Hernando Colón’s new world of books: toward a cartography of knowledge

García (CSIC) and Fermín del Pino (CSIC), who have extensively worked on Francisco Hernández and José de Acosta’s texts, respectively. By exploring early modern naturalists and missionary nature writing, Caraccioli wants to debunk the widespread misconception that portrays the Spanish empire as a largely marginal feature of modernity. Other historians, notably Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (2006) and Irene Silverblatt (2004), have largely insisted on the colonial Iberian roots of Western modernity. However, what modernity means here remains a mystery. How does early modern globalization—what Serge Gruzinski defined as désenclavement planétaire (Paris, 2004)—fit into this imperial legacy?Was this Iberian modernity of the same kind of the Enlightened modernity? I would clearly say no, but when Caraccioli poses that the metanarrative of Scientific Revolution has to do with matters of faith as much as politics, he refers to the writings of Spanish naturalists and missionaries, notably Acosta, as contributing to the Enlightened, capitalist, and industrialized modernity. In my opinion, this book would have benefitted from the reading of the influential Arndt Brendecke’s The empirical empire: Spanish colonial rule and the politics of knowledge (De Gruyter, 2016), which analyzes the relationship between the use of knowledge and colonial domination on the basis of two fundamental premises: on the one hand, that the expansion of European colonialism favored the culture of modern empirical knowledge; and on the other, that the organization and concentration of this same knowledge was indispensable to consolidate the practices of domination and administration that Spain and Portugal put into practice from the sixteenth century onward. Finally, upon unraveling the historiographical prejudice that considers Spain as the opposite side of the Anglo-Saxon, German and French modernity, Caraccioli ironically prioritizes scholarship in English rather than in Spanish, which is shocking in the cases of Fernández de Oviedo and José de Acosta. In addition, this book draws a line of continuity that makes nature not just the setting, as he claims, but the means through which imperial projects developed from the sixteenth century onwards. However, in doing so, he falls into another (Eurocentric) fallacy, which is to make the Enlightenment into the goal of universal history to which all mankind must attain. The problem lies not in neglecting the history of Amerindian peoples who suffered colonial oppression but other forms of historical consciousness. As Caraccioli remarks, Iberian imperialism should be included into a broader conception ofWestern modernity: one that, let us not forget, is based on economic liberalism.