British colonies in North America in 1776—led Spain to enforce poli-
cies aimed at accomplishing an effective occupation of the area.
To this aim, in 1745 Philip V promulgated the royal charter ordering
the governor of Buenos Aires, José de Andonaegui, to found a Jesuit
mission on the eastern coast of Patagonia. Although the mission was
not actually founded, the journey Andonaegui organized for Fathers
Matías Strobel, José Cardiel, and José Quiroga turned out to be useful
to inspect the Patagonian seaboard.25 According to the Instruction of
1778, Count Floridablanca, secretary of state to Charles III, encour-
aged the colonization of the eastern coast of Patagonia by founding
the settlements of Bottomless Bay and San Julian Bay.26 In response
to this Instruction, during the 1780s, the viceroy of Río de la Plata
commissioned Basilio Villarino, Custodio Sáa y Faría, and Antonio
and Francisco de Viedma to organize geographical inspections.27
Furthermore, article CX of the Reserved Instruction of 1787 included
a project that endorsed the need to populate and fortify the places
near the South American coasts in which the English might disem-
bark and come into contact with “the natives of the country.”28 In
1789, the Royal Navy Company was founded to promote whale fish-
ing and the settlement of fishing colonies in Puerto Deseado and Isla
de Reyes.29
Consequently, the eastern coast of Patagonia was included in the cat-

egory of territories that, according to Malaspina, required assessment by
the expedition to determine if they could effectively become part of the
empire and to advise the means for their incorporation.30
In fact, Malaspina’s expedition produced two reports about the
eastern coast of Patagonia as a result of his inspection.31 These reports
claimed that the region was not an effective part of the empire at the
political, military, and economic levels. Therefore, he advocated the
necessary abandonment of this “arid and dry country,”32 hostile to
European colonization.
In the scientific sphere, the eastern coast of Patagonia was also a
contested ground since the English and French voyages had produced
a considerable amount of knowledge on the native peoples, the geog-
raphy, and the natural history of the territory. Byron, for instance,
not only described and located the coasts of South America and the
Strait of Magellan, but also reinstated the debate on the gigantism of
the Patagones33 in academic circles. He had encountered the natives
on the eastern coast of Patagonia, and thus his written account, as
well as his illustrations in his travel log, reinforced their representa-
tion as giants.34 Byron’s travel report was translated into Spanish by
Casimiro Gómez Ortega and published in 1769. This publication can
be considered a reaction to Byron’s assumptions. On one hand, in
the Spanish publication some peninsular authors were quoted, such
as Feijóo and Torrubia, who had approached the matter of gigantism,
and on the other hand, the translation also included a map of the
Strait of Magellan made by Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, based
upon a number of Spanish documents.35
The necessity to produce and publish updated knowledge of their
overseas possessions, in accordance with the scientific and liter-
ary parameters of the century, became a topic of discussion in the
metropolis and in the colonies, given the status of colonial power
that Spain was determined to hold onto in America, especially after
the English colonial and naval consolidation following the Seven
Years’ War (1756–1763).
Thus we can state that the production of knowledge concerning
the southernmost territories of South America was related to three
aspects: territorial possession, international prestige, and imperial
geostrategy.
According to the editor of the introduction of the voyage to the
Strait of Magellan carried out by Antonio de Córdoba between 1785
and 1786, Spain had followed a mistaken policy by not publishing
the travel reports written by the navigators. Even though the “wise
policy” of secrecy had been useful during the sixteenth century, it no
longer made sense in the eighteenth century because many of the
early Spanish discoveries had been rediscovered. The effects of this
omission were, on one hand, the “confusion and variety”36 of the
names given to the geographical points of the Strait of Magellan—
which implied the prevalence of English and French toponymy over
Spanish place names—as well as the growing reputation of the other
powers to the detriment of Spain.37
On the other hand, for José Espinosa y Tello, chief of the hydro-
graphical management created in 1797, and member of the Malaspina
expedition, it was crucial that the hydrographical maps be published
because Spain’s international prestige depended on it.38
By the same token, Basilio Villarino, helmsman of the Royal Army
who had participated in the expeditions organized by the viceroy
of the Río de la Plata by order of the 1778 Instruction to inspect
and colonize the Patagonian region, claimed: “I cannot see how
an Englishman like Falkner is showing us and giving us individual
reports about the far corners of our home, which we ignore.”39
The echoes of this issue surface in the documents of the Spanish
expedition in relation to the discoveries made by the earlier English
and French expeditions. The studies of natural history and the mak-
ing of hydrographical maps constituted the “public” part of the
expedition, whereas the political opinions about the assessment of
the empire made up the “confidential” part.40 Natural history, which
included the “researches on human society,” was a “secondary”
aim complementing Cook’s and La Pérouse’s voyages. The making
of hydrographical and astronomical maps of the American coasts,
accomplished according to those completed by Vicente Tofiño,
who had made the Maritime Atlas of Spain between 1783 and 1788,
was a “primary” aim related to the production of reliable nautical
documents.41
According to Malaspina, these investigations were typical of
“Maritime Powers of Primary Order”42 and their accomplishment had
to do with “national honor.”43 The expedition intended to produce
knowledge about the Spanish colonies in order to contribute to the
achievement of a “more complete idea of the globe in general and
of the man who inhabits it.” Thus the Spanish investigations would
be connected to those carried out by Cook and La Pérouse in the
“countries not subjected to the Monarchy.”44 However, this spatial
distribution of the locations to be scientifically inspected by the expe-

dition lay upon a political conception of the territory that, in connec-
tion with the borderlands of the empire, was weakened because these
contested grounds had been inspected and released through a wealth
of publications funded by rival powers. Consequently, the status of
Spain as a colonial power in the scientific sphere was also challenged
in the southernmost region of South America.
The Malaspina expeditions on land: Instructions
The Malaspina expedition’s inspection of the eastern Patagonian coast

included the mouth of the de la Plata River up to the entrance of the
Strait of Magellan. This journey included two short stays at Puerto
Deseado and Port Egmont, which were located on the continent and
on the Malvinas Islands, respectively.45 On November 15, 1789, the
expedition set out from Montevideo, where it had arrived nearly two
months earlier, and inspected Puerto Deseado between December 2
and 13, and Port Egmont between December 18 and 24.
The inspection of the eastern coast of Patagonia was related to the
scientific and political endeavors of the voyage, which had been pre-
sented broadly in the project that Malaspina and José Bustamante y
Guerra proposed to the king.
However, the project of inspection was completed in Buenos Aires
after Malaspina met the Marquis of Loreto, the viceroy of Río de la
Plata, in October 1789.46 As a consequence, the viceroy commissioned
the expedition with a new task: to survey the Patagonian coasts with
the aid of the brig Carmen, commanded by the helmsman from the
Río de la Plata, José de la Peña, who was originally in charge of car-
rying out the annual inspection of the region with the purpose of
detecting the presence of foreign vessels and settlements, and to
report them to the viceregal authority. De la Peña was an experienced
helmsman, familiar with the western Patagonian coast, whose regular
contacts with the Patagones made him a key middleman.47 According
to what had been stipulated by the viceroy and Malaspina, de la Peña
would continue sailing southbound, following the coastline up to
the Island of the States, while the expedition would go as far as Port
Egmont and later take on the crossing to the Pacific.48 That is why,
during this stretch of the journey, the expedition would be in charge
of assessing the territories for political purposes, making hydrograph-
ical maps, and studying the natural and human history by landing
on and inspecting Puerto Deseado, in order to detect the presence of

whaling ships and foreign settlements. The new development to be
accomplished by the expedition was in the policing tasks, connected
with the surveillance of the Patagonian coast. Furthermore, combin-
ing politics and science meant to confirm the “current ideas and state
of foreign nations” in these territories with “pacific” ends.49 In other
words, the expedition was going to contrast the knowledge other
powers produced concerning this region and verify the presence of
England in these Spanish seas and coasts by inspecting the land. The
voyage on western Patagonia was thus the result of the intersection
of metropolitan and viceregal objectives.50 This makes clear the over-
lapping of the global and local scales, which in turn influenced the
evolution of the expedition: on one hand, reference and revision of
the documentation produced earlier by the helmsmen of the Río de
la Plata in relation to the failed attempts of colonization commanded
from Madrid and Buenos Aires following the 1778 Instruction; and
on the other hand, the naturalist inspection on land carried out in
Puerto Deseado through contact with the Patagones.
The inspection of the eastern coast of Patagonia was the first con-
tact of the expedition with a borderland. The instruction written by
Malaspina to organize the Patagonian journey shows that this ter-
ritory was a contested ground for the expedition. The instruction
includes the itinerary and the dispositions involved in the landing
at Port Deseado, which was related to the study of the natural and
human history of the enclave. The naturalist tasks involved disem-
barking and contacting the natives. According to Malaspina, landing
on distant and strange shores not subject to the Spanish government
could be done out of “necessity,” in order to collect water or timber,
by “instruction,” in order to study plants, animals, and inhabitants,
and out of “whim,” for the sailors to rest. Whereas the landings by
“instruction” were done in colonized areas, the others were not.51
Malaspina had dealt with the issue of landing on inhabited lands
while organizing the expedition in Cadiz. His letters to Antonio
Pineda, who was responsible for the naturalist tasks, show that the
friendly treatment and consent of the inhabitants were two crucial
variables for the development of naturalist explorations in faraway
lands.52 The expedition reached lands inhabited by natives not sub-
ject to European domination on three occasions during their voyage:
Puerto Deseado, Port Mulgrave, and Nootka Sound on the northwest
coast of the Pacific53 and the Island of Vava’u in Polynesia.54 In all
three cases the landing was guided by a military “Defense Plan,”

which protected the crew and the naturalists from a possible attack of
the natives. The pardon of the thefts perpetrated by the natives, the
separation of the women and children of the crew, the maintenance
of military discipline, the respect for the natural rights of the inhabit-
ants, and the control of commercial exchanges were norms that were
repeated on these three landings, with the purpose of regulating the
relations between the voyagers and the natives and of defining the
ground for replenishing and inspection.
Nevertheless, the landing at Puerto Deseado had a particular attri-
bute in relation to the status of the territory in the framework of the
Spanish empire: this was a place under Spanish dominion by right.
Consequently, Malaspina considered that the natives of the eastern
Patagonian coast were in theory subjected to the “High Domination
of Our King.” That is why, together with the universal principles of
“humanity,” “morale,” and “religion,” the principles of the law should
be followed as well, as they protected these so-called subjects, who
owned the lands they inhabited and were the only ones responsible
for tolerating the presence of the naturalists there.55 Puerto Deseado
was thus a place in which Spanish law was nominal. In this sense, the
Instruction was an instrument that was intended to counteract the
effects of the jurisdictional limitation that influenced the treatment
of the natives and the means of collecting information.56
In addition, the aims of the expedition of the eastern coast of
Patagonia were different from those followed on the northwest coast,
where surveillance and political inspection prevailed,57 while in
Vava’u, the island was possessed for the Spanish king.58
Malaspina’s instruction shows the weak foundations of the imperial
inspection on the eastern coast of Patagonia. A parallel can be drawn
between this document and the instructions given to Cook and La
Pérouse. In all three cases, military discipline and the exchange of
gifts were crucial. The instructions share a number of topics about the
norms that should regulate the contact with the natives, the main
aim of which was to secure the life of the crew. The topics included
humane and cordial treatment, gift exchanging, and showing weap-
ons to discourage any kind of attack.59 However, only Malaspina’s
instruction indicates the subjection, in theory, of the territory to be
inspected and its inhabitants, to the Spanish king as a legal framework
to regulate the contact with the natives. Malaspina’s instruction, like
every legal discourse concerning the natives, rested upon the idea
of legal treatment of the natives.60 Considering them as subjects of

the king was a fundamental variable that determined the inspection
tasks carried out through the land by the Spanish expeditions. For
instance, the instructions given to the collectors of the mineralogical
expedition of Conrado and Cristian Heuland (1785–1790), organized
with the aim of supplying the Royal Cabinet of natural history of
Madrid, is explicit in this sense: the eighteenth article established
that the collectors could not take possession of any goods or “curiosi-
ties” owned by the “vassals” of the king with the pretext of supplying
the cabinet. Only a purchase at a “fair” price or donation should be
the means for the collectors to obtain any kind of natural objects.61
Contacts and the circulation of knowledge: Colonial

authorities, local explorers, and the Patagonians
The documents related to the Patagonian voyage reveal that the

reports of the viceregal authorities and the explorers stationed on the
de la Plata River, together with the English and French publications
(among which the travel collections of Charles de Brosses, Alexander
Darymple,62 and John Hawkesworth are worth mentioning63) were
crucial for the political assessment of the eastern coast of Patagonia
carried out by the Malaspina expedition.
The 1778 Instruction, according to which the Count of Floridablanca
had attempted to promote the colonization of eastern Patagonia, had
dictated the geographical inspection of the territory to the viceregal
authorities. The plan designed by the Instruction to stop the English
advances involved the foundation of four strategic settlements: one
in Bottomless Bay on the Negro River to surveil the entrance to the
continent and that would be defended by a fort on Colorado River,
and another in San Julian Bay to aid the Malvinas Islands and that
would be defended by a fort in Puerto Deseado.64
Consequently, a great deal of reports and maps were produced dur-
ing the 1780s, such as the travel logs of the superintendents Juan de
la Piedra and Antonio de Viedma, and the reports of the helmsmen
Custodio Sáa y Faría and Basilio Villarino. These documents, together
with those written by the helmsmen José Goycoechea, Domingo
Perler, Joaquín de Oliva, and Bernardo Tafor, among others, who had
inspected the Patagonian coast and the Malvinas Islands in the years
preceding the 1778 Instruction, were collected and reviewed by Juan
Vernacci and Fernando Quintano in Buenos Aires.65
In general terms, these documents reveal the diverse assessments

about the viability of settlements in Patagonia. On one hand, the
reports by Bernardo Tafor and José Goycoechea stated that these
enclaves should be abandoned because of the weather conditions,
the poor quality of the soil and water, etc., which made them unfea-
sible. Their reports concurred with the opinions of Viceroy Vértiz
and the superintendent Francisco de Paula Sanz, for whom “all the
settlements of the Patagonian Coast are as useless as they are impos-
sible to maintain since they lack everything.”66 On the other hand,
the reports by Basilio Villarino, Francisco de Viedma,67 and Custodio
Sáa y Faría,68 who had participated in the colonizing venture in the
1780s, stated, along with superintendent Antonio de Viedma,69 that
the poor quality of the soil was not an obstacle and that fishing and
commerce with the city of Mendoza, located at the foot of the Andes,
offered good prospects for development.
Similarly, these documents reflect the different notions held
throughout the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata about the occupation
of the Patagonian territory. In fact, while Viceroy Vértiz supported
the abandonment of the settlements owing to their lack of defen-
sive value before an English attack,70 Antonio de Viedma, Basilio
Villarino, and Custodio Sáa y Faría maintained that the settlements
were important since they: (1) prevented English penetration toward
Chile along the Negro and Colorado Rivers, (2) advanced the frontier
in the south of the viceroyalty to the detriment of the natives,71 and
(3) enhanced communication between the Atlantic and Pacific slopes
of Patagonia for the Spanish and natives alike.
The imperial inspection carried out by Malaspina on the eastern
coast of Patagonia informed the opinions contained in the reports
and travel logs produced in the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata. This is
revealed in Malaspina’s travel logs and written reports on the politi-
cal assessment and production of hydrographical data of the terri-
tory. Politically speaking, Malaspina endorsed the abandonment of
the settlements on the Patagonian shore and the Malvinas Islands,
the implementation of fishing as the sole practicable economic activ-
ity excluding any permanent or temporal settlement, and the accep-
tance of foreign ships in the waters and shores of the south Atlantic.72
In relation to the production of hydrographical data, Malaspina was
compelling: the helmsmen of the de la Plata River had “accurately
surveyed” the coasts, ports, islands, and rivers of Atlantic Patagonia,
they had produced a valuable corpus of knowledge that was unknown
to the metropolis and that, to a great extent, had founded the impe-
rial inspection in the southernmost region of South America, and
lastly:
Precise bearings were taken of the entrance to Canal de San Jorge.

Although this channel was known to our Río de la Plata pilotos
from the days when they began to explore the coasts of Patagonia,
it was completely unknown to European hydrographers, including
our Spanish ones. Our shipping bound for Lima followed Monsieur
Bellin’s chart, which, like Anson’s, did not show the slightest trace
of such a channel.73
On December 3 the expedition reached Puerto Deseado and the

location was inspected by hydrographers and naturalists for 11 days.
This enclave had been discovered in 1520 by Fernando de Magallanes;
in 1586 Thomas Cavendish named it when he reached its shores to
repair one of his ships. Since the sixteenth century this port had
been used by the Dutch, English, and French for fishing and hunting
whales and seals, and for the refreshment of their crews. In addi-
tion, Puerto Deseado was a location to collect natural objects: Isaac Le
Maire, in 1615, and Charles Darwin, in 1833, for instance, collected
plants, animals, minerals, and fossils.
The study of the natural and human history of South America
had been referred to in the ninth and twelfth points of the letter
Malaspina sent to Antonio de Ulloa in 1788, during the organization
of the expedition.74
Puerto Deseado was, in Malaspina’s terms, “an ideal place for
research into the natural history of the coast of Patagonia, which was
of such interest to the advancement of science.”75 The correspon-
dence and the inventories related to the stay of the expedition in
Puerto Deseado reveal the collecting task it accomplished76 and the
use of the information produced by the helmsmen of the de la Plata
River, according to what Antonio Pineda expressed in his field log.77
Concerning Puerto Deseado, this implied that part of the informa-
tion about its geography and its inhabitants came from the reports
by the officials and sailors, such as Antonio de Viedma and José de
la Peña, involved in the tasks of exploration and surveillance of
the Patagonian coast, typical of the colonial government. His plain
reports were used as starting points for the inspection, collection, and
classification carried out by the expedition. This would be the connec-
tion between the unadorned description of Puerto Deseado written by
Antonio de Viedma and the assessment of Puerto Deseado made by

Antonio Pineda: the inspection of the former gave way to the natural-
ist studies of the latter, which certified the lack of arable soil.78
According to Antonio Pineda, the study of the Patagones was the
most “interesting” part of the natural history of the location, though
their “height” and their “customs” were still a mystery despite the
references given by Byron and Bougainville in their travel logs.79
The Malaspina expedition had its first contact with a native people
not subject to European dominion at Puerto Deseado, where the cor-
vettes arrived on December 3. José de la Peña, who had arrived the
day before, had already had an encounter with the “natives,” and
had asked them about the presence of the English.80 On the morn-
ing of December 3, Malaspina ordered to examine the port in order
“to foster friendly relations, if possible, with the Patagonians.”81 That
very afternoon the first encounter took place on the beach where
“a long speech” was delivered during which they exchanged some
“ribbons, trinkets, and other trifles,” and “two young guanacos and
a baby ostrich.” As a result, the travelers checked the “cleverness and
kindness”82 of the Patagones, as well as their slenderness, which made
them “models of academia.”83
The second encounter with the “honorable barbarians” took place
on December 7, on the deck of the brig Carmen, commanded by de
la Peña. The Indian chief Jonchar, his daughter Catana, and other
women with some children participated in the encounter. As a result
of the meeting, the Patagones promised to stay close to the shore as
long as the expedition was there.84
The third and last meeting with the Patagones took place on
December 9. According to some of the participants, it was a “conver-
sation which . . . looked like a perfect pantomime,” but which never-
theless enabled Antonio Pineda to make up a short glossary.85
After this meeting, the Patagones did not return to the shore. The
first encounter of the expedition with a “native” people had come
to an end. As a result, the expedition had verified their height—
which did not make them giants86—their “humane character,”87
the honesty of their women, the love of the parents for their chil-
dren, the crudeness of their language—despite Byron’s opinion,
which Pineda questioned—their lack of a writing system,88 and the
extreme simplicity of their material culture. This last trait, accord-
ing to Malaspina, did not allow a glimpse of the establishment of a
lucrative commercial venture89 like the ones settled in other regions
inhabited by natives where the expedition was headed. Such was
the case of the fur trade carried out by the natives on the northwest
coast of the Pacific.90
These considerations show some of the typical features of the
Bourbon reformist policies in relation to the non-subjected natives
on the frontiers of the empire. The conviction that trade, rather than
religion, was to be the basis of coexistence between the Spanish and
the natives was shared by a small number of eighteenth-century
Spanish reformist officials, among whom Alejandro Malaspina should
be included. That is why, for the Malaspina expedition, the Patagones
were considered members of the human race, with whom it would be
possible to establish a contact based upon commercial interests. 91
The Malaspina expedition produced three glossaries of the Pata-
gonian language made up by Antonio Pineda, with the material con-
tributed by the other members of the expedition, in addition to those
compiled by José de la Peña and Antonio de Viedma.92 The reports of
both officials were crucial as they demonstrate the importance of the
colonial bureaucracy in the production of information related to the
conquest and administration of the territory. Such is the case of José
de la Peña, who, as an “eyewitness” of the behavior of the Patagones
in the times of the Spanish settlements in Port Deseado, was referred
to by Francisco Xavier de Viana, who also advocated the “kind char-
acter” of the natives.93
The glossary compiled by Pineda, which was included in the field-
work log of Port Deseado, classifies the words compiled in three fields
related to the mutual physical recognition between the voyagers and
the natives, to the kind of objects exchanged, to the description of the
surroundings, and to naturalist inspection. Correspondingly, some
of the words compiled were “whiskers,” “eyes,” “ostrich,” “bezoar,”
“water,” “cold,” “herbs,” “reed,” and so on.
These glossaries have been defined as lists of words that do not
constitute a grammar and whose importance consists in showing the
pragmatic dimension of communication. In other words, they illus-
trate the behaviors related to the practices of collecting ethnographic
and naturalist information. Such is the case of the lexical formulae
“what,” “where,” “come here,” “go away,” etc., which demonstrate
the use of the imperative mode in relation to a communicative
act.94 That is why Antonio Pineda’s accounts highlight the process
by which the language of the natives was studied on a secondary
level to the collection of information and natural objects during the
encounters between the voyagers and natives: “their language does

not seem scarce in substantives: they attribute many names to many
plants they found.”95
In this sense, some typical plants of the Patagonian steppe collected
by Luis Née, one of the botanists of the expedition, are illustrative.
Years later, the descriptions of these plants were published by Antonio
José de Cavanilles in the Icones et Descriptiones Plantarum. Such is the
case of the Arjona Tuberosa and the Hoffmanseggia Trifoliata,96 with
edible tubers; the Oxalis Laciniata,97 whose leaves could be used as
vegetables; and the Stipa Humilis98 and the Frankenia Microphyla99
used as fodder for cattle, among other plants.100
Conclusion
The eastern shore of Patagonia was, until the end of the colonial
period, a contested ground of the Spanish empire. This condition
determined the manner of inspection as well as the knowledge pro-
duced by the Malaspina expedition. The political aims behind the
Spanish voyage implied that the production of scientific knowledge
related to the assessment of the empire was a priority above the sci-
entific knowledge intended for the international scientific commu-
nity. However, Spain’s status as a colonial power depended upon both
types of production, as demonstrated by the mapmaking, geographi-
cal description, and study of the Patagones. In fact, the seas, shores,
and inhabitants drawn and described in the documents were, in the-
ory, an integral part of the Spanish empire that had been studied by
other rival colonial powers.
Therefore, the inspection of the eastern coast of Patagonia carried
out on land by the Malaspina expedition was a form of exercising
colonial power in relation to the territory, its inhabitants, and rival
colonial powers. In this context, Malaspina’s Instruction was an
instrument of political and scientific intervention that, nevertheless,
depended on the support of the local colonial authorities, as well as
the bonds established with the Patagones. In this way, the inspection
carried out by the Malaspina expedition implied the decentralization
of the empire not only in relation to the fieldwork practices deployed
on the land, but also in relation to the underlying circulation of
knowledge as a consequence of the contact of the Spanish travelers,
colonial pilots, and native peoples.
Notes
* Research for this essay was supported by The John Carter Brown Library
and the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina
(CONICET), which funded a short-term postdoctoral research fellowship from
May to August 2012. The author would like to thank the John Carter Brown
Library staff and colleagues for their carefully considered comments on his
research.
1. Donald Cutter, “Introduction,” in The Malaspina Expedition 1789–1794:
Journal of the Voyage by Alejandro Malaspina, vol. 1: Cadiz to Panama, ed.
Andrew David, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Carlos Novi, and Glyndwr
Williams (London and Madrid: The Hakluyt Society, The Naval Museum,
2001), xxix, xxx, liv, lxxiv.
2. Ibid., xxix, xxxii, lix.
3. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders:
Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American
History,” The American Historical Review 104/3 (1999): 814–841, 816;
Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan, “On Frontiers: The Northern
and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire in the Americas,” in Contested
Ground: Comparative Frontiers of the Northern and Southern Edges of the
Spanish Empire, ed. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan (Tucson: U. of
Arizona P., 1998), 11, 12.
4. Kapil Raj, “Introduction: Circulation and Mobility in Early Modern
Science,” British Journal of History of Science 43/4 (2010): 513–517, 513.
5. Steven Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century
England,” Isis 79/3 (1988): 373–404; Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin,
“The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey,” Science in Context 4
(1991): 3–21; Thomas Gieryn, “A Space for Place in Sociology,” Annual
Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 453–496; David Livingstone, Putting Science
in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Chicago U. P.,
2003).
6. Henrika Kulick and Robert Kohler, “Introduction,” History of Science
11, Special issue devoted to Science in the Field (1996): 1–14, 2; Robert
Kohler, “Place and Practice in Field Biology,” History of Science 40 (2002):
189–210, 189.
7. David Livingstone, “Science and Place,” in Wrestling with Nature, ed.
Peter Harrison, Ronald Numbers, and Michael Shank (Chicago: Chicago
U. P., 2011), 382.
8. Fa-Ti Fan, “Science in Cultural Borderlands: Methodological Reflection
on the Study of Science, European Imperialism, and Cultural Encounter,”
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 1/2
(2007): 213–231, 223.
9. Philip D. Morgan, “Encounters between British and ‘Indigenous’ People,
c. 1500–c. 1800,” in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous
People, 1600–1850, ed. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (Philadelphia:
U. of Pennsylvania P., 1999), 54.
10. Alejandro Malaspina, “Plan for a Scientific and Political Voyage around
the World,” in The Malaspina Expedition 1789–1794, vol. 1: 312.
11. Donald Cutter, “Introduction,” in The Malaspina Expedition 1789–1794,

vol. 1: lxxx.
12. Carlos María Gorla, Los establecimientos españoles en la Patagonia. Estudio
Institucional (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, CSIC,
1984), 1–2.
13. Tratados de Paz y de Comercio, desde el año de 1700 hasta el día, ed. Alejandro
del Cantillo (Madrid: Imprenta de Alegría y Charlain, 1843), 77.
14. Nuria Valverde and Antonio Lafuente, “Space Production and Spanish
Imperial Geopolitics,” in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires
1500–1800, ed. Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and
Kevin Sheehan (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2008), 212–213.
15. Charles de Brosses, Histoire des Navigations Aux Terres Australes. Contenant
ce que l’on scait des moeurs & des productions des Contrées découvertes jusqu’à
ce jour; & où il est traité de l´útilité d’y faire de plus amples découvertes, & des
moyens d’y former un établissement, 2 vols. (Paris: Chez Durand, 1756),
vol. 1: iv.
16. Ibid., vol. 2: 316.
17. Ibid., vol. 2: 317.
18. George Anson, A Voyage Round the World in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV
(Dublin: G. and A. Ewing, 1754), 57.
19. John Narborough, Jasmen Tasman, John Wood, and Frederick Marten,
An Account of Several Late Voyages & Discoveries to the South and North
towards the Streights of Magellan, the South Seas, the Vast Tract of Land
beyond Hollandia Nova, & c. Also towards Nova Zembla, Greenland or
Spitsberg, Groynland or Engronland, & c. (London: Printed for Sam. Smith
and Benj. Walford, 1694), 10.
20. Vincent Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire (1763–1793),
vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, 1952), 20; Alan Frost, “Science for
Political Purposes: European Explorations of the Pacific Ocean, 1764–
1806,” in Nature in Its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific,
ed. Roy MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock (Honolulu: U. of Hawaii P.,
1988), 28.
21. Louis Antoine de Bougainville, “Mémoire sur la découverte des terres
australes (1763),” in Voyage autour du monde, ed. Michel Bideaux and
Sonia Faessel (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2001),
383.
22. David Mackay, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science and Empire, 1780–
1801 (London: Crom Hell, 1985), 45–46.
23. “Tratado del Escorial,” in Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra El descu-
brimiento del fin del mundo (1775–1792), ed. Salvador Bernabeu Albert
(Madrid: Alianza, 1990), 258–259.
24. “Reflexiones sobre la convención hecha en Inglaterra en 28 de octubre
de 1790,” cited in Salvador Bernabeu Albert, “El Tratado de Límites de
1792. Repercusiones del Tratado de Tordesillas en el Pacífico septentri-
onal,” in Nutka 1792: Viaje a la costa noroeste de la América septentrional
por Don Juan Francisco Bodega y Quadra, ed. Mercedes Palau, Freeman
Towell, Pamela Sprätz, and Robert Inglis (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos
Exteriores, 1987), 1713.
25. Armando Braun Menéndez, “Viajes marítimos al Río de la Plata y

Patagonia entre la circunnavegación: Magallanes-Elcano y 1810,” in
vol. 1 of Historia Argentina, ed. Roberto Levillier (Buenos Aires: Plaza &
Janés, 1968), 564.
26. Archivo General de Indias–Sevilla (hereafter: AGI–S), Audiencia de Buenos
Aires, legajo 326, Instrucción de Floridablanca sobre organización de los
establecimientos en Patagonia, mayo 8 de 1778.
27. Perla Zusman, “Entre el lugar y la línea. La constitución de las fronteras
coloniales patagónicas 1780–1792,” Fronteras de la Historia 6 (2001):
41–67.
28. Conde de Floridablanca, “Instrucción Reservada que la Junta de Estado,
creada formalmente por mi decreto de este día, de 8 de julio de 1787,
deberá observar en todos los puntos y ramos encargados a su cono-
cimiento y examen,” in Obras Originales del Conde de Floridablanca, y
Escritos referentes a su Persona (Madrid: M. Rivadeneira-Impresor-Editor,
1867), 229.
29. Carlos Martínez Shaw, “Economía e Imperio. Los Establecimientos de la
Real Compañía Marítima en América,” Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos 54/1
(2008): 593–630.
30. Cutter, “Introduction,” in The Malaspina Expedition 1789–1794, vol. 1:
lxxxvii–lxxxxviii.
31. Archivo Museo Naval, Madrid (hereafter: AMN–M), Ms. 590, 26–49v.;
Ms. 590, 50–61v.
32. AMN–M, Ms. 590, 26–49v., 28.
33. Patagón is used here because this word is contained in the documents;
nevertheless, the right name is Tehuelche.
34. John Byron, Byron’s Journal of His Circumnavigation, 1764–1766, ed.
Robert Emmett Gallagher (Cambridge: The Hakluyt Society, 1964), 51.
35. Casimiro Gómez Ortega, Viage del Comandante Biron alrededor del mundo
hecho ultimamente de orden del Almirantzgo de Inglaterra: En el cual se da
noticia de varios paises de las costumbres de sus habitantes, de las plantas y
animales estraños que se crian en ellos: Juntamente con una descripción muy
circunstanciada del Estrecho de Magallanes, y de Cierta Nación de Gigantes,
llamados Patagones, con una lamina fina que los representa &c. Traducido del
Inglés é ilustrado con muchas notas sobre puntos de Geographia, de Physica, de
Historia natural, de Comercio &c. y con un nuevo Mapa del estrecho (Madrid:
En Casa de Don Francisco Mariano Nipho, 1769).
36. Relación del último viage al estrecho de Magallanes de la Fragata de S. M.
Santa María de la Cabeza en los años de 1785 y 1786. Extracto de todos los
anteriores desde su descubrimiento impresos y MSS y Noticia de los Habitantes,
Suelo, Clima y Producciones del estrecho (Madrid: Imprenta de la Viuda de
Ibarra, 1788), iii, viii, xv.
37. Ibid., ix.
38. José Espinosa y Tello, Memorias sobre las observaciones astronómicas hechas
por los navegantes españoles en distintos lugares del globo; las quales han
servido en fundamento para la formación de las cartas de maear publicadas
por la dirección de trabajos hidrográficos de Madrid, vol. 1 (Madrid: Imprenta
Real, 1809), 95.
39. Basilio Villarino, “Informe de D. Basilio Villarino, Piloto de la Real Armada,

sobre los puertos de la costa Patagónica,” in vol. 6 of Colección de Viages
y Expediciones a los campos de Buenos Aires y a las Costas de Patagonia, ed.
Pedro De Angelis (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Estado, 1837), 118.
40. Malaspina, “Plan for a Scientific and Political Voyage around the World,”
in The Malaspina Expedition 1789–1794, vol. 1: 313.
41. AMN–M, Ms. 427, 7v.–8.
42. Ibid., 2–3.
43. Ibid., 25v.–27v.
44. AMN–M, Ms. 583, 34–37.
45. Ibid., 74v.–75v.
46. AGI–S, Buenos Aires, 106.
47. AMN–M, Ms. 583, 55.
48. Ibid., 59–59v.
49. Ibid., 55v.–57.
50. Juan Pimentel, La física de la monarquía (Madrid: Doce Calles, 1998),
202–203.
51. AMN–M, Ms. 427, 56–58v. Instrucción para la segunda Campaña=Sobre
las Costas Patagónicas y Tierra del Fuego.
52. AMN–M, Ms. 426, 88–88v. Alejandro Malaspina a Antonio Pineda, Cádiz,
mayo 5 de 1789.
53. Andrew David, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Carlos Novi, and Glyndwr
Williams, The Malaspina Expedition 1789–1794. Journal of the Voyage
by Alejandro Malaspina, vol. 2: Panama to the Philippines (London and
Madrid: The Hakluyt Society, The Naval Museum, 2003), 80, 112; Tomás
de Suria, “Journal of Tomás de Suria of His Voyage with Malaspina to
the Northwest Coast of America in 1791,” ed. Henry H. Wagner, Pacific
Historical Review 5/3 (1936): 234–276, 241.
54. Andrew David, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Carlos Novi, and Glyndwr
Williams, The Malaspina Expedition 1789–1794. Journal of the Voyage by
Alejandro Malaspina, vol. 3: Manila to Cadiz (London and Madrid: The
Hakluyt Society, The Naval Museum, 2004), 103–104.
55. AMN–M, Ms. 427, 58.
56. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European
Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2010), 6, 8, 22.
57. Fernando Monge, En la costa de la niebla. El paisaje y el discurso etnográ-
fico ilustrado de la expedición Malaspina en el Pacífico (Madrid: CSIC,
2002), 74.
58. David, Fernández-Armesto, Novi, and Williams, The Malaspina Expedition,
vol. 3: 143.
59. Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse, The Journal of Jean-François de
Galaup de la Pérouse, 1785–1788, vol. 1, ed. John Dunmore (London:
The Hackluyt Society, 1994–1995), cxlviii; James Cook, The Voyage of the
Resolution and Discovery 1776–1780: The Journals of Captain John Cook on
His Voyages of Discovery, vol. 2, ed. John C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: The
Hackluyt Society, 1961), clxviii–clxix.
60. Guillermo Wilde, “¿Segregación o asimilación? La política indiana en
América Meridional a fines del período colonial,” Revista de Indias 59/217
(1999): 619–644, 619.
61. Archivo del Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales de Madrid (hereafter:

AMNCN–M). Fondo expedición mineralógica hermanos Heuland, 664d.
62. AMN–M, Ms. 427, 12–12v.
63. AMN–M, Ms. 583, 15–15v.
64. Perla Zusman, “¿Terra Australis-‘Res Nullius’? El avance de la frontera
colonial hispánica en la Patagonia (1778–1784),” Scripta Nova. Revista
Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales 45/34 (1999).
65. AMN–M, Ms.426, 73–73v.; AMN–M, Ms. 314, 159–159v.; AMN–M, Ms.
427, 43–44v.; AMN–M, Ms. 316, 139; AMN–M, Ms. 583, 80.
66. AMN–M, Ms. 157, 202v–204.
67. Perla Zusman, “El estado de los establecimientos de la costa patagónica
según el informe del marino Francisco de Viedma (1782),” Biblio 3W:
Revista Bibliográfica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales 11/634 (February 20,
2006).
68. Custodio Sáa y Faría, “Informe sobre el puerto de San José, por D.
Custodio Sáa y Faría; Segundo informe de D. Custodio Sáa y Faría sobre
el Puerto de San José,” in Colección de Viages y Expediciones, vol. 6: 90.
69. AMN–M, Ms. 100, 169–182.
70. “Informe del Virrey Vértiz, para que se abandonen los establecimien-
tos de la Costa Patagónica,” in Colección de Viages y Expediciones, vol. 6:
125.
71. Zusman, “¿Terra Australis-‘Res Nullius’?”
72. AMN–M, Ms. 590, 50–61v.
vol. 1: 79.
74. AMN–M, Ms. 426, 61–64.
vol. 1: 69.
76. AMN–M, Ms. 583, 58v.–59v.; AMN–M, Ms. 583, 79v.–80.
77. Ibid., 256–306.
78. Ibid., 256–306, 295, 295v., 299.
79. Ibid., 256–306, 299, 299v.
80. AGI–S, Buenos Aires, Leg. 110.
vol. 1: 85.
82. Francisco Xavier de Viana, Diario de Viaje, vol. 1 (Montevideo: Ministerio
de Instrucción Pública y Previsión Social, 1958), 72.
83. AMN–M, Ms. 343, 75–83v.
84. AGI–S, Buenos Aires, Leg. 110.
85. Antonio Tova y Arredondo, “Incidencias en Puerto Deseado,” in La
antropología y noticias etnográficas. La expedición Malaspina 1789–1794,
ed. Juan Pimentel and María Dolores Higueras (Madrid: Ministerio de
Defensa, Museo Naval, Lunwerg, 1993), 33, 35.
86. Tova y Arredondo, “Incidencias en Puerto Deseado,” 36.
87. Viana, Diario de Viaje, 78.
88. AMN–M, Ms. 343, 75–83v., 77, 78, 80, 82v.
89. AMN–M, Ms. 590, 50–61v.
90. Monge, En la costa de la niebla, 145.

91. David Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of the
Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2005), 37, 50–51.
92. Ana Verde Casanova, “Notas para el estudio etnológico de las expedi-
ciones científicas españolas a América en el siglo XVIII,” Revista de Indias
40/159 (1980): 81–128; María Luisa Martín Merás, “Vocabularios indíge-
nas recogidos en laas expediciones de Malaspina y de las Goletas Sutil y
Mexicana,” Revista de Historia Naval 6 (1984): 57–74, 63; Pimentel and
Higueras, La antropología y noticias etnográficas, 41.
93. AMN–M, Ms. 92 bis, 50–60, 53.
94. Emma Martinell Gifre and María José Martínez, “El interés por la len-
gua de los pobladores de la costa del noroeste,” in Nootka. Regreso a una
historia olvidada, ed. Mercedes Palau, Marisa Calés, and Araceli Sánchez
(Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de España, Dirección de
Relaciones Culturales y Científicas, Lunwerg, 1998), 37, 40.
95. AMN–M, Ms. 343, 75–83v., 80v.
96. Antonio José Cavanilles, Icones et Descriptiones Plantarum, Quae Aut Sponte
in Hispania Crescunt, Aut In Hortis Hospitantur, 6 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta
Real, 1791–1801), vol. 4: 58, 64.
97. Ibid., vol. 5: 7.
98. Ibid., vol. 5: 41.
99. Ibid., vol. 6: 77.
100. Juan J. Ochoa and Ana H. Ladio, “Pasado y presente del uso de plantas
silvestres con órganos de almacenamiento subterráneos comestibles en
la Patagonia,” Bonplandia 20/2 (2011): 265–284.
6
“To Round Out this Immense
Country”: The Circulation of
Cartographic and Historiographical
Knowledge between Brazil and
Angola in the Eighteenth
Century
Catarina Madeira-Santos
If foreigners were expelled . . . it would be possible to pre-

serve the whole coast . . . and an immense Country would
be rounded out without any neighbour, and finally the Law
would be made for Black people.
Letter from Dom Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho to
Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, August 15, 1768
(AHU, Cx. 51, doc. 25).
I cannot . . . explain . . . the joy that I feel watching the rapid

construction . . . of the settlements in these hinterlands . . . if
the couples come, as requested, we will see much more
Populated and useful Cities than those of Brazil.
Letter from Dom Francisco Inocêncio de
Sousa Coutinho, September 13, 1769
(BNL, Res, Cód. 8743, fl. 32–33).
Research on the construction of the South Atlantic and, more gener-

ally, Atlantic studies, have demonstrated that America and West and
153
154 Catarina Madeira-Santos
Central Africa have a common shared history. They should, therefore,

be studied together, regardless of national analytical frameworks. The
relationship between Angola and Brazil, in particular, has engendered
studies on the participation of Brazilian troops in the reconquest of
the city of Luanda from the Dutch in 1648 and the role of slave labor
in the construction of colonial Brazil.1 This chapter also focuses on
the history of the circulations between the two shores of the Atlantic,
but it introduces two dimensions that are usually considered to be
secondary in scholarly literature. First, it is more interested in how
the Brazilian colony collaborated in the construction of the Angolan
colony than in the impact of the different groups of Angolan slaves
on Brazil’s formation. Second, it aims to contribute to the analysis of
the military, economic, and social interactions that have to do with
the intellectual history of the South Atlantic,2 focusing on the circu-
lation of cartographic and historiographical knowledge from Brazil
to Angola. Our goal is to show that the cartographic movement that
delimited the boundaries of Brazilian territory, from the first half of the
eighteenth century, also took place in Angola during the second half
of the eighteenth century. Although, as we will see, the Angolan case
did not have the same success, there is an intellectual bond between
the two Atlantic colonies, which is yet to be studied. Therefore, this
history of intellectual circulations goes beyond the strict scope of the
major European philosophical texts and the development of colonial
projects in metropolitan ministries.3 It focuses on cartographic and
historiographical production in the two colonial territories.
In previous research I have shown that during the second half
of the eighteenth century the administration of the Portuguese
empire was highly marked by the emergence of a new political para-
digm, inspired by the political philosophy of the Enlightenment.
Pombaline enlightened reforms refer to juridical changes, especially
the concept of police as formulated by Nicolas Delamare in the Traité
de la Police (1705–1738), which was incorporated into Portuguese
political and juridical usage.4 Policing was formally defined as a
function of sovereign authority, the objective of which was to guar-
antee the common good, public authority, and the happiness of the
people. In this chapter I shall show how that new paradigm was
implemented on the field by a new body of administrators. The
“philosopher-administrator” was a new figure emerging and stand-
ing out at this time, synthesizing this modern idea of administration,
Cartographic and Historiographical Knowledge 155
aiming to found a political praxis based on philosophical principles

of general interest.5 Administration has a philosophical dimension,
as it does not merely depend on a practical exercise but also draws
on principles that outweigh the immediate sense of reality. During
the eighteenth century, many governors of Angola considered them-
selves philosopher-administrators, and declared that they were not
mere practitioners. On the field, these governors were aided by a
number of individuals, who were mostly career military officers. The
cartographic and historiographical documentation under study in
this chapter was produced precisely by military officers and admin-
istrators with such a profile.
Let us reconsider the title of this chapter: “to round out this coun-
try.” The phrase is a quotation from a letter sent by the governor of
Angola, Dom Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho (1764–1772), to
the colonial affairs secretary, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado,
in 1768. Reflecting on the future of the African colony, the governor
concluded the need “to round out an immense country,” that is, the
need to define its boundaries, to homogenize it through the installa-
tion of colonial administrative structures, and the medium-term sup-
pression of African political formations.6 To round out the country
would then mean to operate the unification of heterogeneous territo-
ries, both colonial and African. This sentence epitomized a true polit-
ical program, the main purpose of which was the territorialization of
colonial presence. In a general context of the reform of Portuguese
imperial policy, the construction of the territory assumed an unprec-
edented centrality. It was declining in a dual movement: a physical
appropriation and an intellectual appropriation.
Without neglecting the physical appropriation devices, to which
I will devote a few lines, I am particularly interested in exploring
the second dimension.7 Since the first half of the eighteenth cen-
tury, cartographic representation and historical narrative appear as
two devices that collaborate in that process of constructing the colo-
nial territory of Angola. However, that movement can only be fully
understood in dialogue with what was being done in Brazil. What I
want to show in this chapter is that the process that led to the imagi-
nation of a united and well-delimited Angolan territory, and to its
cartographic and historiographical representation, is part of a larger
process: the imperial-scale circulation of geographical and historio-
graphical knowledge especially between Brazil and Angola.
From jurisdiction to boundaries:

Brazil as a model for Angola
During the eighteenth century, the imperial Portuguese administra-

tion was forced to rethink the relationship between power and terri-
tory. The international legal and geopolitical conditions had changed
substantially since the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas between the
Crowns of Portugal and Castile in 1494. The meridian separating the
Spanish Empire from the Portuguese Empire was a mere theoretical
line, whose topographic translation remained unknown. Moreover,
the treaty enshrined the doctrine of mare clausum by defining two
major areas of influence where each Iberian Crown had the exclusive
right to sail, discover, and conquer. But, especially in the Portuguese
case, it was a virtual conquest, one that would be necessary to achieve
over time. The title held by the kings of Portugal—“Lord of the con-
quest, commerce, and navigation”—enshrined that notion since the
end of the fifteenth century. For the purpose of this chapter, it is
important to note that the Treaty of Tordesillas licensed the construc-
tion of an empire without defined boundaries. The interior of the
continents, especially of America and Africa, were potential areas
for expansion. The jurisdiction asserted over people was thus more
important than territorial sovereignty.
At the level of international law, the Portuguese Crown invoked
their historical rights over colonial territories. But this argument
became increasingly anachronistic and above all unsuited to the
international conjuncture. The doctrine of Mare Liberum, formulated
by Hugo Grotius (1584–1645), questioned many of the arguments of
the Portuguese: the legitimacy of the donations made by the Popes
through papal bulls, the privileges earned from priority of discov-
ery, the justification for the occupation of land following a just war,
the legitimacy of the inauguration ceremonies, and ius gentium and
its transcendent character. According to Grotius, ius gentium was to
be replaced by a secular international law, in line with ius naturale
legal thinking, which regulated relations between peoples considered
exotic, as well as between European peoples. The great disruption trig-
gered by the Dutch jurist was the following: the act of “discovering”
now meant taking possession of a region, which should be formally
claimed as res nullius. Thus, discovery in itself did not entitle a claim
to territory unless it was accompanied by occupation. The principle
of utis possedetis iuris (as you possess, so may you possess) changed the
terms of legitimation: there was to be a precise delineation of lands

defended by a permanent military force.8
Progressively, then, the principle of jurisdiction asserted over people
gave way to the principle of territorial delimitation, according to which
the occupying power had to exert sovereignty over its territory.
The foundation of the Royal Academy of History in Lisbon, in 1720,
aimed at collecting historical documentation to aid in the validation
of the claims of the Portuguese before the international community.9
The voyage of two Jesuit mathematicians priests to Brazil was also
scheduled around the same time. However, historiography usually
points out the reading of Jean-Baptiste Delisle’s thesis, Détermination
géographique de la situation et de l’étendue des différentes parties de la
Terre, at the Academy of Sciences in Paris, in 1722, as the turning
point in Portuguese policy. In this thesis, Delisle declared that it was
possible to measure longitude and, despite being away from the field,
it challenged the line drawn by the Treaty of Tordesillas. This news
triggered “panic” among the Portuguese royal court, and with it came
the beginning of a whole cartographic movement on the Brazilian
field. After 1722, thanks to news posted by Dom Luis da Cunha,
Portugal’s ambassador in Paris, the investment in the acquisition of
scientific instruments and in the training of engineers was acceler-
ated in Lisbon.
But, the failure of legal arguments occurred primarily regarding this
field. And it was in Brazil that its effects were most visible. Thus, the
Tratado dos Limites of 1750 defined the boundaries of the Spanish and
the Portuguese colonies in South America. This treaty enshrined two
principles: the first was based on the principle of utis possedetis iuris,
under which it was recognized that the ownership of lands belonged
to those who already held possession; and the second principle was
to make the royal court of Spain accept that the boundaries would
be defined by permanent natural features, such as watercourses and
mountain ridges, and not by a conventional line like the meridian of
Tordesillas. The treaty was not easy to execute.10 Nevertheless, the line
defined by the treaty remained the same, besides some minor changes,
and it was enshrined in 1777 in the Treaty of San Ildefonso, otherwise
known as the Treaty of Defensive Alliance. In order to delineate the
new boundaries of Brazil, it became necessary to develop maps. It
was this conjuncture that triggered an unprecedented cartographic
movement in which a body of military engineers participated, tour-
ing Brazilian territory.11
The case of Angola showed huge differences. The colonial popula-

tion had settled mainly along the coast. Access to the interior was
provided through African paths, which gave access to slave markets.
The wars of the seventeenth century had allowed the installation of
a number of fortresses in the interior of the country that maintained
political and commercial relations with vassal African chiefs. These
vassalage arrangements ensured peace, necessary for the commer-
cial caravan routes that took slaves to the port cities of Luanda and
Benguela. But, in fact, a colonization settlement, as in Brazil, had
never been established. The African political context also differed: in
the hinterland there was no European force, or even an African one,
comparable to Spain that could compete directly with the Portuguese.
The major exception was the Kingdom of Kasanje, which remained
an important hurdle for the expansion of Atlantic commercial net-
works until the slave trade crises, around 1850. In any case, Kasanje’s
territorial rights, locally respected, were not recognized by European
states. Therefore, it can be said that the colony of Angola was mostly
settled along coastal fringes, discontinuous with each other, which
extended toward the interior through African paths and had the for-
tresses and markets functioning as support points. Colonial power
was not a territorially hegemonic, or homogenizing, force. There was
no continuous territory over which Portuguese sovereignty was exer-
cised. It was, above all, a space of circulation, a network.12 The inte-
rior boundaries of the Portuguese presence had never been identified
because the definition of continental boundaries had no relevance.
However, the news about the possibility of measuring longitude,
suggested by Delisle, and the map of Africa produced by Jean Baptiste
Bourguignon d’Anville, revealed the true width of Africa. After all,
contrary to what kings and governors had thought since the seven-
teenth century, the distance between Angola and Mozambique was
much greater than one would have imagined. At the same time, there
were signs that the Dutch settled near the Cape of Good Hope since
1652 had advanced into the interior thanks to settlement colonies.
The displacement of populations to the north brought real problems.
The bond between Angola and Mozambique was no longer a crazy
dream; it became a true need, the need to safeguard this “kind of
sovereignty” in the interior of Africa. The Dutch, French, and British
were involved in the slave trade on the coasts since the seventeenth
century, and they drew the commercial caravan routes to points
where the Portuguese had no administrative structures. In the area
of Benguela, and north of Luanda, in the ports of Loango, Cabinda,

and Molembo, their presence continued to get stronger throughout
the eighteenth century.13
It has often been said that it was the slave trade that prevented
Angola from becoming a settlement colony. The colonists, far more
interested in profitable trade than in agriculture, neglected farm work.
Moreover, since they were rarely accompanied by European women,
they ended up having children with African women, who educated
them according to the standards of African cultures. All these circum-
stances contributed to a marked slowing down of colonizing settle-
ment and agriculture in Angola.14
To some extent this interpretation is correct, but only partially. An
analysis of the sources from the second half of the eighteenth century
shows that it is important to introduce another element. In fact, it
was the slave trade itself that needed a policy of territorialization. As
the Marquis of Pombal (1699–1782), the prime minister of King José
I, observed, “Without Angola there is no Brazil.”15 The slave trade was
necessary for the Brazilian economy. In order to safeguard it, African
territories needed to be occupied. And several European powers were
ready to take over the big Angolan ports that supplied manpower for
Brazil. It was thus imperative to territorialize Angola, because without
Angola there would be no slaves and consequently no Brazil, and
most of all, without Brazil there would be no empire.
Then, from the second half of the eighteenth century, and more
precisely from 1753, a movement of territorialization and of bound-
ary delimitation started in Angola, which was very similar to what
was already happening in Brazil. The change in the parameters of
colonization resulted in several convergent measures: to encour-
age white settlement, to build cities in Angola “like those found in
Brazil,” and to construct colonial roads to connect the regions occu-
pied by the Portuguese.16 The medium-term aim was to completely
absorb African societies into the colonial administrative network. I
have already dealt with these issues in other publications. I am inter-
ested here in analyzing the cartographic and historiographic aspects
of this enterprise.
Military engineers and cartography
In 1753, the Marquis of Pombal appointed Dom António Álvares da

Cunha as governor of Angola (1753–1758). This nomination has its
own significance. He had been in Brazil and was the author of a map
of the region between Vila Rica (Minas Gerais) and the Paraguay River.
This map was sent by his uncle Dom Luís da Cunha (1662–1749)
to the French cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville.
Already, d’Anville’s 1725 maps of Africa and Brazil were based largely
on information supplied by the elder da Cunha, attesting to the fact
that these men were a part of very influential European networks of
knowledge and information exchange, especially of colonial spaces.
Hence, Dom António Álvares da Cunha was a “philosopher-admin-
istrator” who was participating in all the cartographic work being
conducted in Brazil and Europe.
It can then be understood that, after arriving at Luanda, he imme-
diately started working on a “general map of the entire kingdom of
Angola,” because, as he would say, it would certainly be useful to his
successors: “It is not possible that one can understand the vastness
of these domains, without anybody having already done the work of
clearly showing it on a geographical map.”17 He would also explain
that he had started developing the map of the coastal areas, but that
he lacked a lot of information about the interior. Although that gen-
eral map was never finished, several partial maps of the city of Luanda
and its coasts were drawn in the 1750s. Dom António Álvares da
Cunha himself drew a map of Luanda’s hinterland, where he marked
the location of the Kwanza River, the fortresses, and the farms of the
Jesuits (see Figure 6.1). Later, the governor of Angola, Dom Francisco
Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho (1764–1772), compiled those maps in
a bound volume that he titled “Atlas of Angola.” Everything points
to the establishment of a parallelism with the notion of atlas, as it
was used in the Brazilian case. Unfortunately, that documentation is
missing today and I have not been able to reconstitute this corpus in
spite of having looked for it in a number of archives.
This moment of production of the cartography of Angola repre-
sents a political act. Ruling and mapping are complementary tasks,
which can be assumed by the same social actor. We are thus far from
the cartography produced in the context of the great scientific expe-
ditions of the eighteenth century, which sought only to clarify the
topography of the territories, fill in the blanks of the maps, or erase
the myths that had been there for centuries.18 The maps produced in
Angola during this period were rather made for political purposes, as
had happened with Brazilian cartography. In the medium term, they
should have thus been able to prove the rights of the Portuguese at
an international level.
Figure 6.1 Topographic plan of the banks and hinterland of the River
Kwanza, Kingdom of Angola, drafted by the governor and General Captain
D. Antonio Álvares da Cunha (Planta Topográfica da margem e certăo
do Rio Coanza do Reyno de Angola feita pelo governador e Capităo Geral
D. António Alvares da Cunha), Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Lisbon,
Portugal), Cartoteca, box 18, doc. 6
From the 1760s military engineers skilled in cartography began to

arrive in Angola, from both Brazil and Portugal. These new actors
participated in the entire reform movement referred to above. Some
came with their families, while others married women from the
former slaveholding elite of Luanda. For example, the Pinheiro de
Lacerda family who contributed two cartographers came from Brazil
and settled in Luanda.
Meanwhile, in 1769, a Class of Geometry and Fortification was
created in Luanda.19 In Brazil, and particularly in Rio de Janeiro,
similar classes had already been created during the first half of the
eighteenth century. The main goal was to train young men born in
Angola, who were thus “children of the land,” so that they could
participate in the reform program. A local surplus would thus be cre-
ated, which in the medium term would lead to the replacement of
the engineers from Portugal and Brazil. Some from the old families
of Luanda were attracted to this teaching structure and participated

in the new imperial project. It is sometimes even possible to follow
them for about 40 years, from 1760 until the first decades of the nine-
teenth century, and to reconstitute their cartographic work. António
Máximo de Sousa Magalhães, for example, was a teacher of the Class
of Geometry; he became a career military officer and drew numerous
maps in different points of the Angolan territory.20
This generation of engineers had the intellectual and technical skills
necessary for the development of maps and plans (of coastal areas,
fortresses, and settlements), for the description of a geographic region
or an African kingdom, and for the quantification of information.21
In the period that coincided roughly with the government of Dom
Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho (1764–1772), a significant set
of maps was developed.
After Sousa Coutinho, it was Dom José de Almeida Vasconcelos
Soveral e Carvalho da Maia Soares de Albergaria, Barão de Moçâmedes
(1784–1790) who as governor took the ambition of unification and
delimitation of the territory further. He was the governor who con-
ceived of Angola with the boundaries that most closely resemble the
current ones. In the 1780s, he organized naturalist expeditions travel-
ing to the south of Benguela and reaching the Cunene River. These
expeditions were accompanied by what can be considered a second
cartographic moment.22
In his letters he reflects on what could be called “the ancient and
the modern,” as perceived in the text of La Condamine. He ques-
tions the authority of texts whose authors had written about Angola
in the past and the value of the maps that had inspired them. In the
instructions that he made for the naturalist expeditions, he advised
that it was necessary to criticize the authority of the narrative of
Andrew Battel,23 the English adventurer who had lived in Angola in
the sixteenth century among the Jaga (Mbangala, Imbangala), south
of the Kwanza River. This text, like many others, had inspired the
production of maps in Europe. The governor concluded the need to
criticize the “foreigners who draw maps based on the information
proposed by Battel.”24 On the other hand, he praised the author-
ity of Prévost’s Histoire générale des Voyages25 and, above all, of the
map of Africa drawn by d’Anville. In his opinion, all this European
knowledge should be harmonized with the information transmitted
by those who knew the coasts and “had practical knowledge of the
hinterland.”
It is the map of Joaquim Pinheiro Furtado, finished in 1790, that

cartographically summarizes the process that we have been describ-
ing. This is an open map, that is, a map that does not delimit bound-
aries. The only defined boundary is the coastline along the Atlantic
Ocean. However, the very frame that surrounds the map ends up
informally defining those boundaries. It is the first general map of the
whole territory of the colony of Angola. It includes in the northwest
the ports of Loango, Cabinda, and Molembo; in the north Mbanza
Kongo; in the east the Kwango River and the Muatianvua Empire;
and in the south, besides the Benguela Plateau, the Moçâmedes Bay.
It collects a great variety of information and represents what experts
call a carte parlante (“talking map”), that is, a map that in addition to
the toponyms, includes a series of short explanatory texts, some with
ethnographic characteristics.
In this map, Pinheiro Furtado reconciled d’Anville’s maps with the
new information conveyed by scientific explorers and by those who
knew the coasts and had practical knowledge of the hinterland. The
areas visited by traders, of which he had only a few unreliable ele-
ments, are not represented. But the itineraries of traveling naturalists
are represented. Some years later (1797), the map was considered a
fragile cartographic piece with respect to the representation of the
interior. It had been based on secondhand information and lacked
information from the field, from men who knew how to manipu-
late mathematical instruments.26 In spite of the critics, this map of
Angola is, in fact, the first general map of the colony. In this sense,
eighteenth-century mapping invented an Angolan space going well
beyond the politically established colonial structures. In representing
a whole continuous space, paper maps anticipated a political real-
ity that was not to be realized until much later, in the wake of the
Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. The Brazilian case was quite dif-
ferent because it delimited boundaries of territories over which the
Portuguese did, in fact, have sovereignty.
The truth is that, when mapping the colony of Angola, the engi-
neers of the eighteenth century were confronted with the existence
of African powers. They could not ignore the specificities of African
political space. Different notions of this space coexisted in the field,
which were hardly reducible to the same representational logic.
Although many questions remained unanswered about the territo-
rial organization of the various African societies that occupied the
current Angolan territory, we can say that it is absurd to continue
to claim that there were no borders in Africa. Of course, in a purely

African context, the territories already showed political, ideologi-
cal, and symbolic signs of well-identifiable limits. The expressions
“lands of the Ginga” or “lands of the Dembo Ambuila” that appear
in Portuguese documents, quoting African terms to designate the
territory, implied the existence of forms of appropriation of space,
as well as the existence within it of political and hierarchical rela-
tionships. What this means is that “limits” and “boundaries” were
familiar notions to African people. Every chief knew perfectly well
the extent of his jurisdiction and knew how far his authority reached.
Even though maps were not used, there was a precise knowledge of
where a given territory ended. Jean Pierre Chrétien, in a study about
the Great Lakes of Africa, insisted precisely on the “myth” created
around the absence of boundaries between the African powers. There
were, in fact, land-based and political reference points.27 António de
Oliveira Cadornega, in his History of the Angolan Wars, gives us a beau-
tiful description of how trees (the “ensandeiras” that were related to
the Mbundu political power) were used for the delimitation of the
N’Gola Kingdom.28
In certain areas, namely those of Mbundu influence, the popula-
tions did not always occupy the same territories. The distinction
between “old banza” and “new banza” indicated that the chief’s vil-
lage was periodically itinerant.29 In the case of the great Ovimbundu
kingdoms, from the Benguela Plateau, the relationship between ter-
ritory and political power was a little different, but also implied the
existence of a hierarchy between the places of power (the territory of
the deposed chiefs and the territory of the acting chiefs).30 The very
characteristics of agriculture demanded itinerancy. The displacement
of villages was constrained by crop rotation and by depleted soils,
and also by the demographic pressure on lineage lands.31 The fallow
land forced populations to move in order to ensure their subsistence.
And the segmentary nature of different societies reinforced that same
circulation.
In the context studied here, colonial demarcation obeyed precise
political goals. It aimed at sedentarizing the African chiefs in areas
determined by the colonial power, in keeping with the interests of
the slave trade.32
Therefore, in some cases, the endogenous organization of the
territory invalidated the colonial program. The first was based
on the mobility of the places of power—such as the itinerancy of
villages—the other presupposed a sedentary space occupation pat-

tern. Therefore, maps of African occupation, if made, would end
up having a very short lifetime. It would quickly transform into a
historical document, with little value as an instrument of govern-
ment. The role that the colonial power attributed to cartography was
subverted in Africa. This idea is explained in a short text, where the
weaknesses of the map drawn by Pinheiro Furtado between 1785 and
1787 are indicated. The topographic part of the map was absolutely
unreliable. As the governor, D. Miguel António de Melo (1797–1802),
observed: “Since the villages of the Negroes are made of Straw houses
and transferred almost every day from one place to another over long
distances, the regions registered on the map as being populated today
will be deserted tomorrow.”33
Cartography as a tool of domination saw itself limited by the
notions and, consequently, by the African usages of space. There was
a mismatch between the challenges and the answers. For an instru-
ment to work it is necessary to know how to use it, it is also necessary
to have the conditions to use it; these conditions did not exist, hence
rendering this instrument of government politically useless. In the
same sense, the governor Dom Miguel António de Melo would claim
to have received cartographic models from the secretary of overseas
affairs, used for the captaincies of Brazil, which he would declare to
be impossible to transpose to Angola “due to the strangeness and
rarity of the country’s features.” Although not in detail, he reiter-
ated the idea that “the political fruits of cartography harvested in
Angola would never be equivalent to the fruits harvested in Brazil.”34
Anyway, Brazil was the reference model for the whole cartographic
movement undertaken in Angola.35
Elias Alexandre da Silva Correia and

his History of Angola
As suggested in the beginning of this chapter, the historiographical

narrative of Angola collaborates with the process of apprehension and
global representation of a territory. Here, too, the intellectual bonds
with Brazil were decisive. The case of Elias Alexandre da Silva Corrêa
is paradigmatic in all aspects. He was a Brazilian career military offi-
cer, who served in Angola between 1783 and 1789, and wrote his
História de Angola in two volumes.36 His História has been looked at as
a source of great value for the knowledge of the history of Angola in
the eighteenth century, which it indeed is. But, more than that, it is
the result and the proof of the intellectual bonds between Brazil and
Angola.
Elias Alexandre was the bastard son of José Mascarenhas Pacheco
Pereira de Melo. Mascarenhas had founded the Academia dos Renascidos
(Academy of the Reborn) in the city of Bahia and had accomplished
an important historiographical project of the reformulation of the his-
tory of Brazil. He knew the European academic community because
he had attended the Academy of History in Lisbon, the Spanish
Academies, and the University of Coimbra (where he graduated in
canon law). When he founded the Academy of the Reborn in Bahia,
he was creating a colonial academy directly inspired by the ideology
of the Enlightenment and dedicated to the production of the history
of Brazil.
His son, Elias Alexandre, arrived in Luanda as a military officer
in 1783, during the government of Barão de Moçâmedes. There he
met the military engineers to whom we have previously referred. In
Luanda he came into contact with the local elite and acknowledged
the existence and circulation of a manuscript, written by several
authors, titled Catalogue of the Governors of Angola. Elias Alexandre
wrote his history of Angola based on this manuscript and on other
orally transmitted information. Let us first analyze the “Catalogue”
and the intellectual context in which it is integrated.
The Catalogue of the Governors of Angola collected a set of texts that
narrated the history of Angola through the description of the events
that took place during the administration of the various governors.
The manuscript had several authors. It is not known who started
this obsession to write the memories of the colony. But, according
to Manuel António Tavares, one of the coauthors, the oldest author
would have been João Monteiro de Morais, member of one of the
oldest families of Luanda. He became interested in the conservation
of some old documentation that he had found, to which he added
more information related to the period between 1738 and 1758 (from
the government of João Jacques de Magalhães until the government
of Dom António Álvares da Cunha).37 The authors who were iden-
tified were all military men, related to the governors’ circle; some
were from the old families of Luanda, others were from families that
had settled in the capital during the second half of the eighteenth
century. It was in fact a professional elite, educated and capable of
producing a memoirist literature, whose object was the history of

the colony of Angola itself. This history of Angola, written by many
hands, circulated in manuscript form, showing the importance of
manuscript circulation in the colonial context. The various known
versions have some differences between them.38 In summary, it can
be said that the “Catalogue” constituted a kind of palimpsest, under
constant construction and reworking, composed of several layers and
that echoed the orally transmitted history. In 1798, after the pas-
sage of Elias Alexandre through Angola, the governor Dom Miguel
António de Melo would say:
We can find evidence of the history of the colony of Angola in the

archives of this State, and in the tradition that is kept among the
current population.39
The Catalogue [of the Governors of Angola] circulates in manu-
script and the copies that I have seen of it are corrupted (adul-
terated) with copyists’ errors. Moreover, they contain some errors
that the author has committed; maybe because he did not have
more books at his disposal, where he could confirm the informa-
tion he gives. The events that are reported in the work of João
Monteiro de Morais were collected from printed books written by
“our Historians” and from documents in the archives. At other
times, the author makes reference to events he had heard of in tra-
ditions, here in Luanda. Those traditions are considered as being
good and ancient.40
The Catalogue of the Governors of Angola resembles what J. Vansina has

called “group accounts,” oral memories of groups, in this case par-
tially in written form, which give testimony of their history.41
Thus, when Elias Alexandre da Silva Correia arrived in Luanda, he
was faced with the existence of a vigorous historical discourse in con-
struction. What is specific in his work is the fact that it integrates that
historical discourse of Luanda into the historiographical model of the
Brazilian Academy of Bahia, using specialized methods. By that integra-
tion, he inscribed the history of the colony of Angola in the models of a
new intellectual field emerging in the Europe of the eighteenth century.
Consequently, it was through Brazil, and, more specifically, through the
circulation of a Brazilian military man from Bahia to Angola, that this
African colony participated in the academic movement.
At various times in the work of Silva Corrêa, that academic feature

appears through a “methodical exposure,” organized into chapters
and small subchapters successively dealing with “Police,” “Army,”
etc.42 Simultaneously, Elias Alexandre had the opportunity to travel
around a good part of the Angolan territory while fulfilling his mili-
tary duties in the colonial army. He observed with his own eyes and
gathered the information circulating orally in the colony.
It is important to stress that we are very far from the model of his-
tory written by António de Oliveira Cadornega in the seventeenth
century (History of the Angolan Wars, in three volumes, 1680).43 This
was an epic narrative of the wars of conquest undertaken by the
Portuguese against King N’Gola. Cadornega followed the model of
Portuguese chronicles of Asian and Brazilian conquests. In the case
of Elias Alexandre, he was writing the history of a colony in its
territorial entirety, following a precise historiographical method.
The explicit reference to the Enlightenment and to the physiocratic
doctrine places this work in the context of the academicism of the
eighteenth century. Nothing is left out. One would say, it was a
complete history, “geometric,” capable of embracing the nature of
men, of mineral, animal, and plant species, in the context of a good
naturalistic observation, and all the components of the history of
the colony (the history of African kingdoms appears in a very frag-
mented way and only for the sake of a better explanation of the
Portuguese action).
Besides the exceptional case of Elias Alexandre’s History, there is still
a set of small “memoires” and “information,” some of them anony-
mous and scattered across the Portuguese and Angolan archives. In
those texts there are descriptions of Angola and Benguela, in their
historical, geographical, chorographical, administrative, commercial,
naturalistic, and ethnographic contexts. I cannot analyze them in
detail in this chapter.44 However, it is important to emphasize that
together they create a relevant textual corpus revealing that in Angola
there was a favorable context for the production of a written memory
of the history of the colony and for the description of its natural and
human resources.
In conclusion, the political need to “round out Angola,” through
a territorial settlement, was complemented through different strate-
gies of intellectual appropriation. Just as with cartography, the histo-
riographical, administrative, naturalistic, and ethnographic discourse
collaborated in this work to “round out” Angola.
The performative dimension of the

discourse over the territory
The maps and the historical narratives that were analyzed had as
their object the space that in the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury was identified under the name of Angola and that included not
only the former kingdom of Angola but also the vast space of the
Benguela Plateau and, further south, the region of Moçâmedes and
the so-called Land of the end of the world. As we have seen it was a
space in expansion, which at the same time was being represented
through cartography and historiography and was also being built
on the field by a body of military officers. The generation that saw
itself involved in this process from 1753 onward, established a close
relationship with the construction and representation of the colonial
territory. They traveled the country from end to end, and when it
was necessary to wage war against African chiefs and Europeans, they
commanded fortresses, founded new cities, created maps, or wrote
descriptions of regions. Because of their military duties, these men
were forced to name the places, to describe them, and to inscribe
them on maps. My argument here is that both naming and repre-
sentation are in themselves performative. This process of construct-
ing a territory ultimately creates a new self-consciousness leading to
the emergence of a specific local discourse.45 Let us analyze the main
stages.
António de Oliveira Cadornega, in his History of the Angolan Wars
(1680), had undertaken to write of the war and collaborated deci-
sively in the construction of the figure of the conqueror and in the
definition of a stereotype that would become a place of memory,
“the ancient conqueror.” The families of Luanda owed their repu-
tation to the wars of conquest of the seventeenth century, and in
particular to the reconquest of the city of Luanda from the Dutch
in 1648.
Throughout the seventeenth century, and until the second half of
the eighteenth century, the local elite evoked this great moment of
legitimacy that had consolidated their identity. It is interesting to
stress here that the identity discourse structured itself in reference to
the imperial space and to the sovereignty exerted on it by the king
of Portugal. Thus, Angola emerged as part of a wider entity, to which
Brazil also belonged; an entity structured by the system of the Atlantic
slave trade and, more broadly, through transoceanic circulation. In
their self-narrative, the elite presented themselves as the guardians

of this imperial sovereignty. It should be noted, incidentally, that the
Luso-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century, at least in the Brazilian
case, initiated a kind of urgency for the recording of memory through
an explicit request from Brazilian prosecutors for the establishment
of a “chronicler of the Brazilian State.”46
Throughout the 1780s, although the argument of “conquest” does
not disappear, there is a new argument emerging in a more systematic
way in Angola: the political use of the word Angolense (different from
Angolan, the word used today meaning the nationality) in the sense
of a “native to Angola.” Inherent to this argument is the assertion of
a natural condition.47 Of course, this term referred to the individual
and cannot be used in a collective sense.48 Although some military
engineers native to Angola started developing its usage (most likely as
a result of Brazilian influence)—for instance, Elias Alexandre would
refer to an África Angolense—it is obviously too early to talk about a
formal social movement, capable of acting in concert for the deliber-
ate production of political effects. However, I think it is important to
underline the appearance of a self-identifying argument, recognized
as national but not meaning nationalist, that is, an argument that
does not establish an unambiguous identification with the discourse
of the metropolis. In other words, if the category was developed, it
was because it became necessary to name a social reality for which
there were no preestablished names. And above all, what seems more
important to me is that this category was developed by the actors
themselves.
Therefore, it is necessary to understand how, when, and why the
Angolense designation was developed. What can be concluded is
that the designation was developed to name the colonists settled in
Angola, to say that they had a regional identity different from that
of the metropolitan people (the reinol, or people from the kingdom),
thus not including them in a supra-regional community. The political
use of the term Angolense was repeated over time. It was often associ-
ated with the description of the Pombaline policy of the second half
of the eighteenth century. In 1796, Martinho Teixeira de Mendonça,
one of these military officers who had begun his career in the 1760s,
wrote to Dom Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, minister of the navy and
overseas dominions, reminding the government of Dom Francisco
Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho how he had favored especially “us, the
Angolense.”49
Conclusion
In this chapter I have tried to identify knowledge circulations

through space in the context of the reconfiguration of the Portuguese
empire in the eighteenth century, which was undertaken by a new
generation of “philosopher-administrators” and military engineers
by their side. Instead of analyzing the circulation of geographical
knowledge between Europe and Africa, I chose here to focus on
the circulations that took place between two colonies—especially
from Brazil to Angola—which led the South Atlantic to attain a
significant degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the imperial metropolis.
Therefore, I chose an analysis that not only decentralizes the pro-
duction of geographical knowledge (by placing Europe in the back-
ground), but also places the production of such knowledge within
a polycentric system: Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Luanda, or Lisbon are
here looked at as producers of that knowledge, each with its own
specificities (local value of the global) and participating, to the
extent of their possibilities, in the circulation of such knowledge.
The military engineers, some born and educated in Angola, others
in Brazil, produced maps and historical narratives locally. Those
productions are localized, but at the same time collaborate in circu-
lations on an imperial scale.
By inverting the more traditionally accepted point of view in
the relationship between Brazil and Angola, I have described how
Brazil served as a model for the policy designed for Angola. There
thus emerges what can be called an “imagined geography” that has
a strong performative dimension. Ultimately, I argue that during this
period it becomes possible to use Angola to designate a whole circum-
scribed space through texts and through cartography. And that this
act of naming Angola comes from the inside out and not any more
just from the outside in. To quote J. M. Coetzee on South Africa:
This landscape remains alien, impenetrable, until a language is

found in which to win it, speak it, represent it . . . The quest for
an authentic language is pursued within a framework in which
language, consciousness, and landscape are interrelated. For the
European to learn an African language “from the outside” will
therefore not be enough: he must know the language “from the
inside,” as well, that is, know it “like a native,” sharing the mode
of consciousness of the people born to it.50
It is exciting to think that the military officers, who were forced to

travel the territory in order to represent it through maps and textual
descriptions, might well have collaborated in the constitution of a lan-
guage specific to Angola through which it could be won, spoken, and
represented, as Coetzee would say—a language that escaped from the
stereotypes and fantasies that were so shocking to men like Rousseau,
and also from other comparative strategies so frequent in travelers’
reports, which would negatively refer to Africa by merely defining it
as non-European.51 Although this is undoubtedly a colonial renam-
ing, the memory of that moment of cartography, of renaming, and
of narrativization, nonetheless participated in the construction of a
discourse organized by those who were born there, born in that land
which was escaping from a simple legitimation of the preservation of
an imperial sovereignty.
Notes
1. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erick R. Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global
History, 1500–2000 (London: Pearson Education, 2007). Charles R. Boxer,
Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola: 1602–1686 (London:
U. of London P., 1952); Charles R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–
1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society (Berkeley: U. of California P.,
1962); Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan
Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (London: James, 1988); Luiz Felipe Alencastro,
O Trato dos Viventes. Formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul. Séculos XVI e
XVII (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000); Luiz Felipe Alencastro,
“Le versant brésilien de l’Atlantique-Sud: 1550–1850,” Annales. Histoire,
Sciences Sociales 61/2 (2006): 339–382; Alberto da Costa e Silva, Um Rio
Chamado Atlântico. A África no Brasil e o Brasil na África (Rio de Janeiro:
Editora Nova Fronteira, 2003). William Joel Simon, in his book Scientific
Expeditions in the Portugueses Overseas Territories (1783–1808) and the Role
of Lisbon in the Intellectual-Scientific Community of the Late Eighteenth
Century (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1983), has
conducted a detailed study of the three major scientific expeditions, to
Brazil, Mozambique, and Angola, focussing on natural history set up from
Lisbon (mainly by the Ajuda Palace Natural History Museum) between
1783 and 1808. It is in this context that Joaquim José da Silva, born in Rio
de Janeiro and a graduate in philosophy from the University of Coimbra,
worked as a naturalist in Angola for around 20 years. Their importance
notwithstanding, these expeditions were organized from the metropolis to
the colonies, whereas I am interested in the relationship between the col-
onies. Besides, naturalists like Joaquim José da Silva were fundamentally
collectors engaged in the construction of scientific knowledge, whereas
the military engineers from Brazil, the protagonists of this chapter, used
their knowledge toward the political construction of the territory. It is for
this reason that the works of naturalists like Joaquim José da Silva born in
Brazil, will not be considered.
2. I am aware that the use of the notion of “intellectual history” requires
some explanation: “intellectual history” surpasses the history of ideas,
tout court, because it includes the history of the reception of the concept
of “good policy” by the colonial administrators, as well as cartography
and historiographical production. Recently, James Sweet, a specialist of
the South Atlantic, has carried this discussion much further in his book
Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic
World (Durham: U. of North Carolina P., 2011). The book is constructed
around the knowledge of an illiterate African witch doctor, and his cir-
culation between the Mina Coast, colonial Brazil, and Portugal in the
eighteenth century. Sweet has a twofold goal: to counteract a certain ten-
dency in historiography to erase the African categories and knowledge for
the benefit of European and American language and colonial institutions,
and to include in the field of intellectual history the cultures of orality.
3. The creation of this Enlightenment project of colonization gathered a
rather varied range of knowledge, from scholarly and philosophical
knowledge being produced in metropolitan Europe, to the African oral tra-
ditions themselves as told by African actors, to the experience of colonial
administrators. See Catarina Madeira-Santos, “Administrative Knowledge
in a Colonial Context: Angola in the Eighteenth Century,” British Journal
for the History of Science 43/4 (2010): 1–18; Catarina Madeira-Santos, “Um
governo ‘polido’ para Angola: reconfigurar dispositivos de domínio (1750
c. 1800)” (PhD diss., Universidade Nova de Lisboa/EHESS, Lisbon and
Paris, 2005); Catarina Madeira-Santos, “Entre deux droits. Les Lumières
en Angola (1750–1800),” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 60/4 (2005):
817–848.
4. Pascale Laborier, Frédéric Audren, Paolo Napoli, and Jakob Vogel, Les sci-
ences camérales: Activités pratiques et histoire des dispositifs publics (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 2011).
5. Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières. Buffon,
Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, Diderot (Paris: Maspero, 1971), 30 and 110–
117; Madeira-Santos, “Um governo ‘polido’ para Angola,” 52–57. For the
use of the expression in the correspondence, see the letter from Francisco
Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho to Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado,
October 18, 1769, in Arquivos de Angola, vol. 1, no. 1 (Luanda: Imprensa
Nacional, 1933), unpaginated.
6. Letter of Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho to Francisco Xavier
de Mendonça Furtado, August 15, 1768, Arquivo Histórico Nacional de
Angola (AHNA), Angola Cx. 51, doc. 25.
7. Concerning the physical appropriation of territory, see Madeira-Santos,
“Um governo ‘polido’ para Angola,” 63–142.
8. Anthony Pagden, “Fellow Citizens and Imperial Subjects: Conquest
and Sovereignty in Europe’s Overseas Empires,” History and Theory 44/4
(December 2005): 28–46.
9. Isabel da Mota, Academia Real da História: Os intelectuais, o poder cultural e
o poder monárquico no séc. XVIII (Coimbra: Minerva, 2003), 38, 98.
10. Jaime Cortesão, Alexandre e Gusmão e o Tratado de Madrid, vol. 2 (Lisbon:

Livros Horizonte, 1984); Luís Ferrand de Almeida, Alexandre de Gusmão, o
Brasil e o tratado de Madrid (1735–1750) (Coimbra: Instituto de Investigação
Científica, 1990); Luís Ferrand de Almeida, “Problemas do Comércio luso-
espanhol nos meados dos século XVIII: Um parecer de Sebastião José de
Carvalho e Melo,” Revista de História Económica e Social 8 (1981): 95–131;
Luís Ferrand de Almeida, A propósito do “Testamento Político” de D. Luís da
Cunha (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 1984).
11. Beatriz Siqueira Bueno, “Desenho e desígnio—O Brasil dos engenheiros
militares,” Special issue, “A Construção do Brasil Urbano,” Oceanos 41
(January–March 2000): 49; Siqueira Bueno, “Decifrando mapas: Sobre o
conceito de ‘território’ e suas vinculações com a cartografia,” Anais do
Museu Paulista, São Paulo, n.s. 12 (January–December 2004): 193–234.
12. Maurice Lombard, Espaces et réseaux du haut Moyen Âge (Paris: Mouton
Éditeur, 1972); Denys Lombard, Le carrefour javanais, vol. 2: Les réseaux
asiatiques (Paris: EHESS, 1990); Jean-Luc Vellut, “Le Royaume de Cassange
et ses réseaux luso-africains vers 1750–1810,” Cahiers d’Etudes africaines
15/57 (1975): 117–136; Jean-Luc Vellut, “Notes sur le Lunda et la frontière
luso-africaine, (1700–1900),” Études d’histoire africaine 3 (1972): 61–166.
13. Phyllis Martin, The External Trade of the Luango Coast, 1576–1870 (Oxford:
Oxford U. P., 1972).
14. See Valentim Alexandre, Os Sentidos do Império. Questão Nacional e Questão
Colonial na Crise do Antigo Regime Português (Lisbon: Edições Afrontamento,
1993), 25–77.
15. Memória, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon (AHU), Cód. 555, fl. 34.
16. See letter from Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho to José de Azevedo
Monteiro Faria, Caconda, January 15, 1772, Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa
(BNL), Res. Cód. 8744, fl. 196–197v.
17. Letter from the governor António Álvares da Cunha to Diogo de Mendonça
Corte-Real, August 8, 1753, AHU, Cx. 38, doc. 82; Letter from Francisco
Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho to Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado,
Luanda, February 16, 1767, AHU, Cx. 51, doc. 8.
18. Niel Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South
America (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 2008), 80.
19. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that it was a reopening for; a
Class of Fortification had been given in Luanda regarding the construc-
tion of fortresses during the seventeenth century.
20. On António Máximo de Sousa Magalhães, see Madeira-Santos, “Um gov-
erno ‘polido’ para Angola,” 355–364.
21. Siqueira Bueno, “Desenho e desígnio—O Brasil dos engenheiros mili-
tares,” 49. Valeria Pansini, “L’oeil du topographe et la science de la guerre.
Travail scientifique et perception militaire (1760–1820)” (PhD diss., École
des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 2002), chap. 2.
22. Letter from Barão de Moçâmedes, May 24, 1785, AHU, Cód. 1642, fl. 60;
and January 12, 1786, AHU, Cód. 1642, fl. 30v–31.
23. Andrew Battel, “The strange adventures of Andrew Battell of Leigh in
Essex, sent by the Portuguese prisoner to Angola, who lived there, and
in the adjoining regions, near eighteen years,” in The Strange Adventures of
Andrew Battell of Leigh, in Angola and the Adjoining Regions. Reprinted from
“Purchas his Pilgrimes,” ed. E. G. Ravenstein. Publications of the Hakluyt
Society, Ser. 2, No. 6, 1901, 367–406.
24. See letter from Barão de Moçâmedes to José Seabra da Silva, Luanda, July
15, 1786, AHU, Cód. 1642, fl. 37v.
25. Antoine François Prévost, Histoire générale des Voyages, vols. 2 and 4, bks.
6 and 9 (Paris: Editeur Didot, 1746–1747).
26. Letter from Miguel António de Melo to Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho,
December 3, 1797, AHU, Cx. 86, doc. 66.
27. Jean-Pierre Chrétien, L’Afrique des Grands Lacs. Deux mille ans d’histoire
(Paris: Flammarion, 2000), 149.
28. Ensandeira or Incendeira, Portuguese colonial designation of mulemba
(pl. milemba), from Kimbundu, a sacred tree related to Mbundu political
power and especially related to the figure of Ngola Quilunaji. According
to Cadornega, “these such trees are very durable in their plant, and grow
naturally from their cuttings and seeds; it is believed that the ancient
Kings of Angola traditionally had them planted as certain signs of the
limits of their Kingdom, of solid ground”; see António de Oliveira
Cadornega, História geral das guerras angolanas, vol. 1 (Lisbon: Agência
Geral do Ultramar, 1972 [1690]), 26–27; Pe. João António Cavazzi de
Montecúccolo, Descrição histórica dos três reinos Congo, Matamba e Angola,
bk. 2 (Lisbon: Agrupamento de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, Junta de
Investigações do Ultramar, 1965), 131; John Gossweiler, Nomes indíge-
nas das plantas de Angola, vol. 7 of Agronomia Angolana (Luanda: Impr.
Nacional, 1953), 459–460. Father Maia made the equivalence between
Mulemba, insandeira, and sycamore. He says the word “mulemba” is of
Kimbundu origin and the word “insendeira” is of Kikongo origin, hav-
ing been formed from unsandi, nsanda (Antonio da Silva Maia, Dicionário
Complementar: Português-Kimbundu-Kikongo [Cucujaes: Tipogafia das
Missoes, 1964], 433); Catarina Madeira-Santos and Ana Paula Tavares,
Africae Monumenta. A apropriação da escrita pelos Africanos, vol. 1: Arquivo
Caculo Cacahenda (Lisbon: IICT, 2002).
29. Virgílio Coelho, “Em busca de Kabàsà: Uma tentativa de explicação da estru-
tura político-administrativa do ‘Reino de Ndongo,’” Estudos Afro-Asiáticos,
Universidade Cândido Mendes, 32 (December 1997): 135–162; Coelho,
“‘Os de dentro, os de fora e os outros’: Análise sucinta de um modelo estru-
tural de organização administrativa e urbana do ‘Reino de Ndòngò’, desde
a sua fundação até fins do século XVI,” Fontes & Estudos, Luanda, Arquivo
Histórico Nacional de Angola, 4–5 (1998–1999): 163–228.
30. Augusto Bastos, “Traços gerais sobre ethnographia do districto de
Benguella,” Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa 26/1–6 (January–
June 1908): 137.
31. See Aida Freudenthal, Arimos e Fazendas. A transição agrária em Angola
(1850–1880) (Luanda: Edições Chá de Caxinde, 2005).
32. General order from the governor Manuel de Almeida Vasconcelos, October
18, 1793, AHU, Cx. 86, doc. 36.
33. Letter from Miguel António de Melo to Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho,
December 3, 1797, AHU, Cx. 86, doc. 66.
34. Letter from Miguel António de Melo to Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, June
28, 1798, AHU, Cx. 88, doc. 21.
35. It should be noted that there was a renaming of places in Brazil and Angola
through the introduction of Portuguese toponyms preceded by the adjec-
tive “novo” (new): for example, “Novo Belém,” “Nova Golegã.” That is
what Benedict Anderson calls “spatial synchrony”; L’Imaginaire national:
Réflexions sur l’origine et l’essor du nationalisme (Paris: La Découverte,
2002), 189–190, Eng. orig.: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Cf. V. Y. Mudimbe, The
Invention of Africa, Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (London:
James Currey, 1988); Roger Chartier, Inscrire et effacer. Culture écrite et lit-
térature (XIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Gallimard and Seuil, 2005); João Carlos
Garcia, “Mapas e Atlas do Visconde de Santarém. A prioridade do desco-
brimento da África Ocidental,” in A História da Cartografia na Obra do
Visconde de Santarém, Exposiçao cartobibliográfica, 24 de Nov de 2006 a 10
de Fevereiro de 2007 (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 2006), 7–16; Madeira-
Santos, “Um governo ‘polido’ para Angola,” 87–119.
36. Mário António, “História de Angola de Elias Alexandre da Silva Corrêa,”
in Reler África (Coimbra: Instituto de Antropologia, Universidade de
Coimbra, 1990), 209–232; Mário António, “À sombra do Marquês de
Pombal—Um grande acto de luso-afro-brasilidade,” in Reler África, 393–
406; Francisco Soares, Notícia da Literatura Angolana (Lisbon, Imprensa
Nacional Casa da Moeda, 2001), 70–71; Iris Kantor, Esquecidos e renascidos:
Historiografia acadêmica Luso-Americana (1724–1759) (Hucitec: Centro de
Estudos Bahianos, 2004), 14. Isabel da Mota, A Academia Real da História:
Os intelectuais, o poder cultural e o poder monárquico no séc. XVIII (Coimbra:
Minerva, 2003), chap. 2.
37. See António Brásio, “Descripção dos Governos . . . , Academia Real das
Ciências de Lisboa,” Stvdia 41–42 (January–December 1979): 206. Cf. John
K. Thornton and Joseph C. Miller, “A crónica como fonte, história e hagi-
ografia. O Catálogo dos Governadores de Angola,” Revista Internacional de
Estudos Africanos, nos. 12–13 (January–December 1990): 12, Eng. orig.:
“The Chronicle as Source, History and Hagiography: The Catálogo dos
Governadores de Angola,” Paideuma 33 (1987): 359–389.
38. See António Brásio, “Descripção dos Governos dos Ill.mos E Ex.mos Snr.es
António de Vasconcellos, e D. Francisco Innocencio de Souza Coutinho,”
Stvdia 41–42 (January–December. 1979): 207 (Lisbon, Centro de Estudos
Históricos Ultramarinos da Junta de Investigações Científicas do
Ultramar).
39. Miguel António de Melo, “Relatório do Governo . . . ,” Boletim da Sociedade
de Geografia de Lisboa, 5th ser. (1885): 557.
40. Letter of Miguel António de Melo, June 5, 1798, Arquivos de Angola, vol. 1,
no. 1, 1933.
41. Jan M. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (London and Nairobi: James
Currey and Heinemann, 1985), 19; Thornton and Miller, “A crónica
como fonte, história e hagiografia. O Catálogo dos Governadores de Angola,”
9–55.
42. Elias Alexandre da Silva Corrêa, História de Angola, vol. 2, Lisbon, Colecção
dos Clássicos da Expansão Portuguesa no Mundo, Série E-Império, 49.
43. See Charles R. Boxer, A “História” de Cadornega no Museu Britânico

(Coimbra: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, 1961), 6.
44. See Madeira-Santos, “Um governo ‘polido’ para Angola,” 367–381.
45. Latin American historiography is abundant on the issue of Creole
people—understood as the descendants of the Spanish colonists—and
the emergence of a self-consciousness; see Jaime E. Rodriguez O., “The
Emancipation of the America,” The American Historical Review 105/1
(February 2000): 131–152. In the case of the Portuguese Empire, the
meaning of the term Creole is less unambiguous. Jill Dias used the term
to characterize the society of Luanda in the late nineteenth century and
showed that, among the great diversity of social actors that it embraces,
there were also Westernized Africans (“ocidentalizados”); Jill Dias, “Uma
questão de identidade: Respostas intelectuais às transformações económi-
cas no seio da elite crioula da Angola portuguesa entre 1870 e 1930,”
Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos 1 (January–June 1984): 61–94.
46. Kantor, Esquecidos e renascidos, 31.
47. Letter from Martinho Teixeira de Mendonça to Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho,
June 10, 1796, AHU, Cx. 83, doc. 61; letter from António Máximo de
Sousa Magalhães to Martinho de Melo e Castro, Angola, April 23, 1780,
AHU, Cx. 63, doc. 17. Óscar Ribas refers to the term Angolan (angolense):
“what is natural or inhabitant of Angola. The same as angolano”; Óscar
Ribas, Dicionário de regionalismos angolanos (Matosinhos: Contemporânea,
1994).
48. See Franz W. Heimer, O Processo de Descolonização em Angola 1974–1976
(Lisbon: A Regra do Jogo, 1980), 23.
49. AHU, Cx. 83, doc. 61; AHNA, J. Cordeiro da Matta, Repositório de Coisas
Angolenses (Usos, Costumes, tradições, lendas e anedotas), 600 fls.
50. J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New
Haven: Yale U. P., 1998), 7, fn. 164.
51. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité
parmi les hommes (1755), publ. in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 3: Du contrat
social. Écrits politiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 216, fn. 9.
Part III
Self-assertion of New Nodes of
Knowledge Production
7
Mexico, an American Hub in
the Making of European China
in the Seventeenth Century
Antonella Romano
Toda la Iglesia de la China gime y se queja, Padre Santísimo:

clama altamente, que no ha sido instruida, sino engañada por
los mismos Jesuitas, en los rudimentos de nuestra purísima
fe que la han ensenado.
Juan de Palafox, Letter to Pope Innocent X, 1649
In 1670, the Histoire de la conqueste de la Chine par les Tartares, conte-

nant plusieurs choses remarquables, touchant la religion, les moeurs, & les
costumes de ces deux nations, & principalement de la dernière . . . was pub-
lished simultaneously in Madrid and Paris, in French and in Spanish.1
The book dealt with the Manchu conquest of China, and its author
was the Spanish archbishop of Puebla, New Spain, Juan de Palafox.
The war, now commonly interpreted as a long 40-year period of
“transition,”2 had very few European witnesses, mostly missionaries
whose understanding of the general situation by and large depended
on their own position (socially as well as spatially).
At the time of publication, Juan de Palafox had been dead for
11 years, and information about the conquest had already been cir-
culated in Europe, mostly but not exclusively by the Italian Jesuit
Martino Martini, in his De bello tartarico, which first appeared in
Antwerp in 1654.3 Between the two dates, different compilations,
copies, and accounts had been either published or spread through
formal and informal channels of communication. These included
the travelogues of Thévenot,4 accounts by Dutch travelers printed
181
182 Antonella Romano
in journals,5 and manuscripts and letters by missionaries.6 In the fol-

lowing period, around the 1690s, a text by another Portuguese Jesuit,
G. de Magalhães, La Nouvelle relation de la Chine,7 was printed in Paris
(1688): it consisted in the rewriting, by the French erudite Bernou,
of Magalhães’s partially burnt 1668 manuscript, brought from China
to Italy by the French procurator of the Chinese mission, F. Couplet,
in 1681.8 In other words, this was another posthumous edition that
appeared around 20 years after its production, and 40 years after the
“event.” Two years later, in 1690, the French Jesuit d’Orléans paid trib-
ute to this historiography through the addition of his own piece.9
Aside from this long list of titles, my aim here is to outline a
European interest, in the seventeenth century, in Chinese history, and
more generally, in China. With the Manchu conquest, “une des plus
grandes révolutions qui soit arrivée dans le monde,”10 the Empire of
the Middle offered Europe an exceptional case study: observers were
faced with the necessity to qualify the “event,” on the basis of a con-
ception of historical time and method that developed and shaped the
European understanding of history, in relation to both European and
non-European cultures. Within this kind of research framework, I see
Palafox’s work as a paradigmatic book in which it is possible to ana-
lyze the articulation of intellectual and political dynamics at stake in
history writing. In fact, most of the authors previously quoted were
at least partly observers of what they described—with the exception
of Palafox, whose text, as far as I know, was the only one authored
while residing in America, more specifically in the viceroyalty of New
Spain,11 where he occupied prominent political and religious posts.
Thus the twofold decentering he represents can enrich the under-
standing of the competition surrounding the circulation of informa-
tion and the making of knowledge, beyond imperial, cultural, and
epistemological boundaries.
Locating Palafox’s voice
My aim here is to locate and analyze Juan de Palafox’s contribu-

tion on the basis of the published version of his History in Spanish
and French, taking into account the first chronological setting of
the work, namely the 1640s, which corresponded to the events he
commented on and to his presence in New Spain. In the context of
the Spanish Empire, Mexico was China’s closest neighbor. More pre-
cisely, seen from a seventeenth-century Spanish perspective, Mexico
Mexico in the Making of European China 183
was the American hub between Europe and Asia: since the 1560s, the
route from Madrid to Beijing took in, from the second half of the six-
teenth century, the port of Seville, the port of Vera Cruz on the other
side of the Atlantic, the cities of Puebla and Mexico, then the port of
Acapulco on the Pacific side of New Spain, and the Philippines and
the city of Manila in the South China Sea, before finally arriving at
the Chinese coast. This is the geographical framework that has to be
envisaged in order to highlight the spatial dimension of the produc-
tion of knowledge, a space that molds it. This, at least, is what my
contribution aims to discuss, showing that within spaces designed
by imperial borders, divergent agencies using different intellectual
resources shaped knowledge through the negotiation of disciplinary
boundaries. In this case, the disciplines are history and theology. How
knowledge production was molded by such a space is linked first of
all to Palafox’s position between the Church and the Crown.12
A Spaniard of noble stock, Palafox embarked on an ecclesiastical
career after classical studies at the Spanish university of Alcala and
then Salamanca, where he graduated in canon law. One of his first
posts was as the young chaplain of Maria Anna, the archduchess of
Austria, on her journey to Austria in order to become the empress
of the Holy Roman Empire after her marriage to Ferdinand III. He
consequently spent three years, between the age of 29 and 31, trav-
eling through Italy, Austria, Moravia, Bohemia, the Palatine States,
Flanders, and France, in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War. Back
in Spain, he was appointed bishop of the diocese of Puebla de los
Angeles, as well as the general visitor of New Spain, where he arrived
in 1640. In short, it could be said that he epitomizes the trajectory
and character of the Counter-Reformation bishop, in the line of
Paleotti or Borromeo at the end of the sixteenth century, but half a
century after the conclusion of Trent.13
The year 1640 was a black one for the Spanish empire, correspond-
ing with the defeat of the Spanish crown in Portugal: on December
1, in the context of a Catalan revolt, John, Duke of Braganza was
acclaimed as King John IV of Portugal, marking the end of the Iberian
Union. Interestingly, the parallel between the importance of this
event for Spain and the beginning of the invasion of China by the
Manchu is drawn from the very beginning of Palafox’s text: “When
in the Year 1640, a year Fatal to several States, those Clouds began
to gather, which shortly after produced such a Storm, as ruined the
whole Empire.”14 To some extent, 1640 marked the beginning of
decadence: two empires, the Chinese and the Spanish, began their
decline, and Palafox was able to observe both.
Palafox’s Mexican years, with his activities as bishop as well as a
short spell as viceroy of New Spain, were particularly intense.15 These
years coincided with a period of political turmoil marked by harsh
conflict between the regular and the secular clergy, a structural prob-
lem for the Spanish Catholic Church in the colonial period. In addi-
tion, the 1640 revolt in which Portugal won back its independence
rekindled tensions between the Spanish metropolis and its colonies.
In these conditions, all Portuguese subjects of the Spanish Empire were
seen as potential suspects, especially in New Spain, where the viceroy
Villena had compromised himself by entering into a pro-Portuguese
alliance against the Crown.16 The Mexican phase of Palafox’s career
spanned this multilayered crisis: in May 1642 he replaced the vice-
roy for several months, and took advantage of his position to launch
important financial and university reforms. In the following years,
and especially from 1647 onward, Palafox engaged in a tough struggle
with the Jesuits, whose privileges he wanted to restrain.17 The final
years of his time in Mexico were therefore deeply affected by these
conflicts, which intersected, on different levels, with other anti-Jesuit
movements in Spain and in the Catholic world.
In this period of strife, with the Spanish bishop constantly having
to face political, jurisdictional, and theological problems in which he
had to tread a path between different potential allies or enemies—in
the colonial administration, the Inquisition, the regular and secular
clergy, the local authorities, and the indigenous peoples—the Chinese
horizon may seem to be too far west. But as current historiography
shows, one has to consider the presence of Asiatic communities in
New Spain.18 And, from the perspective of the Universal Catholic
Church, Puebla was the American diocese closest to the Middle
Kingdom, on the border of which lay the diocese of Macao, created
in 1576, which was under Portuguese Padroado. In other words, in
the middle of the seventeenth century the South China Sea was a
frontier between Catholic churches and between Catholic and Asian
religions.
Among the impressive number of treatises, reports, and other writ-
ings on theology, literature, and indigenous peoples left by Palafox,
one will find The history of the conquest of China by the Tartars together
with an account of several remarkable things concerning the religion, man-
ners, and customes of both nations, but especially the latter first writ in
Spanish by Senõr Palafox . . . and now rendred English. It is a text of 588

pages, in 12 books, consisting of 32 chapters, divided into 2 parts:
the first part describes the story of the military conflict (Chapters 1
to 24 are organized chronologically); the second part (Chapters 25
to 32) expresses some general considerations about the new rulers.
Chapter 1 starts with “the beginning of the troubles” in 1640,19 while
Chapter 24 concludes the historical overview with general thoughts
about the decline of empires,20 after a more precise description of
Chinese-Japanese relations and the Japanese attitude toward China
after the defeat, aiming at a comparison of modern and ancient
empires. Here again, the issue of decline is articulated in terms of
“revolutions of states”:
It is fit therefore that men should rationally ponderate and con-

sider the Revolutions of States. He that would reflect with himself,
that those Calamities which he sees to happen to others, might
likewise fall upon himself, might hereby avoid those Cheats which
are imposed upon most men by the fallacious Smiles of Fortune,
and better arm and prepare himself against those Misfortunes and
Disgraces which are equally incident to all Mankind. Those Princes
and Nations who were Neighbours to the Chineses, ought to have
made these Reflections upon the Ruine of that great Empire, and
not to have insulted over those unfortunate People, as the Iapanners
did, who treated them most barbarously and inhumanely. With
this Remark, I shall conclude the Narrative of the most consider-
able Passages in the Conquest of China.21
In these considerations, Palafox develops and puts into practice

his view of history: a narrative that helps to draw general conclu-
sions about the decline of empires. It does not seem, according to his
description, that the events he narrates could lead to any other con-
clusion than the ultimate victory of the Manchu over the Chinese,
although at the point where his narrative ends, the southern provinces
of China were still under the control of the Ming. But, for him, the
defeat was clear.22 He does not provide his reader with any thoughts
about the faithfulness, accuracy, or trustworthiness of his sources:
no comment is made about them, and they are generally cited as
“relations,” with no further mention. These “relations” allow him
to deploy, throughout his account, a wide body of revealing infor-
mation about China and its extended neighborhood. As the titles of
the chapters show, he is also interested in Korea, the piracy problem,

Japan, and the different players present in this region, including the
Portuguese and the Dutch.23
The second part of the text, as he himself separates it from the
first 24 chapters, encompasses his vision of the Manchu, shedding an
interesting light on his analytical framework. In these seven chapters,
he is interested in the customs and manners of the new rulers, and
the first element he stresses regards the religion, or rather the lack of
religion, of the Tartars:
It may truly be said that those Tartars which conquered China, are
men who have neither the knowledge of God or of any Religion:
For it doth not appear that they apply themselves to the knowledge
of any Deity, or that they shew forth the Notions of any particular
Religion. But they indifferently receive all Religions and Superstitions
which they are acquainted with, refuse none, but conform to all. As
it may be said, that he who is every mans Friend, is no mans Friend,
and that none can be reputed good men in the esteem of that per-
son who is of opinion that there are no ill men; so it may likewise be
said of the Tartars, that they are of no Religion, because they are of
every Religion; for though from their outward actions they may pass
for Idolators, yet to speak properly they have no Religion; for they
neither know nor care to know, what it is they adore: Nay, it doth
not appear, that they retain or receive those first notions which the
sole instinct of Nature, without the assistance of any supernatural
light, impresses into the breast of every man; by which Philosophers
demonstrate a soveraign Being, and a first Cause of all things which
move, and of all the products of Nature.24
In the next paragraph, he once again insists: “They only worship,

or rather admire the Heavens.”25 The qualification of a word belong-
ing to religious vocabulary, “worship” (“révérer” in the French ver-
sion), by one from common language, “admire” (the same in French),
stresses this reading by Palafox. And this line of interpretation is
maintained all through the chapter, so that he can readily introduce
first some comments about the bonzes and, second, compare the
Manchu bonzes with the Chinese bonzes, described by contrast as
lazy idle Fellows, who would neither labour nor take pains; and
cheating Knaves, who gulled and deluded the people, and whilst
they enjoyed plenty and a fluency of all things, eat and devoured
the Bread of the poor . . . Many are of opinion, that in time the
Tartar will either extirpate all these idle and unprofitable fellows,
or else that he will reform them; for the Tartars have a great aver-
sion to the manner of life which the Bonzi lead, which is no ways
sutable to their Genius or Humour.26
A “thick description”27 of the entire text leads to the conclusion that

Palafox’s aim is to establish a strong distinction between two kinds of
barbarians: the Tartar-with-no-religion and the idolater Chinese. The
implicit comparison starts with the religious character, and then, in
the following chapters, continues with other aspects of political and
social organization, government, their women, and their culture. The
lack of religiosity, on one hand, opposed to idolatrous practices, on
the other, paves the way for a systematic comparison between the
new barbarian masters and the defeated Chinese. The Tartars are fash-
ioned as superior to the Chinese, contrary to the image of the refined
and highly developed civilization that the Ming had been associated
with in earlier European literature.
Among the different examples offered by the text, the one relat-
ing to science is eloquent: in a first passage dedicated to the topic,
Palafox outlines the excessive respect the Chinese had for literature
and science, which caused their ruin because of the submission of
the warriors to the learned doctor.28 This is reiterated in Chapter 28,
which is entirely devoted to the question of knowledge: here again,
the combination of arms and letters seems to be suggested as a recipe
for good government, and here again, the model is contrasted with
the Chinese, who are addicted to learning:
Learning and Arms may be considered in a State, as the two Poles

upon which the Government turnes, and by which it subsists; so
that either of them cannot be laid aside, but it must in a manner
occasion a vacuum, and thereby debilitate the body Politick. But
it is most certain that the want of Arms and knowledge in Military
affairs, may have more dangerous consequences than the want
of Books, and ignorance in the learned Arts and Sciences, which
stand in need of Arms and Souldiers to protect and defend them.
Which is clearly manifest by the late Revolution of China, which
the Tartar understood so well, that he thought himself obliged to
remedy that ill, as well as he could, knowing that that which had
given him so great advantage, might prove as much to his disad-
vantage, if he did not shun and avoid it.29
Compared with the abundance of texts in Europe emphasizing the

greatness of China,30 such insistence cannot but surprise. And this
is where Palafox’s thought is interesting: with his comparative tool,
used in order to discredit China, he moves from history to theol-
ogy in order to strengthen his analysis. The shift makes sense if we
consider Palafox not only as an actor settled in New Spain, but also
rooted in the arena of European and Catholic theological debate,
shaped by the first contestation of the Jesuit methods of evangeliza-
tion in China. By stressing the weaknesses of the Ming, Palafox not
only expresses a powerful criticism of China, but also—and one may
assume, more interestingly for his own agenda—condemns the entire
work of evangelization undertaken and promoted by Catholic mis-
sionaries since their arrival in the 1580s, in this case the Jesuits. This
reading is supported by another passage:
I must now say something how the Tartars have carried them-
selves towards the Christians which they found in China. There
was divers Priests of the Christian Religion in several places, and it
is certain, that they had beyond all comparison, a greater respect
and esteem for them, than for all the Bonzi.31
As a consequence, “the whole Nation is very courteous, and won-

derfully compliant to the Humors of all persons, which cannot be
denied to be a very apt disposition to incline them to receive the first
Principles of the Christian Religion, and afterwards to induce them
to give credit to those Truths which it teaches, when upon examina-
tion they shall find them so conformable to the most refined Light of
Reason.”32 In other words, the kind of virginity that the Tartars dem-
onstrate in their attitude to religion, adding to their natural “cour-
tesy,” makes them excellent targets for the expansion of the Catholic
faith, in contrast to the Chinese and their idolatry.
As a provisional conclusion, I would like to make two points: first,
unlike the writing of the Jesuit Martino Martini,33 the account of Juan
de Palafox is not intended to be a text by a historian, whose targeted
audience would mostly have been the European Republic of Letters,
where dilettanti prompted by curiosity, and Orientalists in search of
new pieces of evidence and information about Chinese chronology,

would share the same interest in the Middle Empire.34 Second, this
text is part of a broader debate in which Palafox participates as the
bishop of the diocese of Puebla: the debate is about the government
of the Church, in relation to the imperial power of the Spanish crown,
and Palafox’s contribution, as mirrored by all his writings, aims to
strengthen the part played by the Catholic Church as the spiritual
branch of the crown. This involves not only the organization and the
empowerment of the secular clergy, but also the strict obedience of
the regular clergy, above all, the Jesuits. The Chinese stage functions,
then, as an extension of the Mexican one, where the major battle that
has to be fought is against the Jesuits. The Manchu conquest offered
Spain an unexpected opportunity to get back into China, following a
long history of Spanish spiritual and economic settlement in Asia, in
competition with Portugal.35
The Dominican connection
One strand of Palafox’s narrative refers to an episode of the war with

the pirates:
The great Defeat of the Corsairs happened presently after the reduc-
tion of the City of Canton: But it is not related in the Memorials
which came from China, till after the Relation of the entire
Conquest of the whole Continent of China; to make some distinc-
tion, I suppose, between the Sea-fights and the Land-fights which
the Tartars had with the Chineses.36
Then, he says: “I have related all that I could inform my self of concern-
ing the Conquest of China, from these brief Memorials and Relations
I received.”37 These very few allusions to his sources of information
tell us about the channels and networks connecting Palafox in New
Spain and China.
As already mentioned, the place connecting both sides of the
Pacific Ocean is Manila: “This province being nearer to Macao, from
whence the Relations came to Manila, and from thence were dispersed
into other parts, hath been the occasion that we have been more
exactly informed of all the most remarkable passages in the reduc-
tion hereof.”38 There is nothing surprising about the remark, but it
assumes particular interest if we place it in the broader framework of
the political opposition between Spain and Portugal after Portugal’s

reacquired independence, when the different routes linking China
and Europe stopped being controlled by the universal monarchy.
The major maritime routes, under the control of the Dutch and the
Portuguese, followed the African coast, the Cape of Good Hope,
then India, and Asia. They were activated either by merchant or
by missionary networks, mostly the Jesuits.39 Mexican knowledge
about China circulated through Spanish Church channels, as well
as through the trade represented by the Manila Galleon, connecting
Spain and the Spanish East Indies, where the Spanish empire had to
concentrate its strength on the archipelagos along the sea route to
the Philippines.40
From his position in Puebla, and being part of one of the most
powerful and well-connected institutions of the seventeenth century,
the universal Catholic Church, Palafox had privileged access to a mis-
sionary network distinct from that of the Society of Jesus. This was
the one made up of the ancient mendicant orders—the Dominicans,
Augustinians, and Franciscans—the first to have been entrusted with
the spiritual conquest of America. Palafox’s personal contacts with
some of the Dominicans traveling between Spain and China are doc-
umented, and they contained both a personal and an institutional
dimension. The bishop met the missionary Juan Batista Morales
(1597–1654) in 1646, the year in which the latter passed through
Mexico together with a group of new missionaries on their way to
China.41
It was not Morales’s first journey to Mexico, as he had been part
of the very first group of Spanish mendicants who, in 1633, had
obtained authorization from Rome to go to China, after a first
attempt launched from Madrid in the 1580s. As they were from the
Spanish Church, they effectively destroyed the monopoly position
the Jesuits had enjoyed for the 50 previous years. His first stay lasted
six years, mostly in the province of Fujian. There, the clash with the
Jesuits was almost immediate, sparked by their different understand-
ing of Chinese ritual practices.42 The history of the meeting between
the Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans, which took place in Fujian
in 1635, is well known, and I refer to it now in order to stress the
importance of the debate and controversy at the local level, out of
the control and designs of the Roman power.43 More importantly,
these conflicts were not only played out in China, but also traveled:
Morales was the first to transfer them to Europe, initially to Rome,
then to Madrid, and consequently, and above all, to New Spain. Back
in China, the controversy acquired fresh intensity.44
Morales was therefore among the first clergymen to openly criticize
the methods of the Jesuits, and can be considered to have been one
of the initiators of the Chinese Rites controversy. In fact, in 1643 he
went to Rome to submit a list of 17 questions to the Congregation for
the Propagation of Faith, at that time directed by Francesco Ingoli.45
After he had secured the position of his order in front of the Roman
Congregation, he left Europe again for the Orient. Passing through
Spain in 1644, he took with him a new group of missionaries, includ-
ing the young Domingo Navarette. It was during this journey back to
China that Morales encountered Palafox in Mexico, at a time when
Palafox was struggling with the Jesuits.46
Within this perspective, it is possible to regard Palafox’s writings
as being complementary to Morales’s action. In addition, during the
Dominican’s long stay in Mexico (between 1646 and 1648), he and
the bishop had many opportunities to share their knowledge and
views, and Morales could easily enrich not only Palafox’s knowledge
of China, but also his information about the Roman and Spanish
stages. Back in China after more than ten years, Morales “discovered”
the new political situation in the Middle Empire, and kept the bishop
of Puebla informed: this happened in 1649. We may thus conclude
that the History of the Conquest should be located at the intersection
of two anti-Jesuit fronts, one formed by the secular clergy of Mexico,
and the other by the regular clergy in the Philippines and in China.
The “revolution” was seen as the decisive moment for Spain and the
mendicant orders to go onto the front foot with regard to the Jesuits
and the Portuguese.
Palafox’s take on the Manchu conquest explains another charac-
teristic of his text. Interestingly, and as suggested both by what has
been said previously and by the comparison with Martino Martini,
the Jesuits are basically absent from his report. The entire narrative
works as if they had never been present in the Middle Empire. This
point was noticed by one of his biographers,47 but it deserves closer
examination in order to stress the controversial nature of such a
silence. Very few references to them are present in the book, and
they are quite systematically critical, except for one single passage,
where he admits that “the Iesuits, who are the sole Preachers and
Propagators of the Christian Religion in China,” have, as such, “suf-
fered very much both in their Persons and Goods, from the Insolency
of the Souldiers.”48 But his concession to the Society of Jesus’s pres-

ence in China is immediately counterbalanced by a qualification:
“And this must likewise be said, that whatever the Iesuits suffered,
it was not upon the account of their Religion.” In a further passage,
he goes beyond mere qualification to voice a criticism that not only
avoids mentioning their work, but also emphasizes its negative effects
alone:
The Tartarian Women seemed more inclinable to our Religion;

for they frequently resorted to the Churches of the Christians in
Peking; but in truth, this was rather out of Curiosity than Devotion,
though they shewed a great respect to the Images which adorned
the Altars in the Churches. Perhaps they went out of compliance
to the Iesuites, whom they saw so considered by the Emperour
and all the Grandees of his Court; for the whole Nation is very
courteous.
It is not even contemplated that the women were attracted to the

Catholic Church out of sincere conversions: their curiosity is the con-
sequence of the Jesuits’ strategy. As they are close to the circle of
power, the women see them as a way to reach the court. And, in the
last section of the quotation, their missionary activities are described
in highly ambiguous terms:
This was all the esteem the Tartars had for Books or any learned
Sciences, to which they little applyed themselves, unless it was
out of a desire to have some knowledge in the Mathematicks and
Astrology. For whereas they adore the Heavens, they were well
enough pleased to be able to discourse of the Stars, and to entertain
themselves with that, which is the very ground and fundamen-
tals of their Religion, but they mattered not much for any deep
Learning herein. The Tartars publish every year their Almanacks
or Calenders, which are little different from the Chineses. That in
the year 1647 was the first which was set forth under the name,
and by the order of the Emperour Xunchi. This was a very curious
piece, and the Author thereof was Father Adam the Iesuit, who was
very skilful in the Mathematicks, and was then in great favour and
credit with the Emperour.
Two elements are combined here. One is the missionaries’ close

proximity to secular power, negatively judged as in the previous
comment. But, the additional strand of criticism, less explicit though

more powerful, lies in the description of the astronomical activities of
the Jesuits in relation to “mathematics and astrology.”49 Behind a sort
of neutral comment about the level of the Tartars’ interest in science,
the comment outlines the idolatric relation toward the heavens they
“adore.” The Jesuits’ collaborative stance can consequently be con-
demned, because it pays lip service to and enhances false faith and
idolatry. In the Mexican context, indirectly extending the accusation
of idolatry to the Jesuits was very powerful, because of the presence of
the Inquisition in the New World and its canonical condemnation of
idolatry as the greatest of mortal sins. And the persecution of idolatry
stood at the very heart of the American councils after Trent.50
Palafox’s focus on China is thus twofold: on one hand, it represents
a new battleground for pursuing his fight against the Jesuits; on the
other, he sketches a project that goes beyond a basic anti-Jesuitism.
By describing a Chinese world empty of Jesuits—or where the Jesuits
had not achieved any reliable results in terms of converting the most
powerful state in the world—he offers an interpretation of what
the Manchu conquest might bring: a new agenda for its evangeliza-
tion by a reformed Church, where its secular branch, strengthened
by the action of its regular branch, could finally be victorious. This
reading might explain why, in this text, Juan de Palafox does not
present himself as an historian, but rather as a theologian and a poli-
tician. This dual nature of the text became visible in the context of
the later period, corresponding to the moment of publication of the
manuscript.
From Mexico to Rome, via Madrid and Paris
Palafox’s text is embedded in a second temporal frame, relating to

and defined by its dates of publication. The manuscript was printed
by the ordinary printer of Queen Maria Theresa of France, Antoine
Berthier (1610?–1678) from Lyon, the nephew of the Lyon bookseller
Prost. Berthier had spent some years in Madrid as his uncle’s post-
man in Spain and as a man of Richelieu. After returning to Paris, he
established himself as a bookseller.51 How Palafox’s manuscript came
into the hands of Berthier remains an open question. But, interest-
ingly, the editor’s choice of a double publication delineates a two-
fold European stage for addressing the Chinese question. In the case
of the French version, the publication framework is highlighted by
a quotation from the “avis au lecteur”: “faire bien entendre que la

grandeur humaine qui paraît la mieux établie est bien facile à ren-
verser, quand Dieu veut chastier les pechez des peuples par le change-
ment des Empires.”52 In the previous passage, the editor presented
the event as “l’histoire d’un des plus considerables Evenemens de
notre Siecle. Le lecteur n’aura qu’à suivre Monsieur de Palafox pour
apprendre de lui de quelle maniere il a plû à Dieu de troubler la
fausse felicité d’une Nation qu’on nous avait jusques-icy représentée
comme une des plus heureuses nations qui fussent sur la terre.”53 The
Jansenist overtones shed light on French interest in China at that
time, an interest confirmed by the simultaneous publication of the
first volume of La morale pratique des Jésuites.54 In this context, China
was used as a weapon against the Society of Jesus. As for the Spanish
stage, the History was published in between two other publications:
the biography of Palafox by Antonio Gonzalez de Rosende,55 which
appeared in Madrid in 1666; and, in 1676, the Tratados históricos,
políticos, éticos y religiosos de la monarquia de China by the Dominican
Domingo Navarrete, the missionary who, as already mentioned, had
met Palafox in the mid-1640s.56 The French and the Spanish arenas
of the period can be said to have been connected by an anti-Jesuit
front, a more detailed investigation of which is expected to provide a
clear understanding of the precise circumstances of the publication.
Nonetheless, this publication corresponds to a second temporality,
supported by a generational change: the generation of Morales and
Palafox, active at the time and in the space when China fell under
Manchu rule, gives way to that of Navarrete and Arnaud, engaged
with the reform of the Church and who made China the main
object of their religious struggle within the Catholic world in the
last decades of the seventeenth century. It thus voices other interests
than those of Palafox himself, on two different and complementary
but strictly European stages, Paris and Madrid, facing a third, global,
stage—Rome.
If we return now to Domingo Navarette, the Dominican who trav-
eled back and forth between Europe, America, and Asia, one particu-
lar aspect of his Chinese period needs to be considered. He arrived
in Manila in 1648, after the already mentioned stop in Mexico, and
spent a whole decade in the Philippines.57 He went to China in
1657, once he had learned the Chinese language, and settled in the
province of Fujian. This is where he, like the other members of the
Christian communities of China, had to face the imperial decree of
1665 prohibiting the Christian sect in the empire.58 Navarrete was

exiled to Canton, where he stayed with the Jesuits, together with
23 missionaries of different orders, until he managed to escape in
December 1669 and returned to Macao.
During this period of tension and exile, Navarrete devoted himself,
together with other missionaries, to organizing the “conference of
Canton,” with the idea of solving locally the question of the civil
rites that had been addressed by Juan Batista Morales 20 years ear-
lier, in Rome. In the course of this conference, he compiled a list of
119 “doubts,” which he would eventually present to the Congregation
for the Propagation of Faith in 1673 when he traveled to Rome to
discuss the Chinese rites in his capacity as prefect of the Dominican
mission. In this context, he also translated from Portuguese, and pub-
lished in Spanish, Longobardo’s manuscript on the Chinese name of
Christ: the text, written around 1624, had never been published by
the Society of Jesus itself.59 When he returned to Spain in 1677, Pope
Innocent XI named him the archbishop of Santo Domingo, where he
stayed until his death in 1686.
Navarrete’s life, divided between Spain, the Philippines, the prov-
ince of Fujian, and Santo Domingo, was shaped by different intersect-
ing trajectories and encounters that determined the choices he could
and would make at different times and in different places: it is impos-
sible to disregard the importance of these encounters, mostly due to
contingencies, with Morales, Palafox, Martini, and Pallu. As a result,
what remains from Navarrete’s life is a long text written in Spanish,
Tratados históricos, políticos, éticos y religiosos de la monarquia de China,
the first important Spanish contribution to European writings on
China in the seventeenth century. Printed in Madrid, it contained a
description of the empire and its history, but above all dealt with the
opposition between the mendicant orders and the Jesuits over the
evangelization of China. This is why the book contains all sorts of
documents, mainly pontifical writings on the rites.
The work is most commonly used and cited in relation to the theo-
logical dimension of the Chinese rites controversy: throughout the five
treatises dedicated to the description of China’s history and civiliza-
tion, on one hand, and the seven remaining treatises devoted to the
edition of the official documents produced in relation with the contro-
versy, on the other, Navarrete included his own comments in the style
and with the authority of the distinguished theologian that he was
known to be. It is impossible to give a comprehensive account of the
entire work, which resembles an archaeological reconstruction of the

Chinese rites controversy. Using the power of printing in the produc-
tion of an archive of the debate, he thus staged—for a court of paper,
as would be expected from the good and competent theologian that he
was in a real tribunal—the trial of the Society of Jesus, accused of hav-
ing failed in its most important task, that is, the conversion of China.
My suggestion here is that he moved in the footsteps of Palafox, mostly
in his reuse of criticism relating to the Court of Mathematics. I would
argue that Navarrete was particularly sensitive to the question, because
of the imperial prohibition of 1665, to which he and all Christians in
China were subjected. In fact, the main motive for the prohibition was,
as is well known, the controversy between the Chinese astronomers
and Adam Schall von Bell, challenged in his capacity as director of
the Court of Mathematics, mostly concerned with astronomical obser-
vations.60 What some Jesuits had previously contested, namely, the
inconsistency of missionaries’ engagement in astronomical activities,
was endorsed by Navarrete, as it had been previously by Palafox.
In order to strengthen it, the criticism could only develop in a
theological framework. Disseminated throughout the book are direct
allusions to this question, even if no chapter is clearly devoted to it.
Generally, the allusions are either critical or negative, as it is in Part 2,
Chapter 3, dedicated to the Chinese government. The paragraph
describing the social organization of the empire (“En que se trata de el
govierno Chinico”) refers to the foreigners who were not admitted into
the circle of the prince’s ministers and counselors, not only because of
their lack of knowledge and affection, but also because the native vas-
sals were unhappy with such a choice. At this point, Navarrete takes
Schall’s example, the only Jesuit ever mentioned by Palafox in his own
text:
El principe no admita estrangeros, ni por ministros, ni por conse-

jeros, por la falta de noticias y de amor, y porque siempre lo llevan
mal los vassalos, sobrale razon, pero no le vale. Bien lo mostro
el China con el Padre Adamo Iesuita, pues al passo que crecio,
y le favorecio el Emperador, tanto mas se aumento, y crecio la
embidia, y odio contra el; y en fin, no pararon, hasta destruirle,
y a todos nosotros con el, y por el. A esto se pone, quien funda
sobre arena. Mormurole el China, de que se metia mucho con el
Tartaro, y que no se mostrara mas fiel, y apasionado al Emperador
Chino, aviendo sido el, el que avia honorado, y puesto en çancos.
Oy bueluen a la Mathematica los Padres, quiera Dios sea con mejor

pie, y sucesso, que el del Padre Adamo. Dezia el Padre Govea: el
Padre Mateo Ricci nos metio en China con la Mathematica; y el
Padre Adamo nos destierra con la suya.61
This quotation reveals two problems: the first relates to the rivalry
between the Chinese mandarins and the Jesuits under the rule of
the new Tartar emperor, referring explicitly to the “persecution” of
1665; the second concerns the repeated formulation of an old criti-
cism within the Society regarding intellectual activity in general, and
the savant practice in the mission’s territories in particular. Repeating
what the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio de Gouveia (1592–1677)62 had
remarked in relation to Ricci’s methods, he stated that “father Ricci
brought us to China with mathematics, and now father Adam uses
them to chase us out of China.” With this, Navarrete tries to give
objectivity to his own criticisms by using the words of the Jesuits
themselves. But framed like this, the aspects of the missionary meth-
ods that Navarrete criticizes no longer appear to be randomly chosen
and exclusively connected to Schall, but a structural element of the
Jesuit policy that can be traced back to Matteo Ricci.
In the following chapter Navarrete discusses some of the philosophi-
cal concepts in use among the learned Chinese, but he comments
extensively on the way in which the Jesuits read them in order to sys-
tematically emphasize the ambiguous character of the readings/trans-
lations that they proposed.63 At a later point, in the seventh treatise
in which he presents and rearranges the various decrees from Rome
regarding the Chinese mission, Navarrete includes numerous personal
comments. One of the documents presented is the response given by
the consultants of the Holy Office, Lorenzo Brancati de Laurea and
Johanes Bona, to the list of ten questions that they had received from
the Inquisition and the Holy Office with regard to Chinese ritual prac-
tices. One of these directly concerned the Court of Mathematics and its
role in determining the days and places for sacrifices to the dead: “Et
quia adest Tribunal, seu Regium Consilium Mathematicorum, & astrol-
ogorum, cui, & praecipue eius Praesidi icumbit, quotannis ordinare,
edere, subscribere, ac suo sigillo signare Diarium, seu Lunarium, in quo
plurima immiscentur vana, & superstitiosa, & auspicati praescribuntur
dies.”64
Throughout his work Navarrete thus contributed to the construc-
tion of Catholic knowledge of China, through a Spanish network.
At the same time he played a central role in consolidating the theo-

logical debate about accommodation. By doing this he also helped
to turn the question of the mission savante into a public debate.
Paradoxically, at least since the days of Claudio Acquaviva as supe-
rior general of the Society of Jesus (1580–1615), it had been a ques-
tion that structured the conflictive internal history of the society,
opposing those who were in favor of and those who rejected an
apostolic strategy of this kind, and more generally an intellectual
path toward faith. But such a strategy had been, at least just until
the end of the seventeenth century, the trump card that secured the
Jesuits if not a rich harvest in the Lord’s vineyard, at least a central
place and recognition within the European mechanism of knowl-
edge production.
When, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, that position became
heavily contested, the arguments of people like Navarrete, which were
spread mainly through Jansenist channels in the late seventeenth
century, survived the context of the theological quarrels in which
they were originally developed, and found their way into the ensuing
philosophical controversies. This transfer gave Palafox, the bishop of
New Spain who wrote about China, a place on the European stage of
the most important paper “war of religion” in the Catholic world. It
is therefore no coincidence that the bishop of Puebla became famous
after his own lifetime.65
Conclusion
With this multifaceted reading of Palafox’s narrative about the

Manchu conquest of China, we have explored a number of different
and connected questions.
First of all, the interpretation of the “event” closely depended on
different factors, above all the place from where it was observed. In
our case, there is no one assigned place identified as Europe versus
China. On the contrary, there are a multitude of hubs shaping and
providing different kinds of views, and they change over time.
The issue of location is crucial for another reason as well. In the
early modern period, and in relation to long-distance exchanges, it
created contrasting geographies of available knowledge, depending also
on the diverse communicational configurations imposed by the vari-
ous imperial frameworks. Here the point would be not only about the
gathering of information and its major challenge, that is, the local
interaction between the different communities, but also about the
political constraints related to the circulation of information: the cul-

ture of secrecy in Spain, the grammar of scientific communication
imposed by the censorship of the Catholic Church, and the claimed
freedom of Holland.
Second, it raises the political dimension of the production of knowledge,
which depended on both the type of relations the authors had or
aimed to establish with the different powers in the area, and the goals
of their own writing in relation to the targeted or expected European
audience. Palafox aimed mostly at addressing the Spanish crown, and
its empire, and he did so as a clergyman at the top of the secular
church hierarchy.
Third, there is the question of the epistemological dimension of the
analysis. Moving from one place to another and from one agency to
another, the analysis also has to take into account the methodologi-
cal tools mobilized by the actors as well as their implicit references:
theology, canon law, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy have
been mentioned repeatedly throughout these pages, and the unstable
borders between these different spheres have been used.
As a result, as Palafox understood it, the Manchu conquest offered a
new chance to the universal Catholic Church in its efforts to achieve
the spiritual conquest of Asia. It is within this framework that he
“sees” the Tartars, taking them as a point of reference in opposition
to the Chinese:
As for the Chineses in the Southern Provinces, which are more

remote from Tartary, they are soft and effeminate, beyond all the
Inhabitants of Asia; and that which did produce this Effeminacy in
them, and was a great cause of the ruine and destruction of their
Empire, and ever will be to all other States, was the profound Peace
and Security in which those Provinces had been so long involved;
for several ages there was no mention of War in all the Relations and
Histories of those Provinces. They were so ignorant of Navigation,
that they only knew what Tempests and Shipwrack signified, by
seeing the description of them in Pictures. This Nation which so
little troubled themselves with Arms and War, passed all their life
in indulging their ease and their pleasures. Vicious Crimes were all
their occupation, neither could Ignominy nor Correction check
these Disorders; for they considered nothing but plenty and pros-
perity in this Life, having neither a God nor Religion, at least such a
one as did not restrain them from giving themselves wholly to their
luxurious passions.66
He then launched a new topos about China, which would be appro-

priated in the context of the European Enlightenment, obsessed as it
was with the Asiatic model of despotism. Before this further step,
Palafox contributed to the claim that, in the middle of the seven-
teenth century, the conversion of China was nothing but a lie invented
by the Jesuits. If something was to happen it would be under the
Manchu, an open people opposed to the closed-minded Chinese,67 so
that the “Government of that [Manchu] State would make open and
free the Commerce of not only the goods of the Earth, but that which
is of higher esteem and value, the Riches of Faith.”68
Notes
1. I will use, in this contribution, the English translation The history of the
conquest of China by the Tartars together with an account of several remark-
able things concerning the religion, manners, and customes of both nations, but
especially the latter first writ in Spanish by Senõr Palafox . . . and now rendred
English (London: W. Godbid, 1671). It will be systematically abbreviated
as HCCT.
2. Willard J. Peterson, ed., Cambridge History of China, vol. 9 (Cambridge:
Cambridge U. P., 2002); Jonathan D. Spence and John E. Wills, eds.,
From Ming to Ching: Conquest, Region and Continuity in Seventeenth Century
China (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1979); Frederic E. Wakeman Jr., The Great
Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century
China (Berkeley: U. of California P., 1986); Lynn Struve, The Southern Ming
(New Haven: Yale U. P., 1984).
3. Edwin J. Van Kley, “News from China: Seventeenth-Century Notices of
the Manchu Conquest,” Journal of Modern History 45/4 (1973): 561–582.
4. Melchisédech Thévenot, ed., Relations de divers voyages curieux, qui n’ont
point esté publiées; ou qui ont esté traduites d’Hacluyt, de Purchas, & d’autres
Voyageurs Anglois, Hollandois, Portugais, Allemands, Espagnols; et de quelques
Persans, Arabes, et autres Auteurs Orientaux. Enrichies de Figures de Plantes
non décrites, d’Animaux inconnus à l’Europe, & de Cartes Geographiques de
Pays dont on n’a point encore donné de Cartes, 4 vols. (Paris: J. Langlois, S.
Cramoisy, S. Mabre-Cramoisy, A. Cramoisy, 1663–1672).
5. Johann Nieuhof, Het gezantschap der Neerlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie
aan den grooten Tartarischen Cham. den tegenwoordigen keizer van China
(Amsterdam, 1665); Paul Olofsz Rotman, Kort verhael van d’ avonteurli-
jcke voyagien en reysen van Paul Olofsz. Rotman, zeylende van Batavia na het
eylant Tywan, op het fluytschip “de Koe”: Waer in verhaelt wordt hoe zy door
een schrickelijcke “orkaen” het schip verlooren en met acht mannen daer af
quamen en veel vreemde toevallen in ’t koninckrijck van China hadden en eyn-
delijck behouden tot Batavia weder aenquamen (Amsterdam, 1657), in Van
Kley, “News from China,” 568, fn. 31. Relation du Voyage d’Adam Olearius
en Moscovie, Tartarie, et Perse: . . . Avec deux lettres du Sieur de Mandelslo, was
published in Paris, following a translation by Abraham de Wicquefort,
of Adam Olearius’ Vermehrte newe Beschreibung der Muscovitischen und

Persischen Reyse.
6. Antonio de Gouvea, Asia extema, ms.; Victorio Riccio, Hechos de la Orden
de Predicadores en el Imperio de China, ms.; Anna Busquets Alemany, “La
entrada de los Manchús en China y su eco en España,” accessed May
14, 2013, http://www.ugr.es/~feiap/ceiap3/ceiap/capitulos/capitulo28.
pdf; Joan-Pau Rubiés, “The Spanish Contribution to the Ethnology of
Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Asian Travel in the
Renaissance, ed. Daniel Carey (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 93–123;
Eugenio Menegon, “Christian Loyalists, Spanish Friars, and Holy Virgins
in Fujian during the Ming-Qing Transition,” Monumenta Serica 51 (2003):
335–365.
7. The English translation appeared in the same year: A new history of China
containing a description of the most considerable particulars of that vast Empire
(London, Printed for Thomas Newborough, at the Golden Ball, in S. Paul’s
Church-Yard, 1688).
8. David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of
Sinology (Honolulu: U. of Hawaii P., 1985), 95.
9. Pierre Joseph d’Orléans, Histoire de deux conquerans Tartares qui ont sub-
jugué la Chine (Paris: Louis Lucas, 1690).
10. Juan de Palafox, Histoire de la conqueste de la Chine par les Tartares . . . (Paris:
A. Bertier, 1670), Avis.
11. Some of his biographers have discussed the authorship of this text. I have
not yet been able to examine his personal archives: without expecting
any specific revelation, I will conduct research in them, in order to trace
more precisely the conditions of the production of the manuscript. Here
I endorse the commonly accepted statement that the manuscript pub-
lished in Paris in 1670 is his.
12. Born in Fitero, in the province of Navarra, on June 24, 1600, he was the
son of the marquis of Ariza, Jaime Palafox y Mendoza. When he left
Puebla to return to Europe in May 1649, Palafox’s legacy consisted of
the convent of St. Inés, numerous schools, and, most importantly, the
first public library in the New World. This legacy made him known as a
dignitary of the Church, a scholar, and an erudite. For the last ten years of
his life Palafox remained mostly in Osma, as bishop from 1655 until his
death in 1659. He was beatified on September 12, 1767. Among the biog-
raphies of the period dedicated to him, see Antoine Arnauld, Histoire de
dom Jean de Palafox, evêque d’Angelopolis, et depuis d’Osme, et des diferences
qu’il a eu avec les PP. Jesuites, published as the fourth volume of the Morale
pratique des Jésuites (Paris, 1690); Guillermo Bartoli, Historia de la vida del
venerable señor don Juan de Palafox y Mendoza (Florence, 1773). Recent
historiography includes Genaro García, Don Juan de Palafox y Mendoza
(Mexico City: Bouret, 1918); Perla Chinchilla, Palafox y América (Mexico
City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1992); Cayetana Alvarez de Toledo, Po
litics and Reform in Spain and Viceregal Mexico: The Life and Thought of Juan
de Palafox, 1600–1659 (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2004); Ricardo Fernández
Gracia, “Palafox y su pasión por los libros,” Artes de México 68 (2003):
39–43.
13. Paolo Prodi, Il Cardinale Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597), 2 vols. (Rome,

Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1959–1967).
14. Translation from English, London: Printed by W. Godbid and sold by M.
Pitt . . . , 1671, chap. 1, 2.
15. David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, the Creole
Patriots and the Liberal State (1492–1867) (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.,
1991); John H. Elliott, Spain and Its World, 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale
U. P., 1989).
16. Jonathan Israel, Empires and Entrepôts: The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy,
and the Jews, 1585–1713 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990).
17. His first accusation is formulated in a letter to Pope Innocent X, writ-
ten on May 25, 1647. The second is dated January 8, 1649. See Lettre
de l’illustrissime Jean de Palafox de Mendoza, evesque d’Angelopolis dans
l’Amérique, et Doyen du Conseil des Indes, au pape Innocent X.: Du 8. Janv.
1649, contenant diverses plaintes de cet evesque contre les entreprises et les
violences des Jésuites; trad. sur l’original latin, 1649, 30.
18. Edward R. Slack Jr., “The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a
Distorted Image,” Journal of World History 20/1 (2009): 35–67.
19. HCCT, 2: “The Inhabitants of China enjoyed all the pleasures of Peace,
under the Government of their last Emperour, who was called Nunchin, a
deceitful and unfortunate name. He was the most absolute Monarch that
ever [ . . . ] ruled [ . . . ] those vast Territories.”
20. HCCT, chap. 24, 438: “With this Remark, I shall conclude the Narrative of
the most considerable Passages in the Conquest of China.”
21. HCCT, chap. 24, 437–438.
22. Ibid., 438: “It only now remains, that I should say something of the pres-
ent condition of that State under its new Masters; of their management of
Affairs, and manner of Government; of their Religion; of their Armies and
Military Forces; and lastly, of the Manners and Customs of the Tartars.”
23. James S. Cummins, “Palafox, China and the Chinese Rites Controversy,”
Revista de Historia de América 52 (1961): 399: “He kept himself informed of
the mission, and of Chinese affairs in general, by means of reports which
he received twice-yearly, and it was chiefly upon the basis of these that
he wrote his history of the Tartar invasion of China.” But no evidence is
given to confirm this statement.
24. HCCT, chap. 25, 439–440. Emphasis added.
25. HCCT, 440.
26. HCCT, 443–444.
27. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books,
1973), chap. 1.
28. HCCT, chap. 18, 344–345: “But it is credible it was not so much Peace and
Effeminacy, which ruined the Empire of China, as the little esteem that
Nation had of warlike Discipline and Souldiers. The Chineses valued noth-
ing but Literature and Sciences. Any one who was accounted a learned man,
would have trampled upon twenty of their Captains, who were obliged to
suffer patiently this injurious Affront. There always went with the General
who commanded their Armies, some Learned Doctor, on whose direction
all things depended. The whole Army obeyed this Learned Mandorin: It
was he that gave out all the Orders, and not the General. They were all
Scholars, and persons eminent for Learning, who composed the two
Councils of War of that State: And they only were admitted who were best
able to plead some Argument in their Law, and not those who knew how
to draw up an Army in Battalia.”
29. HCCT, chap. 28, 501.
30. In 1667, A. Kircher had just published, in Amsterdam, his China monu-
mentis: Qua sacris quà profanis nec non variis naturae [et] artis spectaculis
aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata, totally based on the
available information provided by the Jesuits of China.
31. HCCT, 446. The following passage also states: “But amidst the Disorders
of the War, the Sacking and pillaging so many Towns, the Iesuits, who
are the sole Preachers and Propagators of the Christian Religion in China,
have suffered very much both in their Persons and Goods, from the
Insolency of the Souldiers, but chiefly from the Chineses who marched
amongst the Tartars: But this was contrary to the express Orders of the
Viceroys and Generals of the Armies, who were far from authorizing those
Violences; which they sufficiently testified by the obliging reception
which they ever after gave to those Fathers; for they gave them all the
Safeguard and Protection which they could desire; and with great famil-
iarity and confidence they consulted with them about their Affairs. And
this must likewise be said, that whatever the Iesuits suffered, it was not
upon the account of their Religion; for the Tartars (as hath been already
remarked) do not much concern themselves with those Matters. And it
would have been very strange, should not the Insolence of the Victorious
Souldiers have transported them to those Excesses which are so usually
practised by them in all parts; but much more amongst the Barbarians.”
32. HCCT, 446–447.
33. Martino Martini, De bello tartarico, in qua, quo pacto Tartari hac nostra aetate
Sinicum Imerium invaserint, ac ferè totum occuparint, narrator; eorumque mores
breviter describuntur (Antwerp: Plantin, 1654).
34. This was the audience targeted by Martini, who fashioned himself as an
erudite in search of intellectual recognition outside the closed circle of the
Church and the Jesuit milieu.
35. The issue that cannot be developed here concerns the first debates, after
the Spanish conquest of the Philippine Islands in the 1560s, about a
military conquest of China in the 1580s. On this first phase, see Manel
Ollé, La Empresa de China: De la Armada Invencible al Galeón de Manila
(Barcelona: Acantilado, 2002).
36. HCCT, chap. 15, 291.
37. HCCT, chap. 23, 397.
38. HCCT, chap. 9, 182.
39. For more information about the Dutch maritime empire, see Harold Cook,
Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden
Age (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2007); Romain Bertrand, Pour une histoire à
part égale. Récit d’une rencontre Orient-Occident (XVIe-XVIIe siècle) (Paris:
Seuil, 2011).
40. Ollé, La Empresa de China.
41. C. de St. Vincent, O. P., La vie du grand Apôtre de la Chine, le vénérable père
Jean-Batiste de Morales (Cologne, 1701); J. de Palafox, Obras, X, 273, 391;
XI, 213; Cartas, 72, 88–89.
42. Menegon, “Christian Loyalists, Spanish Friars, and Holy Virgins”;
Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local
Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge: Harvard-Yenching Institute
Monograph Series, no. 69, Harvard University Asia Center and Harvard
U. P., 2009).
43. James S. Cummins, “Two Missionary Methods in China: Mendicants and
Jesuits,” Archivo Ibero-Americano 38 (1978): 33–109; Eugenio Menegon,
“Jesuits, Franciscans and Dominicans in Fujian: The Anti-Christian
Incidents of 1637–38,” in “Scholar from the West”: Giulio Aleni S. J. (1582–
1649) and the Dialogue between Christianity and China, ed. Tiziana Lippiello
and Roman Malek, Monumenta Serica Monograph Series (Sankt Augustin/
Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1997), 219–262.
44. “Copia de una carta del P.F. Juan Bautista de Morales O.P. al P. Visitator
Manuel Dias S.J. Macau, 3 de Junio de 1639,” in Domingo Fernandez
Navarrete, Tratados Historicos, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1679), trat. 6, fn. 6; “Quaesita
Missionariorum Chinae, seu Sinarum, Sac. Congregationi de Propaganda
Fide exhibita, Cvm responsis ad ea: Decreto eiusdem Sacrae Congregtionis
approbatis (Romae 1645)”; “Lettera de P. Giov. B. de Morales O.P. alla S.
Congregazione di Propaganda Fide,” Manila, June 4, 1649, in Summarium
super dubio (Rome, 1907), 333–338.
45. Quaesita Missionariorum Chinae, seu Sinarum, Sac. Congregationi de
Propaganda Fide exhibita, Cvm responsis ad ea: Decreto eiusdem Sacrae
Congregtionis approbatis (Rome, 1645).
46. Pascale Girard, Les religieux occidentaux en Chine à l’époque moderne. Essai
d’analyse textuelle comparée (Paris: Centre culturel Calouste Gulbenkian,
2000), 102. The return to China took him to Manila in April 1648. By
1649, he was back in China, where he strengthened his position against
the Jesuits, translating into Chinese the 1645 pontifical decision about
the traditional cult of the ancestors. See Cummins, “Two Missionary
Methods in China”; and Menegon, “Jesuits, Franciscans and Dominicans
in Fujian,” 231.
47. Vie du Vénérable Dom Jean de Palafox, évêque d’Angèlopolis, et ensuite évêque
d’Osme, dédiée à Sa majesté catholique, à Cologne, & se trouve à Paris, chez
Nyon, Libraire, quai des Augustins, à l’Occasion, 1766, anonymous pref-
ace, xliv: “Après avoir examiné avec soin cette Histoire . . . il résulte qu’il
n’y est parlé des jésuites qu’en quatre endroits, pages 245, 269, 362 et 363;
que, dans aucun de ces endroits, il n’y a pas la moindre approbation de
leur doctrine ni de leur conduite. Les seules réflexions qui les concernent
portent: qu’il est à remarquer que ce que les jésuites souffrirent de par
les Tartares, ne fut pas au sujet de la religion . . . ; que si les femmes de ces
conquérants allaient et venaient fort librement dans les églises, c’était.”
48. HCCT, 445.
49. Antonella Romano, “Observer, vénérer, servir. Une polémique jésuite
autour du Tribunal des mathématiques de Pékin,” Annales, HSS 4 (2004):
729–756.
50. Juan C. Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad. La incorporación de

los indios del Perú al catolicismo (1532–1750) (Lima: IFEA, 2003).
51. Accessed May 14, 2013, http://www.idref.fr/030999545.
52. French ed., 1670, Avis au lecteur, s.p.
53. Ibid.
54. It was published by Sébastien Joseph du Cambout de Pontchateau, in 1669,
in Amsterdam, by Elzevir. It is worth noting that the major source of this
first volume, as would also be the case in the subsequent volumes, was a
very difficult-to-access Spanish book that had been placed on the Index
in Spain, the Teatro Jesuitico, first published in 1654. It was an accurate
and detailed attack on the Jesuits, written by a Dominican friar, Ildefonso
a Sancto Tomas, who was also Palafox’s successor as archbishop of Osma.
This reference anticipates the interest in Spanish sources and Palafox,
expressed later by Antoine Arnaud, as the follower of the Morale pratique
des Jésuites and the biographer of Palafox. For a discussion of the impor-
tant consequences of this publication for the missionaries in China, see
Antonella Romano, “Defending European Astronomy in China . . . Against
Europe: Tomás Pereira and the Directorate of Astronomy in 1688,” in
In the Light and Shadow of an Emperor: Tomas Pereira, SJ (1645–1708), the
Kangxi Emperor and the Jesuit Mission in China, ed. Artur K. Wardega, SJ,
and António Vasconcelos De Saldanha (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars, 2012), 424–453.
55. The second edition is Madrid, 1671.
56. Tratados historicos, politicos, ethicos y religiosos de la monarchia de China.
Descripcion breve del aquel Imperio, y exemplos raros de imperadores y mag-
istrados del. Con Narracion difusa de varios sucessos y cosas singulares de
otros reynos, y diferentes navegaciones. Anadense los decretos pontificios, y
proposiciones qualificadas en Roma para la mission sinica, y una bula de
N.S.P. Clemente X, en favor de los missionarios. Por el Maestro Fr. Domingo
Fernandez Navarrete. Cathedratico de Prima del Colegio, y Universidad
de S. Thomas de Manila, Missionario Apostolico de la Gran China,
prelado de los de su Mission, y Procurador General en la Corte de Madrid
de la provincia del Santo Rosario de las Filipinas, Orden de Predicadores,
Madrid, 1676. See Cummins, “Palafox, China and the Chinese Rites
Controversy.”
57. Trained at the faculty of theology in the University of Valladolid, he first
taught Thomist theology in various Spanish universities, and decided then
to join the Dominicans and to become a missionary. During the years
spent in the Philippines, he was present at the ordination of Lo Wen-tsao,
the first Chinese priest, and later bishop of the Catholic Church.
58. Pingyi Chu, “Scientific Dispute in the Imperial Court: The 1664 Calendar
Case,” Chinese Science 14 (1997): 7–34.
59. Elisabetta Corsi, “Niccoló Longobardo,” in Dizionario Biografico degli
Italiani, vol. 65 (Rome: Treccani, 2005), ad hominem.
60. See note 56.
61. Navarrete, Tratados Historicos, 2:63
62. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology,
251.
63. More specifically, see the fifth treatise, devoted to the “secta literaria,”
245–290.
64. Navarrete, Tratados Historicos, 2:478.
65. Nevertheless, his texts did circulate. Thévenot also paid attention to
Palafox’s interest in the indigenous, as shown by L’Indien ou portrait au
naturel des Indiens, présenté au Roy d’Espagne . . . , in Relations de divers voy-
ages curieux, vol. 2.
66. HCCT, 345–346.
67. HCCT, 405–406: “This was the occasion that that great Empire was in
a manner secluded from the Commerce and Society of Mankind; and
thereby from the Light of the true Faith and Religion, which was there so
horribly persecuted, only for this reason, that those who came to reveal
it to them, were Strangers, who came into their Countrey, notwithstand-
ing they were prohibited by the Laws thereof. But all this Inhumanity
proceeded only from a panick Fear, and a base Distrustfulness of that jeal-
ous Nation. The Tartar was very far from these timorous suspitions of
the Chineses; but having a better opinion of his Valour and Strength, he
is willing the entrance into his Provinces should be open and free to all
Nations of the Earth.”
68. Ibid.
8
Anthropology beyond Empires:
Samuel Stanhope Smith and
the Reconfiguration of the
Atlantic World
Silvia Sebastiani
In 1810 Samuel Stanhope Smith, Presbyterian reverend, professor of

Moral Philosophy, and president of the College of New Jersey (later
Princeton), gave to print the second American edition of An Essay on
the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species.
Originally published in Philadelphia in 1787, the year of the ratifica-
tion of the Constitution of the United States, the Essay was reprinted
in London two years later, while a new edition appeared in Edinburgh
in 1788, introduced and annotated by the American medical student
Benjamin Smith Barton. This was, according to John C. Greene, “the
most ambitious and the best known American treatise on physical
anthropology” in the eighteenth century.1
The study of the three different editions of this text and the entan-
gled analysis of their different agencies opens a new Atlantic and
trans-imperial perspective in the understanding of the emergence of
Western racial anthropology. The importance of Smith’s Essay does
not depend on its original approach to the topic, but on its capac-
ity to appropriate the Enlightenment debate about the “science of
man” and to reformulate it for postcolonial America and its political
framework. In the context of a slave society, where an increasing anti-
slavery movement was taking shape, the debate on human diversity
was transformed into a dispute about the inferiority of human races
versus the equality of human beings.
207
208 Silvia Sebastiani
Smith was instrumental in placing the question of race at the center

of the academic curricula—especially Moral Philosophy and Natural
History—at a moment in which they were under construction,
thereby taking part in the reframing of disciplines. Benjamin Smith
Barton, who studied medicine in Edinburgh and from 1789 taught
Natural History and Materia Medica at the College of Philadelphia
(later University of Pennsylvania), is a case in point: he contributed to
the circulation of Smith’s Essay in Europe, and brought the European
classifications of human race, together with a new attention toward
antiquities and language, to the United States.
Smith’s Essay provides an opportunity to understand the produc-
tion of racial knowledge through its circulation across the Atlantic
world, making it possible to trace the fluctuating semantics of “race”
at the end of the eighteenth century.
Science of man through empires
The writing of Jesuits and of Buccaniers are the principal sources

from which our knowledge of man in his savage state has been
derived; but the falsehood, and the errors with which their works
are pregnant, are daily becoming more evident; and those systems
or hypotheses, which were established on authorities so extremely
weak, are now tottering into that contempt and neglect, which
must necessarily await every system whose basis is not constructed
of facts.
During the last 60 years, we have collected more data concern-
ing the natural history of man than have, perhaps, been given to
us in every preceding age; and it would certainly be uncandid not
to observe that it is to Britain we are chiefly indebted for this aug-
mentation of our knowledge of the Human Species. The three voy-
ages of that great, but unfortunate, navigator Captain Cook, have
especially contributed to eradicate former errors, and to establish
permanent truths in the history of man.2
The publication, revision, and reception of Samuel Stanhope

Smith’s Essay contributed to shaping the debate around what, at the
end of the eighteenth century, began to be labeled as “anthropology.”
Defined by Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
as “the doctrine of anatomy; the doctrine of the form and structure
of the body man,”3 the meaning of anthropology expanded in the
Samuel Stanhope Smith and the Reconfiguration of the Atlantic 209
1780s, becoming synonymous with the “general science of man.”4

By encompassing both the study of the human body and the man-
ners and customs of peoples, it became central to philosophical dis-
course. The Essay was delivered in February 1787 as an oration before
the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, and published by
Robert Aitken in the same year, “at the request of the Society.” Founded
by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 and with the physician Benjamin Rush
presiding at the time, the Philosophical Society was the scientific cen-
ter of Philadelphia,5 itself the intellectual capital of the United States of
America, formally constituted—in Philadelphia—in April of the same
year. Smith’s Essay was thus taken up by the most dynamic scientific
society of the newborn state, at the core of dramatic political changes.
It endorsed Baconian utilitarianism, which was a dominant theme
of the Society, looking for useful and practical knowledge “grounded
upon experiments” and “applied to the common purposes of life,” in
contrast to “mere speculation.”6 In 1789, the Essay was reprinted in
London, while a new edition had appeared in Scotland in 1788, intro-
duced and annotated by the American student of medicine, Benjamin
Smith Barton, whose unfinished dissertation in Edinburgh took issue
with the principal William Robertson.
The triple publication of Smith’s book might be recognized both as
the founding act of anthropology in America and as the heart of the
first process of the non-European independence movement, since it
delineated the imperial logic that led to the emergence of the new
discipline. What is at stake in Smith’s recasting of the Enlightenment
“science of man” into anthropology is nothing less than the possibil-
ity of turning an economic process of domination—the trade system
based on slavery as the motor of British expansion and power—into
a scientific explanation of human inequalities. In order to do so,
the Essay takes its stand against the imperial entities of the Atlantic
world.
Barton’s “Preface” to the Essay, included as the epigraph of this sec-
tion, identifies the genealogy of Smith’s work and affirms its scientific
contribution: the science of man, based on the systematic collection
of “data” and constructed on certain “facts,” is a modern invention
and practice. He has to acknowledge the part played by the Spanish
and Portuguese empires in paving the way for the knowledge of the
world’s peoples: they had provided the first sources for the natural
historian, but these were neither scientific nor reliable. By contrast,
the British newcomers as the “Lords of the Oceans” had given natural
history its scientific foundations: they were the ones who had been
capable of organizing philosophical and scientific voyages for the
study of man. Barton identifies a twofold political arena in which to
locate Smith’s Essay, as well as his own scientific contribution. First,
it is crucial for him to distance himself from the Spanish empire,
epitomized, in his quotation, by the Jesuits. Being of British descent,
he emphasizes what radically distinguishes Smith’s, and his own,
work from that of the previous Lords of the Atlantic world: political
divides coincide with religious differences, once again symbolized by
the Jesuits. But the current political phase prompts him to develop a
second line of analysis, in the sentence that follows the one quoted
above, which also stresses his criticism vis-à-vis the British Empire:
he refers to the new political boundaries that both Smith and himself
were in the process of tracing, while proclaiming the independence
of the United States of America. If “the present state of knowledge”
does not allow the development of “a systematic view of the Natural
History of Man,” it is American soil that can provide “future phi-
losophers” with all the necessary ingredients and information for a
proper science of man.7 As the newborn state was about to write its
own Constitution, human rights and civic rights had become part of
a single debate, political as well as scientific, where the claims were
against Britain. The United States of America are thus presented as a
unique laboratory for pursuing the systematic experimentation nec-
essary for the production of anthropological science.
In the aftermath of the American Revolution, differences in the
human species had become an urgent matter for discussion. In
the meantime, the antislavery movement was growing rapidly.
Anthropology was therefore placed at the center of the map of
knowledge: moving science from one place (Europe) to another (the
United States of America) also meant changing the map of disciplines
and its hierarchies. The position of Smith as a professor of Moral
Philosophy and from 1795 to 1812 as president of the College of
New Jersey—a career that ended in his forced resignation—gave him
a crucial role in the reshaping of curricula.8 Smith founded anthro-
pology on Common Sense Philosophy, which he helped to promote
in the United States. Barton, on the other hand, who was educated in
Edinburgh when the study of racial differences was developing into a
key topic on the medical agenda,9 and on his return became profes-
sor of Natural History, Botany, Materia Medica, and the Practice of
Physics at the College of Philadelphia, viewed the natural history of
man from a medical and antiquarian perspective, complemented by

a theory of language.
The study of Smith’s Essay, in its close engagement with Barton,
proves that the formation of anthropology needs to be placed in
trans-Atlantic and trans-imperial perspectives.
Between Scotland and America: Moral philosophy

versus polygenesis
What is particularly interesting about Smith’s Essay is the way it

responds to and reformulates the Scottish Enlightenment debate
about the science of man. It establishes a privileged dialogue with
the group of the Philosophical Society, or Wise Club, which met
in Aberdeen between 1758 and 1773, and to which James Beattie,
Thomas Reid, and James Dunbar belonged. As the cradle of Common
Sense Philosophy, the Wise Club supplied Smith with the language
and philosophical argumentation for integrating the new scientific
analysis of man within a Christian and philanthropic framework.
This converged in the critique of David Hume’s epistemological
skepticism, which had provided the conceptual basis for the “mate-
rialistic” historical and anthropological reflections of the Edinburgh
literati, and in the firm rebuttal of polygenesis, which was considered
its possible and logical consequence.10
Nevertheless, the “Scottish connection” to American anthropology
cannot be regarded as the result of an equal relationship, fictively
maintained through the reference to the “Republic of Science.” In
the aftermath of the American Revolution, intellectual and academic
life was in the process of being reshuffled, and Smith had an active
role in this. The primacy of Britain, however, continued long after the
political independence of the United States was formally established.
Although Philadelphia had become a very important medical center
by the 1770s, Edinburgh was still recognized as the seat of medical
knowledge,11 where the best American students were sent for train-
ing. Personal networks were instrumental in maintaining these ties,
as shown by Benjamin Rush, whose Edinburgh diploma had assured
him, on his return in 1769, the chair of Chemistry at the College of
Philadelphia. Rush’s 1783 letter to his former mentor William Cullen
(to whom, a couple of years later, he would recommend Benjamin
Smith Barton) stresses the universality of science, beyond politi-
cal boundaries: “The events of the late war have not lessened my
attachment to my venerable master. The members of the republic of

science all belong to the same family. What has physic to do with
taxation?”12 This asymmetrical relationship between Scotland and
the newborn Unites States, which Karrian Akemi Yokota has analyzed
in depth, shows how independent Americans remained “insecure cli-
ents” on the cultural periphery of the British Empire.13
Smith closely relates anthropology to moral philosophy, geogra-
phy, medicine, and history—natural as well as civil. By asserting the
unity of the human species against the “arbitrary hypothesis that
men are originally sprung from different stocks,” he not only defends
the truth of the Bible, but also secures the unity of human nature
and the universal foundation of the doctrine of duties and rights,
that is, moral philosophy itself: “Destroy this unity”—he warned in
1810—“and no certain and universal principles remain,”14 no science
of man could ever exist. It is “the doctrine of one race” that “ren-
ders human nature susceptible of system.”15 The fragmentation of
the human species into originally different breeds, stocks, or kinds,
each with its distinct vocation and character, undermines all forms of
comparativism, that is, the epistemological basis of both history and
anthropology.
In his Essay, Smith argues that the human frame is not fixed and
indelible, but mutable and contingent: in conquering the globe,
humankind adapts to different environments and climates, and mod-
ifies its complexion and figures consequently; physiology is plastic
and “assimilated by time.”16 Thus, no stable definition or classifica-
tion of races is ever possible, as one race merges into the other, and
changes continuously: neither the anatomist nor the scientist can
identify lasting divisions within the human species.
The first target of Smith’s polemic is the Scottish judge Henry
Home, Lord Kames, who had recently reasserted the polygenetic
hypothesis17 in his celebrated Sketches of the History of Man. Published
in two quarto volumes in Edinburgh and London in 1774, then in
an expanded edition in four octavo volumes in 1778, the Sketches
also crossed the ocean and appeared in Philadelphia in 1776, in a
partial version containing only six of the eight chapters from the first
book on “The Progress of Men as Individuals”: the development of
languages, mode of subsistence and population, property, commerce,
and the female sex, with an appendix on the propagation of animals,
in comparison with humans.18 Kames outlined the gradual progress
that humankind had made in its path from savagery to civil society,
in line with the four-stage theory of historic development that he

shared with the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment: the
stages of hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce.19 The open-
ing chapter on “The Diversity of Men, and of Languages,” however,
limited the universality of this path, maintaining that humankind
was composed of originally different species/races, distinguished by
their external features, characters, languages, and morals; “native”
Americans, in particular, were described as cowardly and effeminate,
in contrast to ancient Europeans. Similar to Voltaire, Kames made the
different races the subjects of historical discourse, thus celebrating
“the death of Adam” on both the historical and the anthropological
planes.20
Strongly opposed to this view, Smith added to his Essay an
appendix—“Strictures on Lord Kames’s Discourse on the Original
Diversity in Mankind”—that he left almost unchanged up to the
1810 edition.21 His point of departure was the Bible, which unequiv-
ocally denies the polygenetic doctrine. But, in 1787, Smith was pri-
marily speaking as a philosopher: he held it to be “unphilosophical,”
that is unscientific, to resort to supernatural hypotheses when “the
ordinary laws of nature” fully account for the different features of
humankind.22 The Bible and science go hand in hand. Smith appeals
to the Common Sense Philosophy, which John Witherspoon, his
mentor and father-in-law, had introduced in the College of New
Jersey as a core topic of the Moral Philosophy curriculum. A leading
Scottish figure in the Presbyterian Church, and one of the Evangelical
opponents of the Moderate Party, Witherspoon accepted Rush’s
offer to become president of the Presbyterian College of New Jersey
in 1767, also turning into a fervent American patriot.23 Following
in his footsteps, Smith developed Common Sense principles into
a comprehensive educational vision.24 He embraced Thomas Reid’s
statement that “all knowledge and all science must be built upon
principles that are self-evident; and of such principles every man
who has common sense is a competent judge.”25 The Philosophy
of Common Sense conciliates Revelation and reason, Christianity
and science, and shows that the “untutored savage and the culti-
vated sage are found to be men of like passions with ourselves”—as
pointed out by Mary Wollstonecraft’s positive review of Smith’s
Essay, published in the radical Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review.26
The other Scottish bestseller to which Smith’s Essay and Barton’s
footnotes responded was William Robertson’s History of America, first
printed in 1777, with the fifth, revisited, and final edition, published
in 1788. The Presbyterian leader of the Moderate Party (antagonist
to Witherspoon), principal of the University of Edinburgh, and royal
historiographer has been identified by Richard Sher as the institu-
tional key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment and as one of the
first authors able to live by his own pen.27 Robertson looked at the
New World through the interpretative grid of the four-stages theory,
and placed the “native” Americans at the very beginning of human
development: they were “ignoble savages,”28 close to the animals
that they were incapable of dominating, and very distant from polite
Europeans. As they had no writings, they did not possess a recorded
history; Robertson therefore opened his account with the arrival
of the Europeans in America. The divide between the “savage” and
the “civil” was so profound as to appear almost impossible to fill.29
Despite his monogenistic credo, Robertson delineated two different
human natures, the dynamic European versus the static American,
placing “the natives of the new hemisphere in the lowest grade of
Humanity,” destitute of body vigor, intellect, and “those milder vir-
tues and passions which dignify man.” At least this was what Barton
claimed in a long footnote expanding Smith’s argument:
It is indeed truly astonishing, that Dr Robertson in particular

should have ever adopted, on the faith of Jesuits and of Buccaneers,
tales of so gross and extravagant a nature;—as a divine he should
believe that the Americans were descended from the same COMMON
stock with himself.30
With this observation, Barton, who had described Kames’s Sketches

of the History of Man as a “melancholy monument of his ignorance of
natural history,”31 associated Robertson with the same danger, which
leads to a departure from Christian universalistic principles. Barton
and Smith echoed the critical arguments developed in Aberdeen
since the early 1760s, sharing with the Wise Club group a similar
conception of philosophical work as an instrument to defend the
“universal prerogatives of the species.” This is why Barton quotes, in
his Observations on Some Parts of Natural History, published in London
in 1787, James Dunbar’s Essays on the History of Mankind as the only
European historical account to be praised in relation to America—in
contrast with the “disparaging” works of Count de Buffon, Abbé
Raynal, and Cornelius de Pauw, as well as Robertson and Kames.32
In this way, Smith and Barton took part in the “dispute of the new
world,”33 in the year of the ratification of the Constitution of the
United States, which marked the definitive political rupture with
Britain. As a consequence of political emancipation, a large number
of works by American Creoles “invaded” Britain: 1787 was the year of
publication not only of Smith’s Essay, but also of Barton’s Observations
and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia in London; while the History
of Mexico (1780–81, in Italian) by the Mexican Jesuit Francisco Xavier
Clavijero also appeared in the British capital, translated by Charles
Cullen—son of the Edinburgh professor of Medicine and Chemistry,
William Cullen, who had been the mentor of Benjamin Rush in the
late 1760s, and under whom Barton was studying. Besides translating
the book, dedicated to Lord Bute, Charles Cullen wrote an introduc-
tion on historical method, arguing that it is impossible to write his-
tory “from a distance,” without acceding to the “essential documents”
in local history preserved in the archives—as Robertson’s elegant, but
not authoritative, History of America had presumed to do.34
Clavijero’s History of Mexico entered the United States through
Barton’s Observations and his footnotes to Smith’s Essay: the account
of Mexican antiquity, which challenged the primacy of written
sources (in contrast to Robertson’s historical method), and employed
iconographic, archaeological, and pictographic materials instead,35
could be a suitable model for North America as well. The “Account
of several remarkable Vestiges of an ancient date, which have been
discovered in different parts of North America,” that introduced
Barton’s Observations, was intended to provide proof of a glorious past
in North America, parallel to that of Mexico.36
Creole natural histories?
By discovering in Europe another Creole voice like Clavijero’s, coming

from another empire, and while having access to various European
intellectual traditions and disciplines, Barton could enrich with new
perspectives the scientific and institutional edifice that Smith had
started to build in the new America. In 1787, therefore, the American
voices not only arrived on the political stage claiming their indepen-
dence, but also entered a historical and anthropological debate that
until then had been an exclusively European field. From an intel-
lectual perspective, these works taken together challenge European
historiography by endorsing the point of view of experience and
observation; they base their authority on “what I have seen of man,

white, red, and black,” to use Thomas Jefferson’s well-known for-
mula, in contrast to the distant and abstract speculations of European
armchair voyagers.37
As Jefferson clarifies, observation becomes authoritative only
when it is turned into a philosophy of observation, that is, when it
is inserted within the system of nature and established as a history-
system. Jefferson stresses this point in words that are quite similar to
those Barton uses to introduce Smith’s Essay:
To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and

a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red
men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural
history.38
But European natural history is also challenged. In query VI of

his Notes, Jefferson refers to Linnaeus’s “homo sapiens,”39 thus mak-
ing it clear that history could not be independent from the defi-
nition of man in the system of nature. But he especially refers to
Buffon, considered—with the exception of his feeble knowledge
of America—as “the best informed of any Naturalist who has ever
written.”40 Jefferson points to the modern method of encompassing
natural history and classification, in order to give a fuller picture
of humankind in its different complexions and figures, as well as
its historical progress. Similarly, Samuel Stanhope Smith attempts to
connect the study of the mind and culture of man and that of his
bodily form and structure as part of a single system.
Barton goes one step further through the use and appropriation of
his studies at the Edinburgh Medical School. He reframes the dispute
of the New World from a medical and an antiquarian perspective,
focusing at once on the body and features of American Indians, on
their languages, which he traces to a single and common origin,41
and on the American antiquities and monuments as new sources for
natural and civil history. He proposes a method that blends natural
history—which teaches that “physical differences between nations are
but inconsiderable,” so opening “the door to so much precious knowl-
edge concerning mankind”—with archaeology and antiquarianism,
which enables a reconstruction of the most remote past, beyond
memory and writings.42 This results in a dual movement: while
Barton gives history back to the American Indians, who thus no lon-
ger have to stand in the doorway of progress, at the same time he
inserts them in nature as new objects of natural history and medi-
cine. This is where Barton also shapes his political position as a Creole
and an American, sensitive to the dispute of the New World and to
the potential similarities, and alliances, between American Creoles,
beyond imperial borders.
On the basis of this reading, I would suggest the need for a critical
reconsideration of the historiographical debate about the Scottish-
American connections, articulated around a problematic center-
periphery dichotomy. Some scholars have stressed that it was the
peripheral location of Scotland, as opposed to English centrality,
together with important religious affinities, that made the Scots closer
to the Anglo-Americans, thus explaining the privileged relationship
between Philadelphia, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen.43 By maintaining
such center-periphery logic, however, what actually emerges is that
America was far more peripheral than Scotland, and also peripheral
in relation to Scotland. Their different positions within the British
Empire—the Scots were active colonizers, first in America and then
in India—marked a crucial distance.44 The Americans recognized
Scottish superiority in technical knowledge (especially anatomy), and
an Edinburgh training paved the way for a future academic career in
the United States. As president of the College of New Jersey, Samuel
Stanhope Smith struggled to be connected to British centers of knowl-
edge, even appointing scholars like the well-known Scottish chemist
John Maclean. It is rather within this trans-Atlantic interaction, and
competition, that Smith’s Essay has to be placed.45 The fact is that
the peripheral position of America in the British empire, including
Scotland, grounded its claim to a central position in the debate on
humankind.
Blackness and whiteness
The new social and political context created by the foundation of the
United States led to new problems. The language of the rights of man,
marginal in the enlightened discourse of Edinburgh and Glasgow,
but at the core of the Aberdonian moral and philosophical analyses,
acquired new meanings in the aftermath of the American Revolution.
On one hand, this new context highlighted sharp contradictions in
relation to the issue of slavery, in the period marked by the peak

of the slave trade. On the other hand, the expansion to the West
made the question of human development and hierarchies in history
even more urgent. Launched by the Land Ordinance in 1785 and the
Northwest Ordinance in 1787, the conquest of the West culminated
in the expedition of Lewis and Clark, between 1804 and 1806, under
the leadership of President Jefferson. This political enterprise of the
newborn state—the shaping of an empire—put the question of the
Indian and the black at the center of public debate; whereas the for-
mer had to be disciplined, the latter represented the workforce of the
new white settlers.
Smith’s Essay encapsulates this debate, caught between the distinc-
tiveness and likeness of men. Within the context of a slave society,
such debate translated into an uneasy paring of the inferiority of
human races and the equality of human beings. This tension emerges
from the very title of Smith’s An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of
Complexion and Figure in the Human Species: “Variety of Complexion
and Figure” is set against one single “Human Species” (the singularity
of which is stressed by the definite article).46
In his struggle against polygenesis, Smith asserts that human
variations—anatomical attributes and features, such as the color of
the skin, hair, stature, shape, and size of the body and cranium—are
always exterior and contingent. He uses the word “varieties,” bor-
rowed from Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, rather than the vocabulary of
“race,” often employed by Buffon’s Histoire naturelle. However, Smith’s
historical approach makes his argument much closer to the analysis
of the French naturalist, thus providing an example of the semantic
and terminological instability of “race.” Smith embraces the defini-
tion of species, propounded by Buffon, as the reproduction of fecund
offspring, and repeats the idea that man is the same everywhere,
who “s’est verni de noir sous la zone torride” and “qui s’est tanné,
rapetissé par le froid glacial de la sphère du pole.”47 He also reiter-
ates, with Buffon, that the human species has degenerated from an
original white European prototype, so maintaining that races/variet-
ies are a “historical expression of degeneration.”48 Like Buffon, Smith
considers climate and the state of society—what the Histoire naturelle
labels as naturel, that is, inclinations, customs, and way of life—as the
main causes of human differentiations. Smith also thinks that nature
might be transformed by human activity and that the effects of cli-
mate are stronger on animals than on men, and on savages than on
civilized peoples. This is why Smith primarily focuses on “the state of

society,” defined in broad terms:
The state of society comprehends diet, clothing, lodging, man-

ners, habits, face of the country, objects of science, religion,
interests, passions and ideas of all kinds, infinite in number and
variety . . . Combined with the effects of climate will be adequate to
account for all the varieties we find among mankind.49
This means that civilization affects the body: “All the features of
the human countenance are modified, and its entire expression radi-
cally formed, by the state of society.”50 A class bias was being nat-
uralized: the purportedly universal standard was a projection of an
exclusive code of manners and taste. As a civil people is able to limit
the influence of climate, the physical attributes of savages improve in
the process of civilization. The Essay cites the example of an American
Indian whose features, together with his mind, had improved mark-
edly while studying Latin and Greek at Smith’s own College of New
Jersey. But it is to blacks that Smith devotes the greatest attention,
as he considers them the ugliest and most deformed variety of men.
In this sense, their emancipation posed a problem that needed to be
addressed.
Smith was far from alone in thinking this to be a problem. In the
name of beauty and aesthetics, Benjamin Franklin had expressed
a desire, which he labeled as “natural,” to keep “Negroes” out of
North America, in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind
(1755).51 It is from a similar statement that Jefferson had formu-
lated his hypothesis—rejected by Smith52—that “Negroes” belonged
to a separate race/species, a view that has been treated extensively
by historiography. As is well known, he contrasts a positive image
of the “native” American with a negative one of the “Negro,” who,
once emancipated, poses a new, and major, dilemma for the his-
tory of humankind: how to “mix with, without staining the blood”
of the whites. The only feasible solution is, according to Jefferson,
that “when freed, he [the Negro] is to be removed beyond the
reach of mixture.”53 In 1792 Benjamin Rush communicated to the
American Philosophical Society his “Observations Intended to Favor
a Supposition that the Black Color (as It is Called) of the Negroes is
Derived from the LEPROSY,” published in the Society’s Transactions in
1799. The main argument is summed up in the title itself: Rush tries
to attribute the cause of black color to a hereditary disease, leprosy,

from which “Negroes” could recover, if put in favorable environmen-
tal and social conditions. Henry Moss, who became a celebrity by
exposing his “whitening” body in a Philadelphia tavern, was a case
in point.54
If Rush’s hypothesis demonstrates that “all the claims of superi-
ority of the Whites over the Blacks, on account of their color, are
founded in ignorance and inhumanity,” and that there is no ground
for denying the unity of humankind, medical reasons, however, seri-
ously discourage the mixture between blacks and whites, until the
disease has been cured.55 The racial issue becomes a medical problem:
it is up to the physician to discover the treatment for removing the
black infection.
Smith’s argument is instead based on social analysis. He assures
his readers that black slaves become less deformed and fairer when
they live with their masters’ families, as domestics, in contrast to the
field slaves, who, remaining isolated, perpetuate the customs of their
African ancestors. When brought up in the households of their mas-
ters, fed and clothed like them, black domestic servants assimilate
the ideas of elegance and beauty of “their superiors,” which gradually
leads to the improvement of their body and anatomy: by “acquiring
the agreeable and regular features, and the expressive countenance of
civil society,” they become “straight and well proportioned,” “regu-
lar,” lively, and intelligent, whereas the field slaves are “ill shaped”
and “preserve, in a great degree, the African lips, nose, and hair.”56
Smith had found this in his own household, and presents himself as
an eyewitness. The physical, the social, and the aesthetic had become
virtually inseparable.
In other words, Smith, like Rush, rejects the idea of an “inherent infe-
riority” of the “Negroes,” while conceding their “present inferiority.”57
In order to really become equal to their white masters, they would
have to look like them. In the wake of the American Revolution,
such reasoning had two major consequences. The first relates to the
question of abolitionism. Smith noted that slaves in America were
treated with benevolence, and were better fed and clothed than their
African ancestors. While stating in his Lectures on Moral and Political
Philosophy that universal emancipation is “a worthy object of legisla-
tion even in America,” he warns his students that “great precaution
must be used” in order to prevent the emancipation of “Negroes”
becoming “a worse evil than their servitude.” Neither in the name
of justice nor humanity should laws induce the “innocent possessor

of that property” to impoverish himself for the benefit of his slave;
it was therefore necessary to find a solution to compensate the white
owner for his loss. Proclaiming an immediate and universal eman-
cipation would amount to a “manumission,” bringing anarchy and
civil war, like in the “convulsions of St. Domingo” that “we have
lately seen with horror”:
No event can be more dangerous to a community than the sud-

den introduction into it of vast multitudes of persons, free in their
condition, but without property, and possessing only habits and
vices of slavery.58
The only possible solution was a prudent policy, “attentive to the

public safety and tranquility,” which proceeds by a slow and gradual
emancipation, in combination with the settlement of free “Negroes”
on the western frontier, where they can mix with whites. In order
“to bring the two races nearer together,” Smith suggests encouraging
intermarriage, with the proposal to entitle those whites willing to
marry blacks and to move to the West to a double portion of land.59
The second consequence of this reasoning concerns the difference
of ranks in advanced societies, where appearance, disposition, and
fiber are radically different among the “several classes of men.” In a
circular logic, the features that result from physical labor are made to
explain why some peoples, and not others, are assigned to physical
labor.
Between the several classes of men in polished nations, who may

be considered as people in different states of society, we discern
great and obvious distinctions, arising from their social habits,
ideas and employments. The poor and labouring parts of the com-
munity are usually more swarthy and squalid in their complexion,
more hard in their features, and more coarse and ill-formed in
their limbs, than persons of better fortune, and more liberal means
of subsistence.60
The lesson of the Scottish Enlightenment’s historical and socio-

logical approach is crucial here. Adam Smith had explained that
the differences created by the division of labor in advanced soci-
eties could be so radical as to seem to create different “species” of
men.61 According to Samuel Stanhope Smith, an immense differ-

ence still existed in the Scottish Highlands between clan chiefs and
“commonality,” as between nobles and peasants in France, Italy, or
Spain: “If they had been separately found in different countries, the
philosophy of some writers would have ranged them in different
species.”62 Because of their greater equality and liberty, England and
the United States presented fewer distinctions, at least among the
white classes.
But the crucial issue is addressed in a footnote. It concerns the anxi-
eties of European immigrants in relation to their possible degenera-
tion and loss of whiteness in savage America—a question that had
arisen continuously since the sixteenth century.63 If climate and way
of life deeply affect the features of peoples, in a positive or in a nega-
tive sense, then the risk of degeneration becomes real. Smith guaran-
tees, however, that the differences between the Anglo-Americans and
Indians are permanent and indelible:
The Anglo-Americans, however, will never resemble the native

Indians. Civilization will prevent so great a degeneracy either in
the colour or in the features. Even if they were thrown back again
into the savage state, the resemblance would not be complete;
because the one would receive the impressions of the climate on
the ground of features formed in Europe;—the others have received
them on the ground of features formed in a very different region of
the globe. The effects of such various combinations can never be
the same.64
This is to say that whiteness, as “an imagined and consequently

as a physical legal property,” is linked to the maturity and civiliza-
tion that Europeans had imported to America as part of their bodily
migration. As Kariann Akemmi Yokota rightly summarizes, “those
physical features would offer an impenetrable bulwark against the
unbecoming degeneracy embodied by Native Americans.”65 Smith
aimed to reassure Anglo-Americans and Europeans that whites
would not become savages. It is here that white supremacy, embod-
ied in blood ties with Europe, functions most clearly in defense of
the civilized status: “the new American nation appealed to white
supremacy, in order to find a unity within a fractured society,”
according to a process that Dena Nelson has called a “nationaliza-
tion of whiteness.”66
Reasserting the Bible: The 1810 edition
These statements were not only maintained in 1810 but even rein-
forced by Smith in the second American edition of his Essay, which
resulted from the controversy between different intellectual milieus.
What changes in the second American edition, apart from the
fact that it is three times larger and has many more scientific refer-
ences, is the emphasis of Smith’s reasoning: whereas the first edi-
tion is centered on moral philosophy, seen as being in conciliation
with Revelation (in a complementary position), the second edition
reverses this perspective. Revelation becomes central and is concili-
ated with moral philosophy, the point becoming that of “bringing
science to confirm the verity of the Mosaic history.”67 This change of
perspective is mostly due to a pressing new requirement: Smith has to
counter the medical arguments in support of polygenesis provided by
Charles White’s anatomical and physiognomic Account of the Regular
Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables, published in
London in 1799, as well as by his American colleague John Augustine
Smith, who had sharply criticized the Essay in his anatomy lectures at
the University of New York in 1808—partly published in the New York
Medical and Philosophical Journal and Review in February 1809.
In the face of such defiance, Smith changed his system of references.
His new version includes a large part of Barton’s notes in the main
text and deals with the new science of anthropology and comparative
anatomy, developed in the triangle formed by London, Edinburgh,
and Göttingen. As a result, he almost abandons the language of natu-
ral history and classification borrowed from Buffon and Linnaeus, to
employ—following in the footsteps of Blumenbach, Haller, Camper,
and Lavater—the language of physical anthropology, physiognomy,
and comparative anatomy. While in the first edition the comparison
between men and animals was not only ignored, but even rejected
as absurd (animals were simply considered as incomparable with the
human species), in the second edition comparative anatomy becomes
a decisive issue.
Nonetheless, Smith still refuses racial classifications. He lists the
different approaches of Blumenbach, who identifies five races of men
(the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Ethiopian, the American, and
the Malayan) on the basis of phrenology; Linnaeus, who divides the
human species into four major varieties, corresponding to the dif-
ferent colors of the skin; Buffon, who refers to six different races;
and many other variants (among whom Smith quotes, paraphrasing

Blumenbach, the classifications of Abbé de la Croix, Immanuel Kant,
John Hunter, and Eberhardt August Wilhelm von Zimmermann).
These competitive systems lead him to conclude that racial differen-
tiation is always arbitrary: “It is impossible to draw the line precisely
between the various races of men, or even enumerate them with cer-
tainty; and that it is in itself a useless labor to attempt it.”68
In the face of such instability in science, Smith chooses to further
strengthen the sociological approach that he had developed in close
dialogue with the Scottish Enlightenment. In order to refute Charles
White’s polygenism, he adds to the influence of “Climate” and
“State of Society” a third crucial factor in determining the features of
peoples: “the Manner of Living.” In his new 1810 “Advertisement,”
Smith stresses that it is precisely his emphasis on the manners of peo-
ples and on the state of society, indefinitely multiplying “the varieties
of mankind,” that prevents him from any racial classification. This is
what distinguishes his approach from those of the other “modern”
philosophers and scientists who try to explain human diversity. Even
in the new scientific context, Smith’s aim is not to become “a physi-
ognomist, but to evince the possibility of so many differences exist-
ing in one species.”69
However, he names three authors he considers particularly influ-
ential in addressing the question of human variety, belonging to
deeply different intellectual and geographical contexts: the Spanish
Benedictine Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro, author of the mul-
tivolume Teatro crítico universal, published between 1727 and 1760;
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, “one of the most celebrated natural-
ists, anatomists, and physicians of Germany,” only known to Smith
through Barton’s mediation and the third edition of De generis humani
varietate native (Göttingen, 1795; while the first edition dated back to
1776); and Peter Camper, from whom he quotes the Dissertation phy-
sique de Mr. Pierre Camper sur les différences réelles que présentent les traits
du visage chez les hommes de différents ages, published in Utrecht in
1791. The dialogue between Smith and these authors shows the mul-
tiplicity of concurrent discourses about race in the Enlightenment. In
this period, race is not an exclusive category for explaining human
diversity, but either competes with or is complementary to other
explanations, such as climate, cosmology, or cosmetic criteria that
lead peoples to artificially shape their own bodies—like the Indus and
Tartars, who, in the name of beauty, compress their eyes and stretch
their ears, or the Hottentots, who flatten their noses and darken their
bodies with oils.70 Smith does not even exclude the “power of imagi-
nation in pregnant women” over the fetus.71
In reformulating the biblical narrative of the Fall, Smith also rein-
forced his criticism of the conception of history as a process of civi-
lization, shaped by the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment,
from Adam Smith through William Robertson and Lord Kames. He
attacks its foundation that savage society was the original and univer-
sal state of humankind:
The hypothesis that the human kind is divided into various spe-
cies, radically different from one another, is commonly connected
in the systems of philosophers with another opinion, which, how-
ever general the assent be which it has obtained, is equally contrary
to the true philosophy, and to the sacred history; I mean the primitive
and absolute savagism of all the tribes of men.72
By contrast, “the most accurate investigations into the power of

nature ever serve to confirm the facts vouched by the authority of rev-
elation.” The universality of a primordial savage state is contradicted
both by reason and by authentic historical documents. A different con-
cept of history emerges, where peoples progress through the assistance
of “nations who have advanced far before them in their career” and
offer the example for improving, which in Smith’s exemplification:
The Greeks were polished by the Asiatics, and Egyptians; the

Italians by the Greeks, and by colonies from the Lesser Asia; and
Italy extended her arts to Germany and Gaul. But history presents
us no tribe originally and perfectly savage who has voluntarily
sought from abroad, and introduced among themselves the man-
ners, and the arts of any civilized nation.73
It is absurd to claim that “in the natural progress of things, a savage

tribe, cut off from all communication with more polished nations,
will, by the efforts of their own genius, invent, and gradually perfect
the arts of civilized life.”74 In contrast, the Mosaic account is fully
reaffirmed:
Man, originally formed by a wise and beneficent Creator, was

instructed by him in the duties, and the most necessary arts of
life. Thus were laid, in the very commencement of the race, the
foundations of domestic, social, and civil order.75
“Savagism,” far from being the original condition of man, was “an
after growth.”76 Peoples could either improve or degenerate in differ-
ent races.
The number and length of intellectual references employed by
Smith from one edition to another grew considerably: while he
increasingly quoted American voices, he also included studies com-
ing from empires other than the British, and above all the Spanish
one. But French and German intellectual references are used as well,
mirroring the huge alterations that the Napoleonic wars were provok-
ing in the European topography of learned centers and disciplines.
The ways in which the debate was conducted reflect the diversifi-
cation of empirical knowledge required to encompass humankind
within one single theory.
Notes
1. John C. Greene, “The American Debate on the Negro’s Place in Nature,
1780–1815,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15/3 (1954): 384–396; John
C. Greene, “Some Early Speculations on the Origin of Human Races,”
American Anthropologist 56/1 (1954): 31–41.
2. Benjamin Smith Barton, “Preface by the Editor,” in Samuel Stanhope
Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the
Human Species. To Which are Added, Strictures on Lord Kames’s Discourse on
the Original Diversity of Mankind. A New Edition with Some Additional Notes,
by a Gentleman of the University of Edinburgh (1787) (Edinburgh: C. Elliot,
1788; reprint, with an Introduction by Paul B. Wood, Bristol: Thoemmes
Press, 1995), iii, emphasis in the original.
3. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London: W.
Strahan, 1755), vol. 1: 138. In the Encyclopédie, the article “Anatomie,”
written by Diderot, states: “L’anatomie humaine qui est absolument et
proprement appelée anatomie a pour objet, ou, si l’on aime mieux, pour
sujet le corps humain. C’est l’art que plusieurs appellent anthropologie.”
After a first meaning related to anthropomorphism, the anonymous arti-
cle on “Anthropologie” records “dans l’oeconomie animale, c’est un traité
de l’homme.”
4. Alexandre-César Chavannes, Anthropologie ou science générale de l’homme
(Lausanne, 1788). See Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle
des Lumières (1971), with a Postface by Claude Blanckaert (Paris: Albin
Michel, 1995), 12; Claude Blanckaert, “L’anthropologie en France, le mot
et l’histoire (XVIe–XIXe),” Bulletins et mémoires de la société d’anthropologie
de Paris, n.s., 3–4 (1989): 13–43; Larry Wolff, “Discovering Cultural
Perspective: The Intellectual History of Anthropological Thought in
the Age of Enlightenment,” in The Anthropology of the Enlightenment,
ed. Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2007),
3–32.
5. Early members of the American Philosophical Society included George

Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton,
Thomas Paine, David Rittenhouse, and non-Americans such as Alexander
von Humboldt and the Marquis de Lafayette, while both Thomas Jefferson
and Benjamin Rush served as presidents. See John C. Greene, “Science,
Learning, and Utility: Patterns of Organization in the Early American
Republic,” in The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic:
American Scientific and Learned Societies from Colonial Times to the Civil War,
ed. Alexandra Oleson and Sanborn C. Brown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
U. P., 1976), 1–20; John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson
(Ames: U. of Iowa P., 1984), 37.
6. As was asserted in the “Preface” to the first issue of the Society’s Transactions
of the American Philosophical Society 1 (1771): xvii. On the utilitarian con-
text of the Philosophical Society, see Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science
in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina
P., 1956), chaps. 6–7; more generally, see Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the
American Revolution (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P., 2009).
7. Barton, “Preface by the Editor,” vi–vii. Barton follows a similar line of
analysis in his unfinished dissertation, preserved in manuscript form in
the Library of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh: “An Essay towards
a Natural History of the North American Indians: Being an attempt to
describe and to investigate the Causes of some of the Varieties in Figure,
in Complexion, &c. Among Mankind” (Royal Medical Society, Edinburgh,
Dissertations, 1788–90), vol. 23: 1–17.
8. After a student riot in 1807, Smith’s position became highly precarious,
and he was forced to resign in 1812. For his efforts to reconcile reason
and revelation, Smith was charged with rationalism and Arminianism
within the church. See Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768–
1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope
Smith (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1989); Douglas Sloan, The Scottish
Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College
Press of Columbia U., 1971), 164–184.
9. However, Barton never finished his MD degree, either in Edinburgh or
in Göttingen, as he implied. See Theodore W. Jeffries, “A Biographical
Note on Benjamin Smith Barton (1766–1815),” Isis 60/2 (1969): 231–232.
On the debate about race within the Royal Medical Society in Edinburgh
between the 1780s and 1820s, see Colin Kidd, “Medicine, Race, and
Radicalism in the Later Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Practice of Reform
in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500–2000: Essays for Charles Webster,
ed. Margaret Pelling and Scott Mandelbrote (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2005),
207–222.
10. On the Wise Club, see H. Lewis Ulman, The Minutes of the Aberdeen
Philosophical Society 1758–1773 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen U. P., 1990); Stephen
A. Conrad, Citizenship and Common Sense: The Problem of Authority in the
Social Background and Social Philosophy of the Wise Club of Aberdeen (New
York: Garland, 1987).
11. Deborah C. Brunton, “The Transfer of Medical Education: Teaching at the
Edinburgh and Philadelphia Medical Schools,” in Scotland and America
in the Age of the Enlightenment, ed. Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1990), 242–258; Roger L. Emerson, Academic
Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St. Andrews
Universities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2008), chap. 8.
12. Benjamin Rush to William Cullen, September 16, 1783, in The Letters of
Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1951),
vol. 1: 310.
13. Karrian Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America
Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2011), chap. 5.
14. Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion
and Figure in the Human Species. To Which are Added, Animadversions on
Certain Remarks made on the First Edition of this Essay, by Mr. Charles White,
in a Series of Discourses Delivered before the Literary Society of Manchester in
England. Also, Strictures on Lord Kaims’ Discourse on the Original Diversity of
Mankind. And an Appendix (New Brunswick: J. Simpson, 1810), 12.
15. Smith, Essay, 1788 ed., 165; in similar terms, 1810 ed., 244. Smith’s mono-
genetic and biblical outlook plays an important role in Colin Kidd’s view
of the Protestant Enlightenment: The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture
in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.,
2005), esp. chap. 2.
16. Smith, Essay, 1788 ed., 21; 1810 ed., 47.
17. The term “polygenesis” (as well as “monogenesis”) was coined in the writ-
ings of the Philadelphia anthropological school in the 1850s. However,
the debate about the plural origins of humankind dated back to the six-
teenth century, with the discovery of peoples unrecorded in the Mosaic
account, and of chronologies much older than the biblical one. From
among a wide literature on the topic, see David N. Livingstone’s recent
work: Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 2008).
18. Titled Six Sketches of the History of Man, the Philadelphia edition omitted
the other two books composing the work, on the progress of political
nations and of sciences. In all probability, the project of publishing the
entire work failed because of the escalation of hostilities between Britain
and the American colonies, which reduced commerce with the mother
country for the following ten years. See Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment
and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century
Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 2006), 530.
19. From a now extensive literature, see the pioneering study by Ronald
L. Meek, Social Science and Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.,
1976).
20. John Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western
Thought (Ames: Iowa State U. P., 1959). One cannot fail to notice the
parallel with Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs—introduced, from 1769, by
the Philosophie de l’histoire, which developed the “philosophical” argu-
ment of the different origins of human races/species. See George W.
Stocking, “Scotland as the Model of Mankind: Lord Kames’ Philosophical
View of Civilization,” in Towards a Science of Man: Essays in the History of
Anthropology, ed. Timothy H. H. Thoresen (The Hague: Mouton, 1975),
75–89; Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the
Limits of Progress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), chap. 3.
21. In 1810, the “Appendix” to the “Natural Bravery and Fortitude of the
American Indians” was also addressed against Kames.
22. Smith, Essay, 1788 ed., 10.
23. Witherspoon presided over the College until his death in 1794, and was
succeeded by S. S. Smith himself. The Presbyterian community in America
played a leading role in the trans-Atlantic connection with the Scottish
Enlightenment. See Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New
York: Oxford U. P., 1976).
24. Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the
Early Republic (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 2002), chap. 2.
25. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh: J. Bell;
London: J. & J. Robinson, 1785), 523; Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the
Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and
J. Bell, 1764).
26. M. [Mary Wollstonecraft], Analytical Review 2 (1788): 431–39. By con-
trast, the anonymous reviewer of the Critical Review, with clear poly-
genetic sympathies, mocks Smith for his presumption to reconcile
science and the Bible, which history has demonstrated to be at odds:
the language employed by Smith is considered as vague, imprecise, and
unscientific; anatomy only, and not moral sermons, can explain human
diversity. See Critical Review 66 (1788): 308–315; also reprinted in A. B.,
“Reviewers’ Opinion of Dr Smith’s Essay on the Complexion and Figure;
With Remarks on the Same,” American Museum 6 (1789): 241–249. Smith
reacted strongly to this criticism in Essay, 1810 ed., 14–15, 62, 91, 226,
242, and 265.
27. Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The
Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1985); Sher,
The Enlightenment and the Book, 214.
28. Meek, Social Science and Ignoble Savage.
29. Stewart J. Brown, ed., William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1997); Stewart J. Brown, “An Eighteenth-
Century Historian on the Amerindians: Culture, Colonialism and
Christianity in William Robertson’s History of America,” Studies in World
Christianity 2 (1996): 204–222; John G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion,
vol. 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1999),
316–328; vol. 4: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge
U. P., 2005), 181–204.
30. Smith, Essay, 1788 ed., fn. “h” by the editor, 108; emphasis in the
original.
31. Barton, “An Essay towards a Natural History of the North American
Indians,” 16–17.
32. James Dunbar, Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated
Ages (1780) (London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell; Edinburgh: J. Balfour, 1781),
applauded by Barton for his attention to American antiquities. On
the Wise Club in relation to racial subjects, see Sebastiani, The Scottish
Enlightenment, chap. 4.
33. Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic,
1750–1900 (1955), ed. and trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: U. of
Pittsburgh, 1973).
34. Silvia Sebastiani, “L’Amérique des Lumières et la hiérarchie des races:
Disputes sur l’écriture de l’histoire dans l’Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–
1788),” Annales HSS 67 (2012): 327–361; Silvia Sebastiani, “Las escrituras
de la historia del Nuevo Mundo: Clavijero y Robertson en el contexto de
la Ilustración europea,” Historia y Grafía 37 (2011): 203–236.
35. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World:
Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic
World (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2001), 234–249.
36. Barton extensively quotes Clavijero. See, for instance, sect. IV of his
Observations on Some Parts of Natural History, and his New Views of the Origin
of the Tribes and Nations of America (Philadelphia: John Bioren, 1797). In
the American edition of John Pinkerton’s Modern Geography—first pub-
lished in London in 1802 and republished in Philadelphia in 1804, with
Barton’s annotations on the article “America”—Barton defends, against
Pinkerton’s attacks, Clavijero and the reliability of Mexican codes and
symbols as historical sources: Modern Geography: A Description of the
Empires, Kingdoms, States, and Colonies . . . The article America, corrected and
considerably enlarged, by. Dr. Barton, of Philadelphia, 2 vols. (Philadelphia:
John Conrad & Co., 1804), vol. 2: 457. From his extensive correspon-
dence, see especially Barton’s letter to Alexander Tilloch, March 1813, in
Joseph Ewan, Nesta Dunn Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton: Naturalist and
Physician in Jeffersonian America (St. Louis: Missouri Botanical Garden,
2007), 253–257.
37. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Written in the Year 1781,
Somewhat Corrected and Enlarged in the Winter of 1782, for the Use of a
Foreigner of Distinction, in Answer to Certain Queries Proposed by Him, ed.
William Peden (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P., 1955), 59.
38. Ibid., 263, emphasis added. On the centrality of natural history in America,
see Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur,
and the Rhetoric of Natural History (DeKalb: Northern Illinois U. P., 1992),
chap. 3.
39. The Systema Naturae was published for the first time in 1735, and revised
and amplified through to the twelfth, three-volume edition of 1766–68;
Linnaeus coined the concept of Homo Sapiens in 1758. See Lisbet Koerner,
Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1999).
40. Jefferson, Notes of Virginia, 55. See Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity:
Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill:
U. of North Carolina P., 2006); Andrew J. Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural
History in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2011).
41. In his New Views, dedicated to Thomas Jefferson, Barton takes issue with
Jefferson’s claim that Amerindian languages were more ancient than
the Asiatic languages and irreducible to a common stock; on which, see
Edward G. Gray, New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America
(Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1999), 129–130.
42. Barton, New Views, v. On the relationship between antiquarian and natu-
ral history, see Lewis, A Democracy of Facts, chap. 3.
43. John Clive and Bernard Bailyn, “England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland
and America,” William and Mary Quarterly 11 (1954): 200–213; Ned
Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton:
Princeton U. P., 1985); Ned Landsman, “The Legacy of British Union
for the North American Colonies: Provincial Elites and the Problem of
Imperial Union,” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British
Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.,1995),
297–317.
44. The asymmetrical relationship is stressed by all the essays gathered together
in the volume Scotland and the Americas, 1600 to 1800 (Providence: John
Carter Brown Library, 1995).
45. For a broader discussion on this aspect, see Caroline Winterer, “Where is
America in the Republic of Letters?” Modern Intellectual History, 9 (2012):
597–623.
46. Winthrop D. Jordan, Introduction to Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay
on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard U. P., 1965), vii–lvii.
47. Buffon, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, 36 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie
royale, 1749–89), vol. 14 (1766), 311–12; vol. 2 (1749), 10–11; vol. 3
(1749), 530; vol. 4 (1753), 215–216 and 385–386.
48. See, Phillip R. Sloan, “The Idea of Racial Degeneracy in Buffon’s Histoire
Naturelle,” in Racism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro
(Cleveland: Case Western Reserve U. P., 1973), 293–321; Claude
Blanckaert, “Buffon and the Natural History of Man: Writing History and
the ‘Foundational Myth’ of Anthropology,” History of the Human Sciences
6 (1993): 13–50.
49. Smith, Essay, 1787 ed., 98; 1810 ed., with slightly different wording,
176–177.
50. Ibid., 1788 ed., 80; 1810 ed., 157, emphasis in the original.
51. See The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. L. W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale U.
P., 1959), vol. 4: 234.
52. Smith, “Remarks on Certain Strictures made on the First Edition of this
Essay, by Mr. Charles White,” in Essay, 1810 ed., 265–267.
53. Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, Query XIV, “Laws,” 263. From an extensive
literature, see the classical study by Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black:
American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: U. of North
Carolina P., 1968), chap. 12.
54. On this “Great Curiosity” that attracted all the physicians and moral
philosophers of Philadelphia, see Yokota, Unbecoming British, 213–225;
Jordan, White over Black, chap. 14.
55. Benjamin Rush, “Observations Intended to Favor a Supposition that the
Black Color (as It is Called) of the Negroes is Derived from the LEPROSY,”
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 4 (1799): 295.
56. Smith, 1787 ed., 90–92; 1810 ed., 169–172, with slight variations. Smith
reiterated the same point in his “Remarks” against White. See Marvin
Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture

(1968) (Walnut Creech: Altamira Press, 2001), 87. The positive review of
Smith’s Essay in the Monthly Review also makes fun of this aspect: Monthly
Review 80 (1789): 184–185.
57. Jordan, Introduction to Smith, Essay, xlvi.
58. Samuel Stanhope Smith, The Lectures, Corrected and Improved, Which
Have Been Delivered for a Series of Years, in the College of New Jersey; On
the Subjects of Moral and Political Philosophy, 2 vols. (Trenton, NJ: Daniel
Fenton, 1812), Lecture XXI, vol. 2: 164–178, esp. 172. Larry Tise, in
Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840
(Athens: U. of Georgia P., 2004), chap. 8, observes that Smith’s opin-
ions, if not overtly proslavery, are however “defensive of slavery,” as
attested by George Bourne’s criticism: The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable.
With Animadversions upon Dr. Smith’s Philosophy (Philadelphia: J. M.
Sanderson, 1816).
59. Smith, Lectures, 176–177.
60. Smith, Essay, 1788 ed., 83–84; with slightly modified wording, 1810 ed.,
162.
61. Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776), ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford
U. P., 1976), vol. 1: 402. See Silvia Sebastiani, “National Character and
Race: A Scottish Enlightenment Debate,” in Being Sociable: Character and
Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, ed. Thomas Ahnert and Susan
Manning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 187–206.
62. Smith, Essay, 1787 ed., 83–90, quotation on 85; 1810 ed., 163–169.
63. See, for instance, the example provided by Jorge Cañizares–Esguerra, “New
World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and
Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,” The American
Historical Review 104 (1999): 33–68.
64. Essay, 1788 ed., 42n; 1810 ed., with some revisions, 70–71n; emphasis
added.
65. Yokota, Unbecoming British, 218–222.
66. Dena Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined
Fraternity of White Men (Durham: Duke U. P., 1998), 7.
67. Smith, Essay, 1810 ed., “Advertisement,” 4.
68. Ibid., 1810 ed., 240, fn.
69. Ibid., 1787 ed., 82; 1810 ed., 160–161.
70. Ibid., 1787 ed., 99–109; 1810 ed., 177–184. This part closely echoes Adam
Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1st ed., 1759; 6th ed., 1790), ed.
David D. Raphael and Alec L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984),
199.
71. Smith, Essay, 1787 ed., 112n; 1810 ed., 187.
72. Ibid., 1810 ed., 15–16, emphasis added. Smith refers to David Doig’s Two
Letters on the Savage State, Addressed to the Late Lord Kaims (London: G. G.
J. and J. Robinson, 1792; reprint, together with the Edinburgh edition
of Smith’s Essay, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995). See Silvia Sebastiani,
“Conjectural History vs. the Bible: Eighteenth-Century Scottish Historians
and the Idea of History in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” Storia della
Storiografia 39 (2001): 39–50; Sebastiani, “L’Amérique des Lumières et la

hiérarchie des races.”
73. Smith, Essay, 1810 ed., 24.
74. Ibid., 1810 ed., 23–24.
75. Ibid., 1810 ed., 29.
76. Ibid., 1810 ed., 32.
9
Measuring the Strength of
a State: Staatenkunde in
Hungary around 1800
“Die Lehre von der Macht der Staaten”—the doctrine of the power
of states—is how Harm Klueting described the body of teaching on
German soil about the early modern system of states.1 For the lead-
ing European powers of the seventeenth century—Britain, France,
Austria, Russia, and later Prussia—the maintenance of hegemony and
balance in the military and commercial competition, within and out-
side the continent, brought the demand for measurability of might
and power of states in comparison to each other. Empirical ques-
tions about what one would today call material and human resources
became vital for politicians and scholars. How could these factors be
described and how did they relate to each other?
The answer to such questions appeared in German academia as a
new empirical and encyclopedic knowledge and accompanied the
development of territorial polities, which were characterized by
centralizing attempts and the consolidation of the state-managed
economic and administrative sphere at the expense of traditional
privileges. The economic, fiscal, and legal components of this body
of knowledge, the so-called sciences of state, oriented themselves no
longer at classical definitions inherited from Aristotle, but intended
instead to grasp the state as an empirical and historically shaped real-
ity. This was particularly true in the case of state law (based on natural
law), empirical Staatenkunde, the history of the state, and cameral-
ist sciences, as well as Polizeywissenschaft.2 It is Staatenkunde, known
also as Statistik, or descriptive statistics that is of interest here.
235
236 Borbála Zsuzsanna Török
Staatenkunde developed its method for the exhaustive descrip-

tion of the political territory, inquiring into the physical, admin-
istrative, social, and legal structure, treating these components in
their interrelation. Its encyclopedic outlook, frequently compared
to medical anatomy or Linnaean botanical taxonomy, sought stan-
dardized representations of the “strength” of states.3 My chapter dis-
cusses the theory and methods of Staatenkunde in Hungary during
the late Enlightenment. It is an attempt to reconstruct part of the
scholarly discourse on administrative practice in the eastern lands of
the Habsburg Monarchy from the double perspective of state com-
petition on the European scene and state-building at the local level.
The study uncovers the nature and context of the “statistical gaze”
of local scholars, who by the end of the century built up a statistical
repertory of the Hungarian Kingdom.
The main particularity of Hungary was its dependent, although
separate, status within the composite Austrian monarchy, which
often evoked in local scholars the feeling of colonial status. Even
though this was not the case, the kingdom was affected by two kinds
of conflicting polities, which, as Robert Evans formulated, had a deci-
sive impact not only on politics, but also on scholarship and later
historical writing.4 The first was the Habsburg imperial state-building
with a centralized army, bureaucracy, and economy, peaking with the
reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II. Staatenkunde was institu-
tionalized in the Hungarian academe and beyond through the ini-
tiative of the Habsburg government. It can thus be rightly regarded
as a core intellectual asset of imperial administration, character-
ized by Foucault as a “technique of power.”5 The other entangled
dynamics emerged from the regional and local systems of jurisdic-
tion and control, which in the eastern commonwealths meant “cor-
porative structures, noble dominance, contested national traditions,
long-time religious and cultural pluralism and quasi-feudal landed
nexus.”6 The osmosis of statistical knowledge took place in this con-
text of asymmetric power relations, involving the mutual, although
unequal, participation of agents in scholarly exchange.7 This asym-
metry makes the study of the adaptation of Staatenkunde particu-
larly intriguing. Did the transplantation of the discipline from the
German and Austrian universities lead to its transformation among
the local scholars? Did it contribute to a counter-vision on questions
of “good administration” in comparison to the official stance from
Vienna?8 Indicative in this respect may be contemporary assessments
Staatenkunde in Hungary around 1800 237
of the “strength” of the kingdom, in comparison to other Habsburg

lands and other states in Europe.
My chapter focuses on the context of a work by Martin Schwartner
(1759–1823), titled Statistik des Königreichs Ungern, the production
of which reflects the typical problems of dealing with a composite
state at this time. The entire career of this Protestant scholar reflects
well not only the possibilities, but also the limitations and contradic-
tions, of the enlightened reforms and the post-Josephist restoration.
Schwartner was one of the few Protestants to be appointed profes-
sor within a Catholic-dominated academe in Hungary, the latter just
beginning to open up for non-Catholics since the mid-1780s. On the
other hand, he never received the chair of Statistik, despite the large
public acclaim, also in the international field, of his scholarly work.
He taught diplomatics, the discipline of critical analysis of histori-
cal documents, and was also the librarian of the University of Pest.9
As a student Schwartner had spent three years at the University of
Göttingen between 1780 and 1783, and became a disciple of the well-
known Göttingen professor for Statistik and Politik, August Ludwig
Schlözer (1735–1809), with whom he maintained contact even after-
ward.10 They also referred to each other with mutual acknowledg-
ment in their publications. The Statistik is sprinkled with citations
from Schlözer in the habit of a disciple establishing his fame by fre-
quent references to the master. Schlözer too mentions his former
student from Hungary as the only scholar known to him to have
accomplished a complete statistical description about his country,
without governmental support.11
Schwartner’s book had been acclaimed by contemporaries and by
later scholars as a particularly accomplished adaptation of the German
statistical tradition. It also became teaching material in the Lutheran
lycées of Hungary,12 while manuals published in the ambit of the
Catholic university avoided referring to it. The first edition was pub-
lished in 1798, several decades after the introduction of Staatenkunde
in the curricula of legal training and eight years after the end of the
turbulent Josephist decade. The second revised edition appeared in
1809 and 1811, after the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire
and in the midst of the Napoleonic storm in Europe, the latter also
having military and economic repercussions in Hungary.13 How did
the first expert of Hungarian Staatenkunde, who did not belong by
birth and language to the Hungarian elite, but made a career through
his knowledge in the state-controlled academe, see his country within
the Habsburg framework? How did the book describe the nested
power relations that characterized Hungary in the composite mon-
archy? What stance did Schwartner take between the claims of the
“imperial center” and those of the Hungarian nobility?
The publication of the Statistik des Königreichs Ungern falls into a
peculiar cycle of Hungarian history. The modernization of public
administration in the Habsburg lands during the reigns of Maria
Theresa and Joseph II also aimed to transform a decentralized order
based on counties and feudal corporatist autonomies into a unitary,
uniform, and centralized system. The reforms that started in the mid-
century and culminated in the 1780s were radical to the extent that
they replaced temporarily the entire domestic administration with a
centralized one led by officials appointed by the emperor. The turn of
the century, in contrast, witnessed the restoration of the rights and
competences of the estates, most prominently their tax exemption
and the exclusive seigneurial property rights.14 However, the return
to status quo ante affected the economic and commercial subordina-
tion and fiscal discrimination of the country under Habsburg rule.15
Historians agree that the intellectual and political effervescence that
started with the Theresian and Josephist reforms and peaked in dem-
ocratic tendencies and solidarity with the French Revolution in the
shape of Hungarian Jacobinism came to an abrupt halt after the bru-
tal repression of the movement in 1795. The Napoleonic wars were a
good excuse for both the Habsburg and Hungarian parties of gover-
nance to avoid challenging the status quo. Reforms would be under-
taken by the Parliament later, by the generation of the Age of Reform
(c. 1825–1848).
The first section of my chapter will look at the chief arguments of
Schwartner’s Statistik, while the subsequent section will summarize
the methodological and theoretical particularities of the discipline in
(East-)Central Europe in that time. The last two sections will continue
to flesh out the context of Statistik by turning to the institutional
framework. Staatenkunde was introduced into higher education by
a government that, to increase its political and economic efficiency,
looked for models of administrative knowledge in the German
universities. The educational reforms that gradually transformed
a confessionally divided traditional schooling system in Hungary
introduced into the higher tiers, among others, the sciences of state.
However, it is not the educational relevance of the discipline that
is the most interesting aspect, even though the boom in textbooks
is an important indicator of the acceptance of the discipline. More

important for my purposes is the ensuing popularity of Staatenkunde
also among the broader educated public, including the elite of state
administration. The fact that nearly one-third of Staatenkunde hand-
books were penned by members of the reform-minded bureaucratic
elite indicates the pragmatic relevance of the new type of knowledge
in Hungary, and moreover the emergence of a new affirmation of
knowledge production on the shifting map of the European republic
of letters.16
Comparing state strength—An academic pursuit
Schwartner’s Statistik is structured thematically along three main

domains, shaped after the established German canon. The main chap-
ters of the book are titled “Staatsgrundmächte” (fundamental factors
of strength including geography, people, natural resources, produce,
economy, and commerce), “Staatsverfassung oder Staatsrecht” (the
fundamental laws of the country), and “Staatsverwaltung” (public
administration and the executive branch of the state), a structure
maintained in all the editions.
The thematic focus of the Statistik rests on the author’s fatherland,
the Kingdom of Hungary—indeed, Schwartner belongs to the pio-
neers of Spezialstatistik, that is, concentration on a single country.
Yet, the description is firmly embedded in a comparative European
framework. The general goal for Schwartner was to determine the
precise rank of Hungary among the states of Europe and beyond,
between “cultivated Germany” and “wild Turkey.” This could be
assessed especially through the comparative analysis of the human
and material assets, the topic of the first chapter, which has been
praised as the most innovative part and the chief contribution of
the author to Hungarian Staatenkunde. Indeed, this chapter goes far
beyond description in the sense of looking for complex correlations
of mathematical data, such as population density.17 Quantification
was an important tool here, which not only opened up the vista for
alternative modes of data presentation (e.g., tables), but also created
its own objects of analysis.18
The number of the inhabitants is considered a key indicator of
“state strength” and demonstrates the author’s familiarity with
contemporary populationist theories, which correlated the prosper-
ity of a state with the number of inhabitants in its territory.19 The
quantitative evaluation intends to determine the ratio of population

compared to territorial extent, a sort of population density. The task
was difficult. The military mapping of the kingdom had been already
completed in 1784; however, the exact data was not public and
Schwartner extracted numerical geographical approximations from
contemporary publications of his Hungarian and Austrian colleagues
to calculate his own assessment.20 As a next step he approximated the
number of inhabitants (7,456,789 souls) by reference to the Josephist
census, and came to the conclusion that despite the respectable size
of the country, the density of its population was low, that is, circa
1,848 inhabitants per square mile. Thus the country fell “behind”
industrious Bohemia, with its “3,000 souls per square mile,” but was
“far ahead of Russia,” on the other hand, with its ratio of “93 inhabit-
ants per square mile.”21
In the next subchapter Schwartner describes comparatively the
various social categories in Hungary in a synchronic and historical
perspective. The predominantly qualitative description (here, too,
numerical extension is important) draws on ethnographic accounts
and orders the population into distinct subgroups according to lan-
guage/culture, religion/confession, habitat in towns or countryside,
occupation, legal rank, and privileges. The unique and most elaborate
part is the subchapter on the ethnographic characterization and his-
torical account of the numerous linguistic cultures on the territory of
the state.22 The account begins by inserting Hungary into the tableau
of world history:
No other country of the world hosts more numerous languages

and peoples than Hungary. Hungary has been, as long as history
reaches back, the ancestral seat of Slavs, the inn of the barbarians
invading the Roman world since the fourth century, the refuge of
the repressed nomads, . . . the scene of European courage and Asiatic
and Turkish savageness, but also a Dorado for Germans ever since,
particularly the hardworking Saxons and the prolific Swabians.
Italians and Savoyards might have been present in Hungary more
often (in the past) than now.23
The comparative description of Volk (people), understood as a

synonym for Nation (nation) and the subsequent characterization
of these clusters in terms of shared language, origins, history, man-
ners, and customs, had been part of an established tradition of state
description in Hungary since the early eighteenth century.24 The state

appears here as the equivalent of the political society—a conceptual
innovation in the discipline since Schlözer.25 This definition rests on
the historical-developmental classification of societies into those “not
yet having” a state—ranging from single families to the clan-based
stateless natives of Greenland, Kamchatka, or South America—and
those who did. Only the latter “deserved” to be studied via statis-
tics, while the former had to be rendered by natural history.26 In the
case of Hungary, Schwartner identifies the Magyars as the political
nation inasmuch as they constitute and define the character of the
state. However, for him, the German population is not less important
as the most civilized, therefore most productive, most useful ethnic
component of the country. The author never tires of underlining their
merits in practically all fields of public life, from scholarship to com-
merce. At the diachronic level, the reader is presented a panorama
of past and present civilizations evolving on the political territory.
Last but not least, Schwartner classifies the inhabitants of the state
by their numerical extension. Thus, the more numerous Hungarians,
Slavs, Germans, and Wallachs—Hauptnationen (main nations)—were
to be distinguished from the smaller clusters of Armenians, Roma,
Jews, Macedonians, and other ethnic constituents, that is, Nebenvölker
(sub-peoples). He also ranks his ethnic categories according to the
physical, moral, and intellectual “culture” of the peoples in a fashion
similar to the civilized-barbarian divisions of contemporary conjec-
tural histories and ethnographies.27 The vignettes of comparative eth-
nohistories, situating the Germans at the top and the Roma and Jews
at the bottom of the scale of civilization, with all the other ethnic
clusters in-between, strikes me as a characteristic of Enlightenment
ethnography, which casts the inequalities of the feudal/traditional
society in terms of differences in the perceived degree of civilization
of social groups. Such an approach to ethnicity, which reflects the
impact of stadial history, could be read as an instance of racial think-
ing. The overwhelming difference in comparison with the famous
practitioners of enlightened world history, whether in Göttingen or
in Edinburgh, was the narrow geographic frame of comparison. The
entire range of human civilization from ignoble savages to the highest
peak of civilization could be found in the bounds of a single country,
and it was certainly an East-Central European peculiarity to regard
the ethnographic category that came to be termed later as “nation-
ality” and “ethnicity” (in contrast to other sociological categories,
such as occupation, habitat, religion, or social status) as the carrier of

distinguishing collective traits.
Schwartner’s account of the hierarchy of ethnic civilization in
Hungary is certainly racist. But to understand its logic, one has to
also take into consideration the administrative practice of his day.
The administration operated with similar approaches, whose single
purpose was to separate the “productive” and “useful” part of the
population from the “unproductive” and “less valuable” part, based
on their presumed capacity as a workforce.28 Here the German col-
onists of the mid-eighteenth century could easily fall into the first
category, in contrast to the increasingly criminalized poor(er) immi-
grants, including the itinerant Roma and also the Jewish population
migrating from Galicia to Hungary.29 Such classifications of the mul-
tilingual and multidenominational society along “national character,
mores, customs, habitat, and civilization” became a standard compo-
nent of statistical literature on Hungary until the 1840s. They petri-
fied into clichéd expressions of collective identities when it came to
link low(er) social status with the presumed lack of education and
manners.30
The sharp distinction between the Germans and the Magyars
was carried on in the next subchapter on Hungary’s economy and
produce. Praise was earned only by the industrious Germans, who
figured as the only truly valuable human resource of the kingdom.
Schwartner criticized the general weakness of domestic agriculture,
the rudimentary stages of industry, and listed the geographic and
political hindrances of commerce. The exhaustive itemization of the
main products and economic branches was followed by a summary
of unused economic potential. Here, too, the author made compari-
sons with the neighboring countries and closed the account with a
series of proposals to improve the situation.31 The political relevance
of statistical data, such as the relative number of towns, was linked to
their capacity to function as the basis of a forecast.
“An ocean of disciplines”—The particularities of

Central European Staatenkunde
By the time of Schwartner’s peregrination to Göttingen, Staatenkunde

entered a phase of epistemological and political transformation. The
crisis of the discipline is well known and could be summed up as
a discrepancy between its all-encompassing purpose, its ambition
to render a true depiction of a state in a certain moment, and the

relatively meager results published in the actual works. If the late
Enlightenment can be portrayed in terms of tendencies of “rational-
ization,” “the disenchantment of the world,” the rise of mathemati-
cal thinking, and a “paradigm shift” from classificatory knowledge
to one based on counting and measurement, then the discipline
Staatenkunde reflected these (far from even) transformations accu-
rately.32 From an originally descriptive discipline, which ordered and
classified aspects of many states, sections of the description increas-
ingly integrated empirical data, especially regarding the economically
significant realms. Numbers and calculus increasingly made their way
into the descriptions, as well as published data about population fig-
ures, about the extent of registered property, and on denomination.
The epistemological changes highlighted above were by no means
linear or free of self-contradiction and resulted in a great methodolog-
ical diversity in the discipline. How did Schwartner’s Staatenkunde
amalgamate numbers and narrative? The answer lies in the construc-
tion of the unit of analysis, called Staatsmerkwürdigkeit (meaning
“state peculiarity”), introduced by Hermann Conring (1606–1681)
in the seventeenth century and translated into German by Gottfried
Achenwall. The notion of Staatsmerkwürdigkeit designated any
domain worthy of perception, and the definition of what could be
classified as such was changing over time—for Conring it princi-
pally designated the data that was relevant for the state administra-
tion, such as land extension and population. The tautology in the
definition, also purported by Schlözer, is well known: a fact became
statistically relevant when it had bearing on the political function-
ing of the state. Yet it needed the trained eye of the statistician to
determine which fact indeed had such an effect—and this implicit
knowledge, resulting from training and systematic empirical obser-
vation, distinguished the statistical expert from the mere scholar.33
More transparent was the comparative method serving the separa-
tion and description of statistical facts from the mere “bagatelles.”
Since Achenwall, the description had operated simultaneously—and
comparatively—on a diachronic and synchronic axis:
The Statistik of a country and a nation is the embodiment of its

state particularities [Staatsmerkwürdigkeiten]. Whoever wants to
study or define these, should separate them from the mass of the
plain particularities of the land [Landesmerkwürdigkeiten] . . . Then
he should arrange his data in a clear and convenient order so that

he may judge the entire condition of a state at any moment and
compare it with those of other times and other states.34
Staatenkunde had a strong ethnographic and geographic compo-

nent, despite being increasingly susceptible to political arithmetic
and the Tabellenstatistik of the administrative offices:
I venture to say that even the proper knowledge of the extension

and the population of a state is not sufficient to determine the
degree of its strength and the ratio of this strength [in comparison]
to other states. It rather seems to me that to properly assess the
strength of states in comparison to each another, one should also
take into consideration other Grundkräfte in addition to those two
mentioned above . . . [that is,] Grundkräfte that may lead us, more
than any other [factor] to a certain judgment. These are: 1) the
position of a state; 2) the form and character of its government;
and 3) the national character of its population.35
Indeed, the construction of a Merkwürdigkeit required both qualita-

tive description and quantitative analysis, as testified by Schlözer, too
(reinterpreting Süßmilch):
The living and dying of mankind is reigned by a general, con-

stant, and admirable order. The anthropology, the natural law, the
science of finance all seek to find this order, however, it is only
Statistik that may be expected to discover it with precision. This
order is hiding in the particular and is deceptive in the minute, but
the larger the numbers, the more visible they are, the more reliable
the proportions in general, for instance those of the newborn in
comparison to all living persons.36
The lines below witness that Schlözer, at least in his later years, was
no enemy of tables and (numerical) abstractions, despite his estab-
lished reputation to the contrary:
To present a hundred questions about an object (e.g., wine pro-

duction in the entire [Holy Roman] Empire) is tedious both for
the inquirer and the inquired. Thus one should substitute them
with general tabular forms, which have the particular advantage
of being able to be gleaned on a single folio page immediately,

instead of reading through several sheets. With these tables all
depends on good patterns or models.37
The Hungarian disciples of the Göttingen professor—Schwartner,

László Németh (1770–1806), Dániel Ercsei (1781–1836), and others—
relied on approximations in assessing territorial extension or popula-
tion dynamics, as in both cases access to empirical data was limited, if
not impossible. Contrary to the successors of Schlözer in Göttingen,
especially August Ferdinand Lueder (1760–1819) and Arnold Hermann
Ludwig Heeren (1760–1842), who condemned the faulty methods of
the “lowly” Tabellenstatistik and the “soulless” mathematical meth-
ods, the Hungarian scholar was remarkably eclectic in his choice.
Even though his work was predominantly descriptive, Schwartner
was eager to integrate numerical data and correlations between them
whenever it was possible. He held the known practitioners of political
arithmetic in great esteem, and mentions the names of John Graunt
(1620–1674), Arthur Young (1741–1820), and Peter Süßmilch (1707–
1767), along with the representatives of the descriptive method,
Schlözer, August Lueder, and Sir John Sinclair (1754–1835).38
Staatenkunde gathered, ordered, and increasingly measured infor-
mation about the political space at a certain moment. For the com-
pletion of such a demanding task, the “Grundstatistik” of a state,
Schlözer advocated the joint work of experts from several disci-
plines.39 Schwartner’s argument is very similar:
The amount of state particularities which make up the broad field

of Statistik is very large and variegated. No other science is possibly
broader; it encompasses the results of many other [disciplines]. It
is similar to an ocean that swallows numberless large and small
rivers.40
The seemingly impressionistic list of the disciplines involves,

among others, geography, arithmetic, the science of agriculture, law,
the humanities (litteratura), accounting, mining, and ecclesiastic his-
tory.41 Its logic is explained, however, from the perspective of the
doctrine concerning the power of the state. Geographical parame-
ters (the position of the country on earth, extension, physical geo-
graphical characteristics, and climate), the ratio of the population in
relation to territorial extent, the quality of the human and physical
resources, educational infrastructure, and industry are all considered

the key factors of the strength of the state.42
Staatenkunde did not proceed as a description of space only; since
Schlözer it also gradually became a discipline about historical time.
The diachronic comparison of the same type of data made the study
of historical stages in the life of a single state possible. One could
determine causal relationships for improvement or decay, or extrapo-
late the future course of cultures, economies, and political systems.43
Staatenkunde as “history standing still” and history as past statistics
must have been more than a bon mot among the disciples of Schlözer.
Schwartner too utters the famous phrase nine years before the pub-
lication of Schlözer’s magisterial Theorie der Statistik.44 He employs
historical inquiry frequently as an analytical tool, especially when
explaining the dynamics of the mores and customs of the inhabit-
ants, the particularities of the feudal administration in Hungary, and
the privileges of the nobility.
Schwartner maintains that “the liberty of the proud British is not
safer than the personal freedom of the Hungarian nobleman,”45 the
latter owning the exclusive “right to property”46 within the still reign-
ing seigneurial system. The portrait of the opposite end of the social
hierarchy, the peasant and the serf, is portrayed on the other hand in
a tone of empathy that reveals clearly the political preferences of the
author. Indeed, Schwartner is never tired of listing the tremendous
obligations and economic bounds of the peasants that make up, as he
calculates, 90 percent of the population. He lashes out at the endemic
injustice of the tax system—all the taxes rest on the shoulders of the
peasants and a tiny layer of city burghers—and condemns the chaos
that dominates the judicial system.
The complexity of the status quo and the effort of Schwartner to pres-
ent it as an administrative and legal anomaly of the empire raise a the-
oretical question. Conforming to the Göttingen canon, Staatenkunde
is located in the closest vicinity of prudentia civilis (Staatsklugheit)
and history.47 Thus “the striving for security and also positive hap-
piness prompted Man to give up a considerable part of his natural
freedom and join the state,” so the author, and the task of Statistik
was to describe “how the state contributed to the happiness of its
subjects, to their security, the maintenance of their life and health.”48
But how was the relationship of Hungary and the Monarchy to be
understood—was it a matter of domestic politics, to be studied in the
ambit of Polizey only? The answer may be more difficult than it seems
as the kingdom was not directly subordinated to the Gesamtstaat. The

author avoids addressing the legal relationship between the “impe-
rial” and local government. Instead, Schwartner speaks cryptically
about the use of Staatenkunde for Hungarian patriots, to prevent
“inconsiderate behavior” vis-à-vis both the Crown and the subjects
of their land.49 In the second edition we find reference to the loosen-
ing of the absolutist rule, which he qualifies as “convenient” for the
common good, even if it makes the art of politics a difficult affair.50
The cautious hint indicates that the question of political sovereignty,
manifest most prominently in the relation between the Crown and
the Hungarian estates, had remained an unresolved matter since the
death of Joseph II.
This turned out to be a true challenge, not only for Schwartner,
but also for many historians of the day. Johann Christian Engel
(1770–1814), for instance, sought to uncover the “statistical monu-
ments of the past,” of Hungary, meaning the task “to follow histori-
cally the internally quiet, nevertheless changing pace of the state
administration.”51 Engel also inquired into the history of the legis-
lative system (innere Staatsverfassung), the history of privileges and
the “Constitution,” through which the Hungarian nobility had
managed to secure their legal position vis-à-vis the non-Hungarian
and non-noble population of the country, and Vienna.52 The author
praised Schwartner’s Statistik as the compass for his own writing and
sought a historical explanation for Hungary’s legal, political, cultural,
and social status quo. Twenty-one years after the first edition of the
Statistik, the Newest geographical-statistical description of Hungary by
Pál Magda (1770–1841) defined the rights of the nobility in terms of
positive domestic state law: “These laws are the founding stones of
the Hungarian legal system (Staatsverfassung).”53 The next generation
of national liberals went even further. According to the retrospective
account of the prominent historian Mihály Horváth (1804–1878):
Our homeland, with its ancient constitutional institutions and

whose autonomy was guaranteed by state agreements and law,
was part of a monarchy, whose other element administered it with
unlimited power and despotic principles . . . The nation was forced
to fight ceaselessly for its threatened constitutional rights, legal
autonomy, and self-administration. Even its most cherished trea-
sure, the nationality, had been in such lethal danger, that it could
be saved only through great effort from dissolution.54
Although the historians of the Hungarian Vormärz built on the the-

matic grounds of Staatenkunde by focusing on the society, economy,
laws, and culture of the secular state, they showed little understand-
ing for the political outlook of the earlier generation. Schwartner,
the loyal adept of the well-ordered (constitutional) absolutism, could
earn only contempt from them. A shift of interest from the monarchy
to the nation-state brought about the change of the social vision as
well. The encyclopedic gaze on the ethnic clusters of the state, sorted
by their “usefulness,” yielded to the focus on the “nation.”55
Staatenkunde: New discipline, new careers,

new sites of learning
The eighteenth century is known in Europe as the age of maturing

state power based on knowledge about itself.56 Studies in cartography,
political economy, statistics, and the everyday practice of administra-
tion have demonstrated the correlation between claims on behalf of
the state for knowledge of the human and physical resources of the
political territory and the control thereof.57 The process was largely
responsible for the gradual shift in perceptions of the political space
as a geographically defined, closed, homogeneous, and measurable
territory. The new administrative practices, based on empirical knowl-
edge and the increasing quantification of information, envisaged the
former as an abstract operation board, ready for state intervention.
Growing military competition and the sheer demand for its finance
had a decisive role, too, in the shaping of the sciences of state.
Staatenkunde had been long regarded as a purely academic pur-
suit, disconnected from administrative practice and therefore of
little practical use.58 Newer studies about the practice of administra-
tion raise doubts whether such a neat separation was possible and
desirable.59 In Hungary, too, the study of statistics in the late eigh-
teenth century has been related mostly to the study of the public
administration, with only sporadic interest in the academic realm.60
Rather instructive is the study of the first military census in Hungary
and Transylvania under Joseph II (1784), which was carried out in
the service of the Habsburg Machtstaat. The historian Antal Szántay
referred to the scholarly context of this state-led project, rooted in
the sciences of state. Accordingly, the reforms of Joseph II (laid out
in his Entwurf of the mid-1780s) targeted the annihilation of noble
privileges, which not only legitimized the tax exemption, but also
prevented the homogenization of this socially heterogeneous land

with a weak economy. The school system was also found to be inad-
equate for the promotion of reform-oriented thinking and it had to
be transformed to fulfill the requirements of the new type of infor-
mation-based administration. The latter involved skills in the acqui-
sition of relevant data from the administrative units that could be
provided by Staatenkunde.61
The case prefigures two major themes of future Staatenkunde in
Hungary, namely, the description of the Hungarian constitution (and
the attendant debates) and an official demand for public instruction
about the condition of the country. The urgency of these issues was
highlighted by the fact that on the first possible occasion that the
Hungarian Diet was allowed to convene (1790–1792) after the death
of Joseph, it also stipulated the teaching of proper knowledge on the
legal, historical, and “statistical” matters of Hungary in the law faculty
of the country’s only university, as well as at the law academies.62
By that time, Europe’s best universities, many of which were in the
Holy Roman Empire, underwent significant transformation because
of substantial governmental commitment to the production and dis-
tribution of “useful knowledge.” The influence of the state in the
running of universities increased considerably, making them fit for
educating their growing bureaucracy, the norms being set by the
northern Protestant institutions, with the University of Halle and
Göttingen in the lead. Such pragmatism showed itself in the reform
of academic curricula, with an emphasis on applied and natural sci-
ences, and the concomitant decline of the faculty of theology and the
ascent of the faculty of law.63 The adaptation of the Göttingen model
in the core Habsburg lands differed from the Protestant German pat-
tern, inasmuch as these were directed against the Jesuits, which had
dominated education before the dissolution of the order in 1773.
Also, here the reforms had a more pragmatic agenda, namely, the
education of future bureaucrats, not scholars—hence the selective
adaptation of the scientific curricula from Göttingen.
This became the fixed pattern in Hungary, too. Here, educational
policy was intended to break the monopoly of the churches and
apply the previously introduced utilitarian reforms. The Theresian
and Josephist reforms placed much weight on the modernization of
education to fit the requirements of the new methods of governance.
To be a member of the new state administration required training
in fields that had not formed part of the curriculum before: natural
jurisprudence, cameralist economy (finance, commerce, population-

ist policies), Polizeywissenschaft, and Staatenkunde or Statistik.64 In
1777, Staatenkunde was introduced in the higher legal education, and
the curriculum required that textbooks have Hungary as a subject, and
thus a compulsory project for future professors of the discipline.65
The social heterogeneity of late eighteenth-century Hungary is well
reflected in the structure of its educational system, divided by confes-
sional appurtenance. Most dynamic were the northern and western
areas of historic Hungary, with the political-administrative seat of
the country in Bratislava (Pozsony, Pressburg)—to be transferred later
to Pest-Buda. These areas were known for their law academies and
advanced Lutheran lycèes, which prepared the careers of many schol-
ars, who, after studies in Austria or Germany, often established them-
selves in the emerging Hungarian cultural capital. Most important
was the University of Buda, later Pest (the former Jesuit University
of Nagyszombat [today: Trnava, Slovakia] founded in 1635), and its
faculty of law where Staatenkunde was introduced in the course of
educational reforms.
In the last three decades of the century, the Catholic monopoly
on higher education diminished in Hungary and Protestants were
admitted for the first time since the Counter-Reformation to the uni-
versities, including the emerging Hungarian cultural and administra-
tive capital, Pest-Buda. Although schools in Hungary were run and
largely controlled by the churches until the mid-nineteenth century,
the educational reforms led to a convergence of the curricula despite
the confessional fragmentation. With its emphasis on the secular
state and standardized themes of study such as Staatsgrundmächte,
Staatsverfassung, and Staatsverwaltung, Staatenkunde contributed to
shared methods, independent of the confessional and institutional
background of the practitioners.
By the last decade of the century the first results of the changes
could be felt through the appearance of dozens of publications (of var-
ied content and quality) on the discipline, printed in the academic cit-
ies of Košice (Kaschau, Kassa), Bratislava (Pressburg, Pozsony), Oradea
(Nagyvárad), Calvinist Debrecen, Lutheran-dominated Sopron (Erlau),
and the University Press in Buda.66 There were scholars publishing
Staatenkunde who were associated with the university, like Martin
Schwartner, Béla Barits (1742–1813), and Endre Michnay (1804–
1854), who worked as professors in Lutheran gymnasiums, or taught
in Calvinist colleges, like Dániel Ercsei and Pál Magda, while others,
such as Anton Faber (1772–1854) and Mathias Kolbay (1795–?), were

employed at the Catholic law academies. A good number of authors
belonged to the administrative elite, such as Nikola Škrlec (1729–1799),
Johann Andreas Demian (1770–1845), and László Bielek (1744–1807).
That at least one-third of the authors of Staatenkunde came from the
military and the public administration suggests that scholarly mer-
its in the discipline facilitated social assent in the broadest sense and
were not confined to the academic curriculum only.
There had to be more exchange between armchair practitioners
and the clerks than hitherto presumed. Indeed, the published offi-
cial records did find their way into the handbooks.67 In Hungary,
the administrative offices were required to gather encompassing data
about all aspects of the social, economic, and legal whereabouts of
their area in charge. The year 1771 marks the beginning of a more
systematic enumeration of the non-noble population. The census of
1784–1787 registered for the first time the whole population, includ-
ing the nobility, this undertaking being repeated the next time only
in 1850–1851. Other important surveys undertaken in the period,
with a possible impact on scholarly writing, were the cadastral sur-
veys and registration of agricultural products.68
As previously shown, the Statistik des Königreichs Ungern clearly
strives to incorporate such numerical data. Moreover, this data
is employed in a comparative assessment about the assets of the
states, and thus carries the account at a level of more abstract under-
standing. The population surveys employed social classifications,
which are very similar to those employed in Schwartner’s Statistik,
the main difference being the fact that the census never registered
either the language or the “ethnicity” of the population. The latter
was a scholarly and administrative construct, that is, a speculative
correlation of denomination with language.69 In similar fashion, the
description of Hungary’s commercial and fiscal issues and the field
of production in Schwartner’s work should be analyzed while keep-
ing in mind the initiatives for the formalization of revenue con-
scription in 1772, the property conscription taking place between
1784 and 1787, and the regularly published church lists about the
figure of the non-noble population.70
This material was an important new topic in the international
republic of letters, which linked up even newer regions into the
Central and Western European networks of learned exchange. The
hubs of continental learned exchange were often French and (for
the Habsburg realms especially important) German academic cities,

such as the University of Göttingen. The encompassing scope made
Staatenkunde a cooperative discipline. Schwartner mentions in great
detail the array of his sources in the introduction, the most relevant
being printed documents of the central administration in Hungary
(the Viceregal Council, located in Buda). The encompassing descrip-
tion demanded indeed the use of a great variety of sources, both con-
temporary and historical, which experts like Schwartner promptly
classified and enlisted. He also used the results of the conscriptions
effected under Joseph II. Information could also be requested through
question forms sent to the local administrative bodies or beyond—
presumably with the support of the Gubernium—and it was often up
to the persuasive skills of the author, and the cooperative will of local
bureaucrats, to acquire up-to-date information.71 Therefore, travel lit-
erature and learned journals, which were starting to be established at
that time in the Kingdom of Hungary and beyond, were still impor-
tant sources of Staatenkunde.72
In the German practice, Staatenkunde envisaged a new concept
of politics as rational, transparent, and increasingly accessible to cri-
tique. It was a public genre, surpassing the narrow bounds of strictly
academic circles. Making knowledge about the state public, so it was
held, would by itself contribute to reforms. This political bent of
Staatenkunde as the enlightened critique of administration became
particularly strong in the rhetoric and activity of August Ludwig
Schlözer. Yet the public nature of Staatenkunde stood in a dramatic
conflict with the secretive nature of most practices of administration,
and many of its goals proved to be utopian prior to the liberalization
of politics and the creation of state-managed statistical bureaus in the
first half of the nineteenth century. Even if much of the noble goals
of Staatenkunde remained wishful thinking, the French Revolution
taught many continental states to carefully open up the administra-
tive accounts to public scrutiny. In any case, by 1800, information
exchange on statistical matters also took place in Hungary, as testi-
fied by the relative frequency of books and periodicals with “statisti-
cal” content in the decade preceding and in the decades following
1800.73
Yet secrecy continued to play a considerable role—Schwartner often
refers to the censor who delayed the publication of his book for years.
It is also possible that a large amount of his sources were not named
in the book in order to avoid complications and further delays in the
publication. In other places his formulations are cryptic, for instance,

in his section about the peasants of Hungary. He introduces the topic
with a disclaimer in which he clarifies his position. Much ink and
even more emotions have been spilled on this issue; and likewise
the author, in his introduction, restricts himself only “to the facts
that everyone is allowed to know and, provided they make an effort,
everyone can know, yet everything beyond that (realm) belongs to
higher politics.”74 In the footnote he refers the reader to a well-known
treatise, De conditione et indole rusticorum in Hungaria (1807), written
by his brilliant fellow scholar, Gergely Berzeviczy (1763–1822). The
latter work was the most vigorous contemporary attack on the feudal
system and on what he held to be the Habsburg colonial administra-
tion in Hungary, from a liberal perspective. Schwartner also notes the
review of this “cosmopolitan” work in the Göttingische Magazin für
Geschichte, by no less an authority than the famous Schlözer, written
in his “usual Schlözerian spirit.” At this point one cannot help evok-
ing both the habitual interest of the Göttingen professor in Hungarian
matters and his famous utterance about the role of Statistik as an
enlightened critique, an enemy of despotism.
Conclusion
It is impossible not to evoke, at the end of my chapter, once again

the classical study by Michel Foucault on the historical development
of governmentality.75 The lecture addresses the emergence and devel-
opment of the “art of government” (linked to the development of
the administrative apparatus of territorial monarchies, as well as to
a series of savoirs, i.e., disciplines for the knowledge of the state and
the “things” of which it is comprised, having as its end the well-being
of the entire population). Foucault speaks about a separate and new
dimension of rule in early modern European states, in contrast to
the traditional juridical forms of sovereignty, the obedience to laws.
The consolidation of this former, “economic” type of governing led,
according to Foucault, to the redefinition, even crisis, of the juridi-
cal connection between the ruler and ruled toward the end of the
eighteenth century. Schwartner’s Statistik (a discipline at the heart of
the mentioned savoirs) illustrates this very double dynamic. On one
hand, it is an unprecedentedly keen attempt to provide a systematic
and precise knowledge about the Foucauldian things (of human and
non-human kind) of the kingdom. On the other hand, Schwartner’s
statistical balance sheet remains incomplete on account of the unre-

solved juridical status of Hungary within the composite Monarchy.
Indeed, what Schwartner one-sidedly condemns as the legal egoism
of the Hungarian estates would grow later into a complex delibera-
tion of legal, economic, and administrative reform during the pre-
1848 decade, which could not leave the question of sovereignty
unaddressed. This would peak, as we know, with the tragic events of
the failed quest for national independence in 1848.
Obviously, this was by no means a linear process and Schwartner’s
is but one contribution, from a particular angle, to the accumula-
tion of knowledge relevant to governance. Indeed, Schwartner prob-
ably did not pay mere lip service to the censor when stating that
Hungary’s future and interests were entangled with those of the
Habsburgs. He never mentions the reigning emperor, Francis I, by
name, which might signify a critical stance toward his policy. He is
full of praise for the previous rulers, Maria Theresa and Joseph II, a
fact that draws attention to an attitude that was probably as idealistic
as self-contradictory in the age of Francis I, namely, “constitutional
absolutism.”76
Nor is his description complete. Today’s readers know too well that
not only the much-rebuked nobility but also the Viennese authori-
ties and their restrictive legislation were responsible for the king-
dom’s backwardness. However, Schwartner’s merits are undeniably
a rich book, well beyond the level of existing works in Staatenkunde
and the contemporary standards of the discipline. The Statistik is a
remarkably erudite account of the particularities of Staatenkunde
in contemporary Hungary. The chief novelty, namely, the thorough
concentration of the description of a single country while maintain-
ing the comparative framework, has already been mentioned. Also, in
contrast to the noted theoreticians in Göttingen and elsewhere, the
author seems deeply intrigued by practical solutions to the problems
of the comparison, correlation, and mathematization of data. His sta-
tistical gaze manages to amalgamate the viewpoints of the Austrian,
Sonnenfels-type narrower cameralistic utilitarianism with the larger
analytical viewpoints of a Göttingen-type Staatenkunde, anchored in
the humanities and with a European comparative vantage. The result
is a work with many precise details and diagnoses, a wide breadth
and depth, which places Schwartner in the ranks of contemporary
German, Italian, and French practitioners of the discipline.
Last but not least, the merit of Statistik is that it provided standard-
ized definitions for the economic, human, political, and cultural fac-
tors of state “strength.” The comparison with the more developed
states also introduced the narrative of backwardness, a notion of
great future career in nineteenth-century political thinking, especially
among Eastern and Southern European intellectuals. The mentioned
factors included the population itself, the land, correlation between
population extent and territorial magnitude (what later became
termed as population density), economy, trade, and agriculture, and
the more complex themes such as the social heterogeneity of the
population or the particularities of the feudal legal system. Notable
is a complex meaning of the terms “nation” (Nation) and “people”
(Volk), used in political and ethnographic sense and, as seen before,
in terms of numerical extension. Although the Hungarians as an eth-
nic cluster and the Magyar nobility do take the center stage in the
account, they are just one among the other constituent entities of the
population. Schwartner was an eager commentator of the budding
Magyar patriotism, and his intention was to reflect on the virtues
and flaws of his compatriots from the lofty position of the expert,
loyal to the (ideal of his) state. Here personal background must have
played an enormous role. As a Lutheran of German mother tongue,
he owed his career to the very benefits of the reforms of the Habsburg
administration, and his attitude to the Magyar elite of his country
remained ambiguous.
Finally, the choice of German as the language of his treatise illus-
trates that his scholarly ambitions went beyond the confines of the
patria: “Most foreign scholars know Essequibo and Buenos Ayres, and
the Ceres Ferdinandea better than Hungary and Slavonia, so impor-
tant from the historical and statistical point of view for every European
citizen,” Schwartner laments.77 We should not test this statement for
its truth content (it actually did contain a grain of truth); what is
more intriguing is that he does link up, through myriad comparisons
and assessments, his topic to the international scholarly discourse of
his time. His footnotes abound with cross-references, dialogues, and
hinted debates with various representatives of the European learned
public, with an implicit preference for (Protestant) German learning.
The bibliographical references of his Statistik convey, too, the image
of a self-confident member of the European republic of letters, intent
to be recognized as such.
Notes
1. Harm Klueting, Die Lehre von der Macht der Staaten. Das außenpolitische
Machtproblem in der “politischen Wissenschaft” und in der praktischen
Politik im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1986), 13–38,
esp. 13–20.
2. Hans Erich Bödeker, “Das staatswissenschaftliche Fächersystem im 18.
Jahrhundert,” in Wissenschaften im Zeitalter der Aufklärung. Aus Anlaß des
250 jährigen Bestehens des Verlages Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (1735–1985), ed.
Rudolf Vierhaus (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1985), 143–162,
143–145. For a recent overview of the scholarly disciplines as taught in
eighteenth-century Göttingen, see Hans Erich Bödeker, Philippe Büttgen,
and Michel Espagne, eds., Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen um
1800. Wissenschaftliche Praktiken, institutionelle Geographie, europäische
Netzwerke (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008).
3. David Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in
the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1997).
4. Robert J. W. Evans, Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Essays on Central
Europe, c. 1683–1867 (Oxford: Oxford U. P. 2006).
5. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller
(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 87–104.
6. Evans, Austria, viii.
7. László Kontler, “What Is the (Historians’) Enlightenment Today?” European
Review of History 13 (September 2006): 357–371.
8. See especially László Kontler, “Polizey and Patriotism: Joseph Von
Sonnenfels and the Legitimacy of Enlightened Monarchy in the Gaze of
the Eighteenth-Century State Sciences,” in Monarchism and Absolutism
in Early Modern Europe, ed. Cesare Cuttica and Glenn Burgess (London:
Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 75–90, 232–236.
9. Katalin Gönczi, Die europäischen Fundamente der ungarischen Rechtskultur.
Juristischer Wissenstransfer und nationale Rechtswissenschaft in Ungarn zur
Zeit der Aufklärung und im Vormärz (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2008).
10. From the more recent documentation of Protestant peregrination to
German universities, see Márta Fata, Gyula Kurucz, and Anton Schindling,
eds., Peregrinatio Hungarica. Studenten aus Ungarn an deutschen und öster-
reichischen Hochschulen vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Tübingen:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006); István Futaky, Göttinga. A göttingeni Georg-
August-Egyetem magyarországi és erdélyi kapcsolatai a felvilágosodás idején
és a reformkor kezdetén [Göttingen. The Hungarian and Transylvanian
connections of the Georg-August University of Göttingen during the
Enlightenment and the beginning of the Age of Reforms] (Budapest:
Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Egyetemtörténeti Albizottsága, 2007);
László Szögi, Magyarországi diákok németországi egyetemeken és főiskolákon
1789–1919 [Students from Hungary at German universities and colleges,
1789–1919] (Budapest: Gödöllői Egyetemi és Főiskolai Levéltári Szövestség,
2001); Gönczi, Fundamente.
11. August Ludwig von Schlözer, Theorie der Statistik. Nebst Ideen über das
Studium der Politik überhaupt (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1804),
83.
12. I am thankful to my colleague Mária Hídvégi for this information.
13. Martin Schwartner, Statistik des Königreichs Ungern. Ein Versuch von Martin
Schwartner, Professor der Diplomatik, und Erstem Bibliotheks-Custos, aus der
Königl. ungarischen Universität zu Pest (Pest, 1798). A second, enlarged, and
updated edition of the book was published in two volumes; vol. 1 (1809)
and vol. 2 (1811). An abbreviated French translation was published in
1813 in Frankfurt. All later references to Statistik refer to the 1798 edition,
unless otherwise stated.
14. István M. Szijártó, “The Diet: The Estates at the Parliament of Hungary,
1708–92,” summary, in A diéta. A magyar rendek és az országgyűlés 1708–
1792 [The diet. The Hungarian estates and the Parliament, 1708–1792]
(Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 2005), 406–407, 406.
15. János Poór, Adók, katonák, országgyűlések 1796–1811/12 [Taxes, soldiers,
diets, 1796–1811/12] (Budapest: Universitas Kiadó, 2003), 232.
16. Out of 44 authors of Staatenkunde focusing on Hungary in the period
1770–1848, I could identify 11 authors as members of the military and
the state administration. This list has not been finalized yet.
17. Schwartner, Statistik, 38 and 81–83. All translations from the German
original texts are mine.
18. About quantification in Staatenkunde see Wolfgang Bonß, Die Einübung
des Tatsachenblicks. Zur Struktur und Veränderung empirischeer Sozialforschung
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982); Holger Krahnke, Reformtheorien zwischen
Revolution und Restauration. Die “gesammte Politik” an der Universität
Göttingen im ersten Drittel des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Lang, 1999).
19. Cf. Joseph von Sonnenfels, “Mittel, die Bevölkerung zu berechnen,” in
Grundsätze der Polizey, Handlung und Finanz, ed. Werner Ogris (Munich: C.
H. Beck, 2003), 26–33 (1st ed.: Vienna, 1787).
20. Martin Schwartner, “Allgemeine Bemerkungen über die Menschenmenge
in Ungern,” in Statistik, 81–87.
21. Ibid., 83.
22. Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, “Ethnizität in der Statistik der ungarischen
Spätaufklärung: Die Staatenkunde von Martin Schwartner,” in Beschreiben
und Vermessen. Raumwissen in der östlichen Habsburgermonarchie im 18.
und 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Reinhard Johler and Josef Wolf (Berlin: Frank &
Timme, forthcoming).
23. Schwartner, Statistik, 118.
24. See especially the chorographical works: Matthias Bel, Notitia Hungariae
novae historico-geographica, divisa in partes quatuor, quarum 1-a Hungariam
Cis-Danubianam; altera Trans-Danubianam; 3-a Cis-Tibiscanam; 4-a Trans-
Tibiscanam; Accedunt Samuelis Mikovinii mappae singulorum comitatuum,
methodo astronomico-geometrica concinnatae, vols. 1–4 (Vienna, 1735–1742).
Also mentioned by Schwartner, Statistik, 21. About the interface between
Staatenkunde and ethnographic descriptions, see Justin Stagl, “August
Ludwig Schlözer and the Study of Mankind according to Peoples,” in
A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800, ed. Justin Stagl

(London: Routledge, 1995), 233–268; Han F. Vermeulen, “Göttingen
und die Völkerkunde. Ethnologie und Ethnographie in der deutschen
Aufklärung, 1710–1815,” in Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen, ed. Bödeker,
Büttingen, and Espagne, 199–230.
26. Schlözer, Theorie der Statistik, 29–30.
27. See Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Section IV: “Five Principal Varieties of
Mankind, One Species,” in The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach: With Memoirs of Him by Marx and Flourens, and an Account
of His Anthropological Museum by Professor R. Wagner and the inaugural
dissertation of John Hunter, on the Varieties of Man (London: Roberts, &
Green,1865).
28. See also András Vári, “The Functions of Ethnic Stereotypes in Austria and
Hungary in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Creating the Other: Ethnic
Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe, ed. Nancy M. Wigfield
(Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), 39–55.
29. Péter Őri, “Értelmezési keretek” [Framework of interpretation], in A
demográfiai viselkedés mintái a 18. Században. Lélekösszeírások Pest megyé-
ben, 1774–1783 [Patterns of demographic behavior in the 18th cen-
tury. Conscriptions in County Pest, 1773–1783] (Budapest: KSH, 2003),
99–105.
30. See, for instance, Pál Magda, Magyar Országnak és a határőrző katonaság
vidékeinek legújabb statisztikai és geográfiai leirása [The newest statistical-
geographical description of the Kingdom of Hungary and the Military
Border] (Pest: Trattner, 1819), 46–52; Endre Michnay, Statistika (Pozsony:
Wigand, 1844).
31. Schwartner, Statistik, 224–226.
32. About this transformation, addressed by a range of prestigious authors
from Max Weber to Foucault, see more recently William Clark, Jan
Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds., “Introduction,” in The Sciences in
Enlightened Europe (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1999), 3–31.
33. Schlözer, Theorie der Statistik, 36.
34. Gottfried Achenwall, Staatsverfassung der heutigen vornehmsten europäischen
Reiche und Völker im Grundrisse (Göttingen: Verlag der Witwe Vandenhoek,
1768), 37.
36. Ibid., 67–68.
37. Ibid., 90; Krahnke maintains the contrary, see Reformtheorien, 295–330.
38. Schwartner, “Etwas von der politischen Arithmetik,” in Statistik, 63–68.
41. Ibid., 4.
42. Ibid., 5; Márki, Schwartner, 85, 87.
45. Ibid., 383.
46. Ibid., 384.
47. Ibid., 3.
48. Ibid., 7–8.
49. Ibid., 48–49.
50. Schwartner, Statistik, 1809 ed., vol. 1: 10; 48–49.
51. Johann Christian von Engel, Geschichte des ungarischen Reiches und seiner
Nebenländer, vol. 1 (Halle: J. J. Gebauer, 1797), 5.
52. Ibid., 9–12.
53. Magda Pál, Magyar Országnak és a határőrző katonaság vidékeinek legújabb
statisztikai és geográfiai leirása [The newest statistical and geographi-
cal description of Hungary and the border guard military region] (Pest:
Trattner, 1819), 118.
54. Mihály Horváth, Huszonöt év Magyarország történelméből, 1823-tól 1848-ig
[Twenty-five years from the history of Hungary], 1st ed. (Geneva, 1864);
2nd enlarged ed. (Pest: Ráth, 1868), 5.
55. About the development of the national perspective, which relegated the
kaleidoscopic view of Staatenkunde to the margins, see Monika Baár,
Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century
(Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2010), in particular the subchapter “The Hungarian
Constitution and the Spirit of Liberalism,” 242–253.
56. More recently, see Peter Collin and Thomas Horstmann, eds., Das Wissen
des Staates. Geschichte, Theorie und Praxis (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2004).
57. Marcus Sandl, Ökonomie des Raumes. Der kameralwissenschaftliche Entwurf
der Staatswirtschaft im 18. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999); Eric Brian,
La Mesure de l’État. Administrateurs et géomètres au XVIIIe siècle (Paris:
Éditions Albin Michel, 1994); Lars Behrisch, ed., Vermessen, Zählen,
Berechnen. Die politische Ordnung des Raums im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt:
Campus, 2006); Guillaume Garner, “Politische Ökonomie und Statistik
an der Universität Göttingen (1760–1820),” in Die Wissenschaft vom
Menschen, ed. Bödeker, Büttingen, and Espagne, 371–390.
58. Bonß, Die Einübung des Tatsachenblicks. This dichotomist vision is also
characteristic of the Hungarian historians of statistics and Staatenkunde,
see especially Hugó Márki, Schwartner Márton és a statisztika állása a XVIII.
és XIX, század fordulóján [Martin Schwartner and the standing of statistics
at the turn of the nineteenth century] (Budapest: Politzer, 1905), 119;
Róbert Horváth, A magyar leíró statisztikai irány fejlődése [The development
of the Hungarian descriptive statistical direction] (Budapest: KSH, 1966).
The methodological eclecticism of the discipline has been noticed, how-
ever, in Hungarian scholarship, even in older works.
59. Behrisch, Vermessen.
60. Róbert Horváth was a remarkable exception, as well as the monograph by
Katalin Gönczi on the relevance of Staatenkunde in the development of
the Hungarian legal culture in the first half of the nineteenth century.
61. Antal Szántay, Regionalpolitik im alten Europa. Die Verwaltungsreformen
Josephs II., in Ungarn, in der Lombardei und in den österreischhischen
Niederlanden 1785–1790 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2005), 61–62.
62. Ibid.; László Hajdu, II. József igazgatási reformjai Magyarországon [The
administrative reforms of Joseph II in Hungary] (Budapest: Akadémiai
Kiadó, 1982).
63. Notker Hammerstein, Aufklärung und katholisches Reich. Untersuchungen zur

Universitätsreform und Politik katholischer Territorien des Heiligen Römischen
Reiches deutscher Nation im 18. Jh. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1977).
64. Poór, Adók; Szántay, Regionalpolitik; Evans, Austria.
65. Ferenc Eckhart, A jog- és államtudományi kar története, 1667–1935 [History
of the faculty of law and the state sciences, 1667–1935], vol. 2 of A Királyi
Magyar Pázmány Péter Tudományegyetem története [History of the Royal
Hungarian Péter Pázmány University] (Budapest: Királyi Magyar Egyetemi
Nyomda, 1936), 97–101.
66. See also Horváth, A magyar leiró.
67. Behrisch, “Introduction,” in Vermessen, 7–25, 20.
68. Benda Gyula, “Fényes Elek forrásai” [The sources of Elek Fényes], in
Társadalomtörténeti tanulmányok [Studies in social history], ed. Vera
Bácskai, János Gyurgyák, and György Kövér (Budapest: Osiris, 2006),
113–129.
69. See note 28 above. Cf. Tamás Faragó, “Történeti Demográfia” [Historical
demographics], in Bevezetés a társadalomtörténetbe [Introduction to social
history], ed. Zsombor Bódy and József Ö. Kovács (Budapest: Osiris, 2003);
and Péter Őri and Levente Pakot, “Census and Census-Like Material
Preserved in the Archives of Hungary, Slovakia and Transylvania (Romania),
18–19th centuries” (working paper, Max Planck Institute for Demographic
Research, Rostock, Germany, December 20, 2011).
70. Az 1784–1787 évi népszámlálás. II. az Alföld, a Délvidék és a Dunántúl népes-
ségi adatai [The census of 1784–1787. Vol. 2, The data of the Hungarian
Plains, Slavonia, and Transdanubia], ed. Tamás Faragó and Péter Őri
(Budapest: n. p., 2008).
71. See the introductions of András Vályi, “A kegyes olvasónak mind a
két bóldogságot” [To the honored reader, wishing both kinds of hap-
piness], in Magyar országnak leírása (Buda: Buda Egyetemi Nyomda,
1796), no pages; and László Németh, “Előbeszéd” [Preface], in Az európai
nevezetessebb országoknak rövid leírása [Short description of the more sig-
nificant European states] (Sopron: Szász Klára, 1795), iii–viii.
72. About the categories of sources, see Schwartner, “Quellen der Statistik,
vorzüglich der ungrischen,” in Statistik, 9–27.
73. A few of the works also mentioned by Schwartner include Johann
Andreas Demian, Versuch über die Staatskräfte der österreichischen Monarchie
in Beziehung, in Beziehung auf Europa (Germanien, 1797); Johann Andreas
Demian, Statistisches Gemälde der östreichischen Monarchie: Ein Lesebuch für
denkende Unterthanen derselben (Vienna: Wappler, 1796); Mihály Horváth,
Statistice Regni Hungariae, vol. 1 (Posonii: J.N. Schauff, 1794); Johann
Mathias Korabinsky, Geographisch-Historisches und Produkten Lexikon von
Ungarn, in welchem die vorzüglichsten Oerter des Landes in alphabetischer
Ordnung angegeben, ihre Lage bestimmt, und mit kurzen Nachrichten, die im
gesellschaftlichen Umgange angenehm und nützlich sind, vorgestellet werden
(Preßburg: Weber und Korabinsky, 1786); Honoratus Novotny, Sciagraphia
seu compendiaria Hungariae veteris et recentioris notitia historico-politica in qua
status regni Pars I. (Vienna: Apud F. J. Roetzel, 1798); András Vályi, Magyar
országnak leírása [Description of Hungary], vols. 1–3 (Buda: Buda Egyetemi
Nyomda, 1796–1799). For more details see Schwartner, Statistik, 1809 ed.,
vol. 1: Dritte Quelle der ungr. Statistik. Inländische Schriften, 20–27.
75. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 87–104, esp. 96–103.
76. About the term, see Ambrus Miskolczy, “Hazai historiográfiai tájak vita
közben” [Our home historiographic landscapes engaged in debate], in A
felvilágosodás és liberalizmus között [Between enlightenment and liberal-
ism] (Budapest: Lucidus, 2007), 66–81, 69.
Index
Aberdeen, 211, 214, 217 American Indian/Native American,

Academia dos Renascidos (Bahia), 129–31, 134–5, 138–41, 143–5,
166–7 213–14, 216–17, 219, 222, 241
Academia Real da História (Lisbon), American Philosophical Society
157, 166 (Philadelphia), 209, 219
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Amersfoort, 111
Lettres (Paris), 112–13, 121 Amsterdam, 111, 121
Académie royale des sciences (Paris), Andonaegui, José de (1685–1761), 134
25, 43, 57–9, 61–2, 64, 69 Anglo-American, 217, 222
Achenwall, Gottfried (1719–1972), Angola (Angolan), 16, 153–6, 158–63,
243 164–77
Africa (African), 12, 120, 154–6, Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham-
158–60, 162–5, 168–9, 171–2, Hyacinthe (1731–1805), 15,
190, 220 109–13, 115–22
Aitken, Robert (1734–1802), 209 Anson, George (1697–1762), 132–3, 142
Alba Iulia, 96 Antwerp, 181
Albrecht VII, archduke of Austria Atlantic Ocean, 16, 132–4, 141,
(1559–1621), 34 153–4, 158, 163, 169, 171,
Alcala (University), 183 183, 207–11, 217
Aleni, Giulio (1582–1649), 60 Arabia (Arabic), 112, 122
Alexandria, 26–9, 32–3 Arctic region, 79, 84–5, 88, 99, 123
Almeida, José Bernardo de Armenia (Armenian), 241
(1728–1805), 84 Asia (Asian), 3, 17, 44, 54–7, 59,
Almeida Vasconcelos Soveral e 111–12, 116, 120, 123, 168,
Carvalho, Dom José de, baron de 183–4, 189–90, 194, 199, 240
Moçâmedes, 162, 169 East Asia, 3, 53–4, 57, 72
Altona, 83 Lesser Asia, 225
America (American), 3, 15, 17, South-East Asia, 15
120, 123, 132, 134–7, 142, Austria, 89–90, 92, 97, 183, 235–6,
153, 156–7, 182–4, 190, 240, 250, 254
193–4, 209–17, 219–20, Austrian Academy of Science, 93–4
222, 226, 241 Auxerre, 82, 86, 111
North America (North American),
17, 134, 215, 219 Bacon, Francis (1561–1626), 28, 42,
South America, 15, 132, 134–5, 113, 209
137, 142, 157, 241 Bahia, 166–7, 171
263
264 Index
Bailly, Jean-Sylvain (1736–1793), 14, Bougainville, Louis Antoine de

25–7, 37, 41–4 (1729–1811), 132–3, 143
Balajthi, Máté (b. 1732), 96 Bourbon, House of, 92, 144
Baluze, Étienne (1630–1718), 113 Bouvet, Joachim (1656–1730), 58–60
Banská Štiavnica, 80 Brahe, Tycho (1546–1601), 13, 25–43
Banská Bystrica, 80 Bratislava, 95, 250
Barits, Béla (1742–1813), 250 Brazil (Brazilian), 16, 153–61, 163, 165–71
Barkóczy, Ferenc (1710–1765), 95 Breslau, 83
Barthélemy, Jean-Jacques (1716–1792), Brest, 82
109, 113, 119, 121 Britain (British), 15, 17, 55, 87, 208,
Barton, Benjamin Smith (1766–1815), 210–11, 215, 235
207–11, 213–17, 223–4 British Empire, 210, 212, 217
Barvitius, Johannes (c. 1555–1620), 34 Brosses, Charles de (1709–1777),
Battel, Andrew (c. 1565–1614), 162 133, 140
Batthyány, Ignác, count (1741–1798), Bruin (Bruijn), Cornelius de
96 (1652–1727), 121
Beattie, James (1735–1803), 211 Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600), 36, 39
Beijing, 12, 55, 58–63, 65, 72, 84, 183 Buda, 84–5, 95, 97, 250, 252
Benares, India, 117 Buenos Aires, 134, 137–8, 140, 255
Benedict XIV, pope (1675–1758), 95 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc,
Bengal, 115 comte de (1707–1788), 214,
Benguela, 158–9, 162–4, 168 216, 218, 223
Benguela Plateau, 163–4, 169 Burckhardt, Jacob (1818–1897), 11
Berlin, 81, 82, 85, 97, 122, 163 Bustamante y Guerra, José
Bernier, François (1620–1688), (1759–1825), 131, 137
112–13 Bute, John Stuart, earl of
Bernoulli, Johann III (1744–1807), 97 (1713–1792), 215
Berthier, Antoine (1610?–78), 193 Byron, John (1723–1786), 132–3,
Berzeviczy, Gergely (1763–1822), 253 135, 143
Besztercebánya, 80
Bielek, László (1744–1807), 251 Cabinda, 159, 163
Bignon, Jean-Paul (1662–1743), Cadiz, 138
113–14 Cambridge, 118
Black peoples, 153, 216–21 Cambridge, Richard Owen
Blekinge Province, 82 (1717–1802), 117
Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich Camper, Peter (Petrus) (1722–1789),
(1752–1840), 223–4 223–4
Bode, Johann Elert (1747–1826), 81 Canton, 189, 195
Bodin, Jean (1530–1596), 5, 35 Cape of Good Hope, 60, 133,
Bohemia, 29, 89–90, 183, 240 158, 190
Bologna, 29, 82, 83 Cape Town, 134
Bona, Johanes (1609–1674), 197 Cardiel, José (1704–1782), 134
Borromeo, Charles (1538–1584), 183 Caron, François (1600–1673), 113
Bottomless Bay, 134, 140 Carteret, Philip (1733–1796), 132–3
Index 265
Cassini, Giandomenico (1625–1712), Constantinople, 114

60–1 Cook, James, (1728–1779), 129,
Castile, 156 132, 136, 139, 208
Catalonia, 183 Copenhagen, 83–5, 99
Caucasian, 223 Copernicus, Nicolaus (1473–1543),
Cavanilles, José de (1745–1804), 145 28–30, 32
Cavendish, Thomas, Sir (1560–1592), Córdoba, Antonio de (1740–1811),
142 135
Caylus, Anne Claude, comte de Coromandel Coast, 115
(1692–1765), 109, 111, Corraducius, Rudolfus (d. 1618),
113, 116, 121 34, 36
Chandernagore, 117 Cosimo II of Medici, grand duke of
Chaozhou, 62 Tuscany (1590–1621), 36, 39–40
Chapelain, Jean (1595–1674), 113 Craig, John (d. 1620), 27
Chardin, Jean (1643–1713), 112 Creole (American), 215, 217
Charles III, king of Spain (1716–1788), Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, Juan de la
131, 134 (1734–1790), 135
Charles V, emperor of the Holy Roman Cullen, Charles (d. 1827), 215
Empire (1500–1558), 4, 6–7 Cullen, William (1710–1790),
Charron, Pierre (1541–1603), 111 211, 215
Chengde, 67 Cumans, 98
Chile, 120, 141 Cunene River, 162
China (Chinese), 2, 8, 10, 12, 14, 17, Cunha, Antonio Álvares da
53–62, 64–5, 67–8, 70–2, 114, (1700–1791), 159, 160–1, 166
116, 181–200 Cunha, Luis de, Dom (1662–1749),
Great Wall of China, 59, 67, 72 157, 160
Christian VII, king of Denmark-
Norway (1766–1808), 79 d’Acquapendente, Girolamo Fabrici
Clavijero, Francisco Xavier (1537–1619), 40
(1731–1787), 215 d’Alambert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond
Cluj, 80 (1717–1783), 42
Coimbra (University), 166 d’Anville, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (1619–1683), (1697–1782), 65, 71, 158,
113 160, 162–3
Collegium Germanicum et Darab, 115–17
Hungaricum (Rome), 95–6 Darwin, Charles (1809–1882), 142
Colorado River, 140–1 Darymple, Alexander
Columbus, Christopher (1450/51–1506), (1737–1808), 140
122 Debrecen, 250
Condorcet, Nicolas de (1743–1794), Dee, John (1527–1608/09), 29
42 Delamare, Nicolas (1639–1723), 154
Conring, Hermann (1606–1681), 243 Delisle, Jean-Baptiste, 157–8
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, Delisle, Joseph-Nicolas
Byzantine emperor (905–959), 98 (1688–1768), 83
266 Index
Dellon, Charles (1650–1709?), 111 Ethiopia (Ethiopian), 223

Demian, Johann Andreas (1770–1845), Eurasia, 3, 9, 14, 53–5, 63–4, 66, 72
251 Europe (European), 1–12, 14–17,
Denmark, 33–4 29–30, 33, 35, 37, 39–40, 43–4,
Denmark-Norway, 79, 85 53–5, 57–8, 63–6, 71–2, 84–5,
Diderot, Denis (1713–1784), 112 82, 92, 99, 109–10, 112, 116–20,
Dillingen, 82 122–3, 130–2, 135, 138, 142–3,
Dolon Nor, 64, 66, 68 154, 156, 158–62, 166–7, 171–2,
Dresden, 82 181–3, 187–91, 193–5, 198–200,
Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste (1674–1743), 208–10, 213–16, 218, 222, 226,
59, 63, 65, 71 235–42, 248–9, 251, 253–5
Dunbar, James (1742–1798), 211, 214 East-Central/Central Europe, 6,
Dunyn-Szpot, Thomas Ignatius 14–15, 79–80, 84, 91, 99,
(1644–1713), 65 238, 241–2
Dutch, 3, 4, 6, 55, 115–16, 133, 142, Eastern Europe, 12
154, 158, 169, 181, 186, 190 Northern Europe, 15, 33
Duval de Leyrit, Georges (1717–1764), Southern Europe, 255
117 Western Europe, 14, 53, 64, 251
East India Company, 113–15, 117 Faber, Anton (1772–1854), 251

Edinburgh, 12, 17, 51, 207–12, Falkner, Thomas (1707–1784), 136
215, 217, 223, 241 Feijóo y Montenegro, Benito Jerónimo
Medical school (Edinburgh), 17, 216 (1676–1764), 135, 224
University, 214 Ferdinand III, emperor of the Holy
Eger, 84–85, 88, 95–97, 99 Roman Empire (1608–1657),
Egypt (Egyptian), 28–29, 31, 114, 225 183
Elbląg, 83 Finnmark, 82
Elbing, 83 Flanders (Flemish), 6, 183
Engel, Johann Christian (1770–1814), Florence, 40, 82–3
247 Floridablanca, José Moñino y
England (English), 3–5, 7, 29, 81–2, Redondo, count (1728–1808),
85, 87, 112, 115–19, 121–2, 134, 140
132–6, 138, 140–3, 162, 217, 222 Fontaney, Jean de (1643–1710), 59,
Ercsei, Dániel (1781–1836), 245, 250 61–3, 68–9
Erlau, 250 France (French), 3–5, 7, 11–12,
Ernest of Bavaria, archbishop-elector of 14–17, 25–7, 42–3, 53, 55–66,
Cologne (1554–1612), 33–4 68–72, 81–2, 85–8, 111–12,
Eskimos, 123 114–18, 120–1, 123, 132,
Espinha, José da (1722–1788), 84 135–6, 140, 142, 158, 160,
Espinosa y Tello, José (1763–1815), 181–3, 193–4, 218, 222, 226,
136 235, 238, 251–2, 254
Esztergom, 95 Francis I, emperor of the Holy Roman
Eszterházy, Károly, count (1725–1799), Empire (1708–1765), 254
88, 95–6, 99 Frankfurt am Oder, 83
Index 267
Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790), 209, Hamburg, 82

219 Hangzhou, 60
Frauenburg, 29 Hawkesworth, John (c. 1715–1773),
Frombork, 29 140
Fujian Province, 190, 194–5 Heeren, Arnold Hermann Ludwig
(1760–1842), 245
Galdan (1644–1697), 64–7 Heidelberg, 83, 86
Galicia, 242 Hell, Maximilian (1720–1792),
Galilei, Galileo (1564–1642), 14, 15, 79–88, 91–9
25–7, 32, 36–44 Hess, Ignaz Mathes von
Galland, Antoine (1646–1715), 113 (1746–1776), 93
Gassendi, Pierre (1592–1655), 32 Heuland, Conrado, 140
Gaubil, Antoine (1689–1759), 116 Heuland, Cristian, 140
Gaul, 225 Hire, Philippe de la (1640–1718), 61
Gerbillon, Jean-François (1654–1707), Holland, 39, 111, 199
14, 59–60, 62–9 Holy Roman Empire, 2, 4–5, 27, 89,
Germany (German), 4–5, 35, 81–2, 183, 237, 244, 249
85–7, 121–2, 224–6, 235, 239–40, Horváth, Mihály (1809–1878), 247
242–3, 249–50, 252, 255 Huberti, Franz (1715–1789), 86
Glasgow, 217 Hume, David (1711–1776), 211
Göttingen, 82–3, 87, 223, 227, 241, Hungary, 17, 80–1, 84–5, 89–91,
245, 249, 252–4 95–9, 248–55
University, 87, 237, 241–2, 245, Hungarian Kingdom, 236
249, 252–4 Hutan River, 67–8
Gouveia, Antonio de (1592–1677), 197
Goycoechea, José, 140–1 Iceland, 85
Graunt, John (1620–1674), 245 India (Indian), 8, 54, 109–15, 117–18,
Graz, 83 120–3, 190, 217–18, 222
Greece (Greek), 114, 122 Ingoli, Francesco (1578–1649), 191
Greenland, 85, 241 Ingolstadt, 82, 84
Greenwich, 82, 85, 87 Innocent X, pope (1574–1655), 181
Grotius, Hugo (1584–1645), 156 Innocent XI, pope (1611–1689), 195
Guangzhou, 61–2 Intorcetta, Prospero (1626–1696), 60
Gyulafehérvár, 96 Italy (Italian), 6, 28–9, 31, 44, 81–2, 85,
182–3, 215, 222, 225, 240, 254
Habsburg Monarchy/Empire, 7, 10,
12–13, 18, 53, 79–82, 85, 88–92, Japan (Japanese), 185–6
94–5, 98–9, 236–8, 248–9, 252–5 Jazig, 98
Hájek,Tadeáš (1525–1600), 29–30 Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826),
Halle (University), 249 215–16, 218–19
Haller, Victor Albrecht von Jew (Jewish), 241–2
(1708–1777), 223 Jiangzhou, 59–62
Hallerstein, Ferdinand Augustin Joachim III Frederick, elector of
(1703–1774), 84 Brandenburg (1546–1608), 35
268 Index
John IV, king of Portugal (1604–1656), La Croix, Nicolle de (Abbé)

183 (1704–1760), 224
Jones, William (1746–1794), 15, 109, La Mothe Le Vayer, François de
121–3 (1588–1672), 113
José I, king of Portugal (1714–1777), 159 La Pérouse, Jean François de Galaup,
Joseph II (Josephian), emperor of the comte de (1741–88?), 129
Holy Roman Empire (1741–1790), Ladvocat, Jean-Baptiste (1709–1765),
7, 92, 95, 236–8, 240, 247–9, 121
252, 254 Lalande, Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de
(1732–1807), 83, 86
Kamchatka, 241 Lamoignon de Malesherbes,
Kames, Henry Home, lord Guillaume-Chrétien de
(1696–1782), 212–14, 225 (1721–1794), 113
Kampmiller, Ignaz (1693–1777), 92 Laurea, Lorenzo Brancati de
Kangxi, emperor of China (1654–1722), (1612–1693), 197
14, 55–6, 58, 63–71 Lavater, Johann Kaspar (1741–1801),
Kaous, 115–17 223
Kaprinai, István (1714–1785), 98 Le Comte, Louis (1655–1728),
Kaschau, 250 59–63, 68–9
Kassa, 250 Le Gac, François Etienne (1671–1738),
Kästner, Abraham Gotthelf 115
(1719–1800), 83 Le Maire, Isaac (c. 1558–1624), 142
Katona, István (1732–1811), 98 Lemberg, 82
Kaunitz, Wenzel Anton von, Leipzig, 82
(1711–1794), 92–3 Leroux Deshauterayes, Michel-Ange-
Kepler, Johannes (1571–1630), 36, 39–40 André (1724–1795), 112
Khalkha Mongols, 64–6 Letschau, 80
Kimbundu, 175 Leusden, Johannes (1624–1699), 111
Klausenburg, 80 Levoča, 80
Kolbay, Mathias (b. 1795), 251 Lexell, Anders Johann (1740–1784),
Kolozsvár, 80 83–4, 86
Korea (Korean), 186 Linnaeus, Carl (1707–1778), 216, 218,
Košice, 250 223
Koxinga (1624–1662), 55 Lisbon, 16, 157, 166, 171
Kremsmünster, 83–5 Literary Club (London), 121
Kunszentmárton, 96 Ljubljana, 82
Kurz, Jacob, von Senftenau Lőcse, 80
(1554–1594), 29–34, 36 Loango, 159, 163
Kwanza River, 160–2 London, 17, 88, 118, 121, 207, 209,
212, 214, 215, 223
La Caille, Nicolas Louis de Lopburi, 60
(1713–1762), 83 Loreto, Nicolás Francisco Cristóbal
La Condamine, Charles Marie de del Campo, marquis of
(1701–1774), 162 (1725–1803), 137
Index 269
Louis XIV, king of France Maria Maddalena of Austria, grand

(1638–1715), 7, 26, 55, duchess of Tuscany (1589–1631),
57–8, 113 40
Luanda, 16, 154, 158–62, 166–7, Maria Theresa, empress of the Holy
169, 171 Roman Empire (1717–1780),
Luca, Ignaz de (1746–1799), 97 18, 80, 89, 92, 94–5, 193, 236,
Lucas, Paul (1664–1737), 116–17 238, 249, 254
Lueder, August Ferdinand Martini, Karl Anton von (1726–1800),
(1760–1819), 245 92
Lund, 82, 85 Martini, Martino (1614–1661), 181,
Lviv, 82 188, 195
Lyon, 193 Maskelyne, Neville (1732–1811), 87–8
Lysogorski, Abbé, 82 Maurepas, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux,
comte de (1701–1781), 121
Macedonia (Macedonian), 241 Mayer, Christian (1719–1783), 83, 86
Maclean, John (1771–1814), 217 Mazarin, Jules, Cardinal (1602–1661),
Madarassy, János (1743–1814), 95–6 113
Madrid, 16, 82, 138, 140, 181, 183, Mbundu, 164, 175
190–1, 193–5 Medici, House of, 26, 41, 44
Magalhães, Gabriel de (1609–1677), Melo, José Mascarenhas Pacheco
182 Pereira de, 166
Magalhães, João Jacques de Melo, Miguel António de, Dom,
(1765–1822), 166 165, 167
Magallanes, Fernando de Mendonça Furtado, Francisco Xavier
(1480–1521), 142 de (1700–1769), 153, 155
Magda, Pál (1770–1841), 250 Mendonça, Martinho Teixeira de, 170
Magellan, Strait of, 120, 133, 135–7 Mendoza, 141
Magini, Giovanni Antonio Messier, Charles (1730–1817), 83
(1555–1617), 29, 31 Mexico (Mexican), 12, 16–17, 120,
Magyar, 98, 241–2, 255 181–4, 188–91, 193–4, 198, 215
Maine, Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, Michelet, Jules (1798–1874), 11
duke of (1670–1736), 68–9 Michnay, Endre (1804–1854), 250
Makó, Pál (1723–1793), 93 Middle East, 116
Malaspina, Alejandro (1754–1810), Milan, 82, 85
15–16, 129, 131, 135–9, 141–5 Minas Gerais, 160
Malay (Malayan), 223 Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 16, 53–5,
Malvinas Islands, 133, 137, 140–1 59, 61, 185, 187–8
Manchuria (Manchu), 14, 16–17, Moçâmedes, 163, 169
53–4, 59, 63, 68, 70–1, 181–3, Moçâmedes, José de Almeida
185–6, 189, 191, 193–4, 198–9, Vasconcelos Soveral e Carvalho da
200 MaiaSoares de Albergaria, Barão
Manila, 183, 189, 194 de (b. 1737), 162, 166
Maria Anna, empress of the Holy Molembo, 159, 163
Roman Empire (1606–1646), 183 Mongolia (Mongolian), 14, 54, 59, 223
270 Index
Montaigne, Michel de (1533–1592), 111 Orme, Robert (1728–1801), 117

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Ortega, Casimiro Gómez de
Secondat, baron de (1741–1818), 135
(1689–1755), 7 Ottoman Empire, 3, 8, 35, 53, 89, 110
Montevideo, 137 Ovimbundu, 164
Moors, 115 Oxford (University), 112, 118
Morais, João Monteiro de, 166–7
Morales, Juan Batista (1597–1654), Pacific Ocean, 132–4, 137–8, 141,
190–1, 194–5 144, 183, 189
Moravia, 183 Padua (Paduan), 25–6, 32, 37–8, 82
Moss, Henry, 220 Palafox, Juan de (1600–1659), 16–17,
Mozambique, 158 181–91, 193–6, 198–200
Muatianvua, Empire of, 163 Palatine States, 183
Mughal Empire, 53, 113, 117 Paleotti, Gabriele (1522–1597), 183
Müller, Ignaz (1713–1782), 92, 96 Pallu, François (1626–1684), 195
Paraguay River, 160
Nagyszombat, 82–5, 95–6, 250 Paris, 12, 16, 25, 43, 58–61, 63, 82–3, 85–6,
Nagyvárad, 250 109, 115–21, 123, 157, 181–2, 193–4
Nanchang, 62 University, 211
Nancy, 82 Parrenin, Dominique (1665–1741), 70
Nanjing, 59, 61–3, 69 Parsi, 109, 116–17
Naples, 82 Patagones (peoples), 135, 137
Narborough, John (c. 1640–1688), 133 Patagonia, 16, 129–145
Navarette, Domingo (c. 1610–1689), Paula Sanz, Francisco de (1745–1810),
191, 194 141
Née, Luis (1734–1803), 145 Paula Triesnecker, Franciscus de
Negro River, 140–1 (1745–1817), 81
Negro(es), 165, 219–21 Pauw, Cornelius de (1739–1799), 214
Németh, László (1770–1806), 245 Peña, José de la, 137
Netherlands, 55 Pereira, Tomas (1646–1708), 63
Neusohl, 80 Perler, Domingo (1724–1800), 140
New Jersey (College of ), 17, 207, 210, Persia (Persian), 109–10, 112, 114,
213, 217, 219 116, 121–2
New South Wales, 134 Peru, 120
Ningbo, 57, 59–62 Pest, 18, 250
Ningxia, 67 University, 237, 250
Nootka Sound, 136, 138 Pest-Buda, 12, 250
North Pole, 63 Philadelphia, 12, 17, 207, 209,
Nuremberg, 31 211, 217, 220
College of Philadelphia (later
Oirats, 65, 67 University of Pennsylvania),
Oliveira Cadornega, António de 208, 210–11
(1623–1690), 164, 168–9 Philip II, king of Spain, emperor
Oradea, 250 (1527–1598), 132
Index 271
Philip V, king of Spain (1683–1746), 134 Quintado, Fernando, 140

Philippines, 56, 183, 190–1, 194–5 Quiroga, José (1707–1784), 134
Piedra, Juan de la (d. 1785), 140 Quito, 120
Pilgram, Anton (1730–1793), 84
Pineda, Antonio (1751–1792), 138, Rákóczi, Ferenc II (1676–1735), 89
142–4 Rantzau, Heinrich (1526–1598), 33
Pinheiro Furtado, Joaquim, 163, 165 Rask, Rasmus Christian (1787–1832),
Planman, Anders (1724–1803), 82 109
Plata River, 132, 134, 136–8, 140–2 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François
Pliny, 28 (1713–1796), 214
Polling, Bavaria, Germany, 82 Regiomontanus, Johannes
Polynesia, 138 (1436–1476), 31
Pombal, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Reid, Thomas (1710–1796), 211, 213
Melo, marquis of (1699–1782) Rhynwijk, 111
(Pombaline), 154, 159, 170 Ricci, Matteo (1552–1610), 197
Pondicherry, 60, 117 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis de
Pont-à-Mousson, 82 (1585–1642), 193
Pope, 34, 156 Rio de Janeiro, 16, 161, 171
Port Egmont (Malvinas), 137 Robertson, William (1721–1793),
Port Mulgrave, 138 209, 213–15, 225
Portugal (Portuguese), 3, 12, 16–17, Rocha, Félix da (1713–1781), 84
35, 55–6, 61, 63, 71, 92, 154–61, Rodrigues Island, 82
163–4, 168–9, 171, 182–4, 186, Roma, 241–2
189–91, 195, 209 Romania (Romanian), 241
Portuguese Empire, 16, 154, 156, Romanov, House of, 10
171, 209 Rome (Roman), 4, 25, 39, 65–6,
Poznan, 82 82, 92, 190–1, 193–5, 197
Pozsony, 95, 250 Rosende, Antonio Gonzalez de, 194
Prague, 14, 29, 31–2, 35–7, 82–3, 85 Rudolph II, emperor of the Holy
University, 29 Roman Empire (1552–1612),
Pray, György (1723–1801), 98 13, 29, 32–7
Pressburg, 95, 250 Rush, Benjamin (1749–1813), 209,
Princeton, 17, 207 211, 213, 215, 219–20
Prost, Jérôme, 193 Russia (Russian), 14, 53, 55, 63–4,
Prussia, 7, 235 235, 240
Ptolemy, 28–32
Puebla de los Angeles, 16, 181, 183–4, Sáa y Faría, Custodio (1737–1792),
189–91, 198 134, 140–1
Puerto Deseado, 130, 134, 137–40, 142–4 Safavid Empire, 53
Sagan, 83
Qianlong, emperor of China Sagredo, Giovanfrancesco
(1711–1799), 67 (1571–1620), 38–9
Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 14, 53–7, Sagredo, Zaccaria, 38
59, 63–6, 69–72 Sajnovics, János (1713–1785), 79, 96, 98
272 Index
Salamanca (University), 4, 183 South China Sea, 183–4

Sallier, Claude (1685–1761), 109, 111 Sousa Coutinho, Francisco Inocêncio
Sámi, 79, 98 de, Dom (1726–1780), 153,
San Julian Bay, 134, 140 155, 160, 162, 170
Santo Domingo, 195, 221 Sousa Coutinho, Rodrigo de, Dom
Sarpi, Paolo (1552–1623), 38–9 (1755–1812), 170
Sartine, Antoine Raymond Jean Sousa Magalhães, António Máximo
Gualbert Gabriel de de, 162
(1729–1801), 117 Spain (Spanish), 2, 3, 7, 15–16, 34,
Sascerides, Gellius (1562–1612), 31 55–6, 82, 92, 129–32, 134–42,
Savoy (Savoyard), 240 144–5, 157–8, 166, 181–4,
Saxons, 240 189–91, 193–5, 197–9, 222
Schall von Bell, Adam (1592–1666), Spanish Empire, 12, 129–34, 139, 144,
196–7 156–7, 183–4, 190, 209–10, 226
Schärffer, Karl, 93 Spittalberg, 82
Schemnitz, 80 St. Petersburg, 82, 83, 84
Scherer, Caspar, 82 Stepling, Joseph (1716–1778), 83
Schlözer, August Ludwig (1735–1809), Stockholm, 82, 83
237, 241, 243–6, 252–3 Strobel (Strobl), Matías, 134
Schwartner, Martin (1759–1823), 18, Surat, 109, 115–17, 102
237–43, 245–8, 250–5 Süßmilch, Peter (1707–1767), 244–5
Schwetzingen, 82, 83 Swabians, 240
Scotland (Scottish), 4, 17, 209, Swieten, Gerhard van (1700–1772), 92
211–14, 217, 221–2, 224–5
Selmecbánya, 80 Tacitus, 5
Seville, 183 Tafor, Bernardo, 140–1
Shaanxi Province, 61 Taillefert, Isaac (1648–1699), 116
Shanghai, 62 Taiwan, 55
Shanxi Province, 61 Tang dynasty (618–907), 69
Silva Correia (Corrêa), Elias Alexandre Tartary (Tartar), 14, 16, 59, 62–7,
de, 165–8, 170 69–70, 72, 84, 181, 184, 186–9,
Sinclair, John, Sir (1754–1835), 245 192–3, 196–7, 199, 224
Škrlec, Nikola (1729–1799), 251 Tavares, Manuel António, 166
Slavs, 240–1 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste
Slavonia, 255 (1605–1689), 112
Slovakia, 80, 250 Thévenot, Melchésidech (1620–1692),
Smith, Adam (1723–1790), 221, 225 111–13, 181
Smith, John Augustine (1782–1865), 223 Thomas, Antoine (1644–1709), 60,
Smith, Samuel Stanhope (1751–1819), 65–6, 69
17, 207–26 Thury, César François Cassini de
Song Empire (960–1279), 54 (1714–1784), 83
Sopron, 250 Tibet, 54, 65
South Africa, 133, 171 Tieffenthaler, Joseph (1710–1785), 116
Index 273
Toaldo, Guiseppe (1719–1797), Villarino, Basilio (1741–1785), 134,

14, 25–8, 32, 37–40, 42–3 136, 140–1
Tobolsk, 82 Vilnius, 83
Tofiño de San Miguel, Vicente Visdelou, Claude de (1656–1737),
(1732–1795), 137 59, 61–2
Torrubia, José (1698–1761), 135 Volney, Constantin François de
Toulon, France, 82 Chassebœuf, count of
Tranquebar, 82 (1757–1820), 112
Trattner, Johann Thomas von Voltaire (1694–1778), 112
(1717–1798), 87, 93–4
Trébuchet, Claude-Étienne Wallis, Samuel (1728–1795), 132–3
(1722–1784), 86 Wargentin, Pehr Wilhelm
Trnava (University), 82–5, 95–6, 250 (1717–1783), 83
Turkestan, 54 Warsaw, 83
Turkey (Turkish), 35, 239–40 Weiss, Franz (1717–1785), 83,
92, 96–7
Ulloa, Antonio de (1716–1795), 142 Weissenburg, 96
United States of America, 17, 207, Wernigerode, 83
209–13, 215–17, 220, 222, 226 White people, 216, 219–22
Uppsala, 82 White, Charles (1728–1813), 223–4
Uraniborg, 28 Wise Club (or Philosophical Society,
Ursus, Raimar (1551–1600), 27, 33, 35 Aberdeen), 211, 214
Utrecht, 224 Witherspoon, John (1723–1794),
213–14
Venice (Venetian), 13–14, 26–9, 31–3, Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–1797), 213
35–41 Wrocław, 83
Vera Cruz, 183 Würzburg, 82, 86
Verbiest, Ferdinand (1623–1688),
57, 63, 66, 68 Xi’an, 62, 69
Vergennes, Charles Gravier, comte de Ximenes, Leonardo (1716–1786), 83
(1717–87), 117 Xunchi Emperor (1638–1661), 192
Vernacci, Juan (1763–1810), 140
Vértiz, Juan José de, viceroy Yellow River, 67–8
(1719–1799), 141 Yinzhi, Prince Cheng (1677–1732),
Veszprém, 96 69–70
Viana, Francisco Xavier de Young, Arthur (1741–1820), 245
(1764–1820), 144 Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), 54
Viedma, Antonio de, 140–2, 144
Viedma, Francisco de (1737–1809), Żagań, 83
134, 141 Zanotti, Eustachio (1709–1782), 83
Vienna, 12, 15, 79, 80, 82–5, 90, 93, Zárate, Juan Ortíz de (c. 1515–1576),
95–6, 99, 236, 247 132
Vila Rica, 160 Zunghar Khanate, 54, 64

(Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History) László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Eds.) - Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires - A Decenter

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(Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History) László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Eds.) - Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires - A Decenter

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

NEGOTIATING KNOWLEDGE IN EARLY MODERN EMPIRES

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Part I Negotiation of (Trans-)Imperial Patronage

2 The Jesuits’ Negotiation of Science between France and

3 The Uses of Knowledge and the Symbolic Map of the

Part II Competition of Empires: A Motor of Change

5 Contested Locations of Knowledge: The Malaspina

6 “To Round Out this Immense Country”: The Circulation of

Part III Self-assertion of New Nodes of

8 Anthropology beyond Empires: Samuel Stanhope Smith

9 Measuring the Strength of a State: Staatenkunde in

Gábor Almási is postdoctoral fellow of the Hungarian Academy of

Marcelo Fabián Figueroa is assistant professor at the National

Catherine Jami is senior researcher at the Centre national de la

László Kontler is professor of history at Central European University

Translations, Histories, Enlightenments: William Robertson in Germany,

Catarina Madeira-Santos is associate professor at the Institut des

Antonella Romano is full professor at the École des hautes études

Silvia Sebastiani is associate professor at the École des hautes

Borbála Zsuzsanna Török is research fellow at the Zukunftskolleg at

her research and teaching embraces the history of the migration of

Stéphane Van Damme is professor of the history of science at the

The completion of this volume would have been impossible without

Knowledge in the empires, knowledge of empires

What we attempt here is not the assembly of another book in this

This introduction is articulated in three main parts. In order to

Early modern empires: Semantics and politics

As is well known, the concept of empire and its implementations

elements of analysis were confronted not only with ancient legacy,

that as the imperial constitution had organically evolved over many

however, still existed as a result of the hazy, even uneasy, connec-

these vast, noncontiguous territories as a single entity under unitary

As this concise panorama illustrates, the early modern Europeans

Connecting early modern empires and

movement in space, as well as of situatedness—for historical interpre-

based,” as was the case of the European empires (often written in

the other hand, new traditions of empirical experimental inquiry and

Negotiating knowledge, decentering

The collection of essays we present in this volume sketches an early

of the natural and mathematical sciences. How important the happy

by the Jesuit scholar Maximilian Hell in his capacity as imperial and

the eastern shore of Patagonia, a territory where the status of Spain

to Portugal in Asia. Romano emphasizes that Palafox’s theological

science of states. The analysis of the Statistik des Königreichs Ungern

U. P., 2007). In relation to non-European models, Enlightenment phi-

The Ambitions of Curiosity. Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and

33. “AHR Roundtable: Historians and the Question of ‘Modernity,’” American

The debate this chapter is going to reconstruct happened between

[In the Roman republic] one cultivated eloquence as it led to

Experimental and observational sciences better suited monarchies,

This chapter invites the reader to reinvestigate the cases Toaldo

Tycho’s scientific problems

In 1588, after many years of maturation, Tycho Brahe finally produced

The mission to Egypt, proposed to Venice and mentioned by

to have worked out the longitude of Frombork (Frauenburg), a city

Tycho’s first contact with the imperial court

To realize the observations in Egypt, Tycho needed backing on a

Next to freeing the exact science of comets of the deep-rooted

of invaluable utility to every affair and enterprise both maritime

While Tycho was not prepared to speak the subservient language

Becoming an imperial client

Two weeks before Vice-Chancellor Jacob Kurz approached the