"Pathbreaking and provocative throughout, Nature, Empire, and Nation represents revisionist history at its best. The eight essays assembled here focus new attention on a much-neglected area of research: the place of both Spain and Spanish America in the history of early modern science and scientific thought. Canizares-Esguerra's range of subjects is impressive--botany, cosmography, ecology, race, and more--but he addresses each in a lively, intelligent, and accessible manner. The book should be required reading for historians of science, as well as for anyone with interests in the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern Ibero-Atlantic world." --Richard L. Kagan, Johns Hopkins University

In the mid-eighteenth century, the French naturalist Buffon contended that the New World was in fact geologically new—that it had recently emerged from the waters—and that dangerous miasmas had caused all organic life on the continents to degenerate. In the “dispute of the New World� many historians, naturalists, and moral philosophers from Europe and the Americas (including Thomas Jefferson) sought either to confirm or refute Buffon’s views. This book maintains that the “dispute� was also a debate over historical authority: upon whose sources and facts should naturalists and historians reconstruct the history of the continent and its peoples? The author traces the cultural processes that led early-modern intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to question primary sources that had long been considered authoritative: Mesoamerican codices, early colonial Spanish chronicles, and travel accounts. In the process, he demonstrates how the writings of these critics led to the rise of the genre of conjectural history. The book also adds to the literature on nation formation by exploring the creation of specific identities in Spain and Spanish America by means of particular historical narratives and institutions. Finally, it demonstrates that colonial intellectuals went beyond mirroring or contesting European ideas and put forth daring and original critiques of European epistemologies that resulted in substantially new historiographical concepts.

"Pathbreaking and provocative throughout, Nature, Empire, and Nation represents revisionist history at its best. The eight essays assembled here focus new attention on a much-neglected area of research: the place of both Spain and Spanish America in the history of early modern science and scientific thought. Canizares-Esguerra's range of subjects is impressive--botany, cosmography, ecology, race, and more--but he addresses each in a lively, intelligent, and accessible manner. The book should be required reading for historians of science, as well as for anyone with interests in the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern Ibero-Atlantic world." --Richard L. Kagan, Johns Hopkins University

Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the connections among Africa, the Americas, and Europe transformed world history--through maritime exploration, commercial engagements, human migrations and settlements, political realignments and upheavals, cultural exchanges, and more. This book, the first encyclopedic reference work on Atlantic history, takes an integrated, multicontinental approach that emphasizes the dynamics of change and the perspectives and motivations of the peoples who made it happen. The entries--all specially commissioned for this volume from an international team of leading scholars--synthesize the latest scholarship on central themes, including economics, migration, politics, war, technologies and science, the physical environment, and culture.

Part one features five major essays that trace the changes distinctive to each chronological phase of Atlantic history. Part two includes more than 125 entries on key topics, from the seemingly familiar viewed in unfamiliar and provocative ways (the Seven Years' War, trading companies), to less conventional subjects (family networks, canon law, utopias).

This is an indispensable resource for students, researchers, and scholars in a range of fields, from early American, African, Latin American, and European history to the histories of economics, religion, and science.The first encyclopedic reference on Atlantic historyFeatures five major essays and more than 125 alphabetical entriesProvides essential context on major areas of change: Economies (for example, the slave trade, marine resources, commodities, specie, trading companies)Populations (emigrations, Native American removals, blended communities)Politics and law (the Law of Nations, royal liberties, paramount chiefdoms, independence struggles in Haiti, the Hispanic Americas, the United States, and France)Military actions (the African and Napoleonic wars, the Seven Years' War, wars of conquest)Technologies and science (cartography, nautical science, geography, healing practices)The physical environment (climate and weather, forest resources, agricultural production, food and diets, disease)Cultures and communities (captivity narratives, religions and religious practices)Includes original contributions from Sven Beckert, Holly Brewer, Peter Coclanis, Seymour Drescher, Eliga Gould, David S. Jones, Willem Klooster, Mark Peterson, Steven Pincus, Richard Price, Sophia Rosenfeld, and many moreContains illustrations, maps, and bibliographies

Contributors include: Sven Beckert, Holly Brewer, Peter Coclanis, Seymour Drescher, Eliga Gould, David S. Jones, Willem Klooster, Mark Peterson, Steven Pincus, Richard Price and Sophia Rosenfeld.