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Bringing Together the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas of the Spanish Empire

October 9, 2021

From the editors: In 2021, Not Even Past launched a new collaboration with LLILAS Benson. Journey into the Archive: History from the Benson Latin American Collection celebrates the Benson’s centennial and highlights the center’s world-class holdings.

In Spanish, the word relación encompasses both to narrate (relatar) and to connect (relacionar). The Relaciones genre, prevalent from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries, incorporates this dual aspect. They consisted of short reports to the imperial government about a person, community, or town. These accounts help show the nature of the relationship between those narrating (communities), those that were the object of narration (towns), and those receiving the information (the empire). Emerging from the relación genre, the Relaciones Geográficas (of the New World)and the Relaciones Topográficas (of the Castille) were comprised of maps and texts describing hundreds of communities throughout the late 16^th-century Spanish empire. Scholars who have delved into these documents have tended to follow the structure of archival memory that distinguished the Relaciones Topográficas from Geográficas. Moreover, studies on the Geográficas have primarily focused on the texts produced for the townships of New Spain (Mexico). Scholars are right to be intrigued by the Relaciones maps of New Spain. Consider Map 1 depicting Cempoala through Nahuatl logograms and Spanish texts.

Map of Cempoala, Pasayuca, and Telistaca, towns in the Archbishopric of Mexico — Map 1: Relación de Cempoala, New Spain. Source: *Benson Latin American Collection*

My life’s story has come to be entwined with the history of the Relaciones. My intellectual place of origin, Bogotá, Colombia, facilitated my first encounter with them. My continued engagement with these sources from Latin American classrooms and special collections to Spanish archives has culminated in my current dissertation project at the University of Texas at Austin – the principal observatory and repository of these documents in the Americas.^[1] My life and research paths have allowed me to explore this neglected historical terrain. I argue that by drawing together the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas as a genre of documents, we can better envision how people from diverse ethnic compositions on both sides of the Atlantic produced a massive number of descriptions of local nature and societies around the same period. This perspective may allow us to see and understand the complex knowledge networks of Atlantic towns that the Spanish Crown wove together. Consider, for instance, how the Relaciones go beyond the famous Mexican indigenous charts as revealed by Map 2, the Relación of Valledupar, a township located in what is now Colombia.

*Map 2: Map of the Relación de Valledupar, New Granada. Source: Biblioteca Digital Real Academia de la Historia*

My first encounter with the Relaciones was not via the vibrant native maps of New Spain as experienced by many scholars from the global north, but through the Relación de Valledupar (Map 2). During an undergraduate course on Colombian geography, I was assigned to analyze and contextualize this document with the earliest known map of this tiny Caribbean town. The map shows an urban design based on a square grid, principal rivers, mountains, and no indigenous glyphs. At first glance, I was surprised by how close this 1580s map was to our modern understandings of space and knowledge-making. Its empiricism and “cartesian” portrayal of the environment took place years before Descartes wrote his works. Through this piece, we can see how a peripheral village conceived of its environment, demography, and connections to the empire and did so by answering a survey, as in modern governmental censuses. I fell in love with this topic and drafted my honors thesis about the Relaciones of Santa Marta.^{^[2]}

My honors thesis work quickly brought me to the realization that the Valledupar Relación was just one tiny piece of a puzzle formed of hundreds of similar manuscripts and maps composed between 1575 and 1590 under the rule of Philip II. In the Universidad de Los Andes, my alma mater, I found not only marvelous transcriptions of the many Relaciones from Peru and New Granada, but also the excellent book by Barbara Mundy about the Relaciones of New Spain.^[3] I began to realize that the Relaciones could help us re-think the connections that may have existed among various Spanish-American communities in this knowledge-crafting effort. My place of origin mattered for this argument because I began to identify with past and present Spanish-Americans who have engaged in processes of interpreting our historical realities. By doing so, we have produced and continue to produce knowledge about ourselves, not only through (or following on from) European and U.S.-American academic views.

Thanks to Los Andes’ library’s collections, I also learned that the Relaciones are now dispersed worldwide, and it has been challenging to bring them together. Roughly speaking, the current location of these documents depends on the place they described. I learned that the Relaciones Geográficas encompass over 250 reports from New Spain, New Granada, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Central America, the Caribbean, and that the Relaciones Topográficas covered over 700 municipalities in the Kingdom of Castille. El Escorial hosts more than seven hundred Relaciones Topográficas de España that depicted Castilian towns. The Real Academia de la Historia keeps 19^th-century copies of these Castilian reports and many of the Relaciones of New Granada, Venezuela, and New Spain, some of them with their own maps. In addition, the University of Glasgow hosts the Relación Geográficas de Tlaxcala. At UT Austin, the Benson Latin American Collection shelters forty-three Relaciones’ manuscripts and twenty-six maps (also known as pinturas) from Mexico and Guatemala. Finally, the Archivo General de Indias possesses at least a hundred Relaciones’ texts and more than a dozen maps from the whole New World.

*Figures 1 and 2: Frontispieces of the questionnaires of the Relaciones Geográficas (left) and Topográficas (right)*

In 2017, the Colombian government awarded me a research grant to travel to Spanish archives and delve more deeply into the history of the Relaciones. In the Real Academia de la Historia, I became curious about the similarities between the Relaciones Geograficas and Topograficas, usually considered entirely separate efforts. Scholars and archivists after the sixteenth century assigned the labels “Geográficas” and “Topográficas” to distinguish New World descriptions of municipalities from those of the Old World. And yet, I came to see how both corpora were essentially chorographical—i.e., town descriptions and were remarkably similar conceptually. Consider the titles to the questionnaires reproduced in figures 1 and 2. Notice how similar they are: “Instrucción y Memoria de las Relaciones que se han de hacer para descripción de las Indias […] para el buen gobierno y ennoblecimiento de ellas” (for the Geográficas),^[4] and “Instrucción y Memoria de las Relaciones que se han de hacer […] para la descripción y historia de los pueblos de España […] para honra y ennoblecimiento de estos reinos” (for the Topográficas).^[5] The Royal Cosmographers López de Velasco and Vásquez de Salazar designed parallel surveys in the same decade to describe both the Indies and Castille (respectively) at the municipal level for enhancing their governmentality. Despite the similar purposes and timing, they differed in some questions about landscape and customs’ description. Additionally, the Topográficas were more numerous and briefer, while the Geográficas were usually more prolonged, and many included maps.

The project that led me to UT Austin has been to reconnect and recontextualize the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas as ambitious bottom-up knowledge endeavors about nature and human communities during the Early Modern period. However, since they did not produce tangible results like an encyclopedic compendium of Spanish municipal geography, some scholars still see them as either as curiosities or even as failed efforts. Shifting attention away from the Relaciones questionnaires, their two cosmopolitan white male designers, and subsequent uses of the reports may open a path towards an alternate understanding of why these documents are valuable. I argue that we need to understand how these documents reveal the collective efforts of thousands of ordinary people in these townships. At the end of the day, the real creators of the Relaciones were their communities themselves.

Each municipality responded to the questionnaire and sent it back to the cosmographers. But the process of generating responses to the questionnaires was complex. Every town council summoned courtroom meetings in which local sages stated their answers and drew maps. They discussed toponymies, climate, fauna, flora, minerals, topography, customs, traditions, and urban layouts. Answering questionnaires was not rare in the Spanish legal culture of interrogatories. Nevertheless, employing these methods to craft empirical knowledge about nature and societies was not common. Before a scribe notarized it, these officials and local sages signed and approved their responses through ritualized agreements.

The consensus these documents show elides frequent factional struggles occurring in these townships, highlighting instead the minimal agreements formed amongst powerful elites. Eliding political competitors through these representations nevertheless offered political gains. The Relaciones often excluded key political actors’ direct participation and hid local conflicts that would be visible to the Crown via other mechanisms, especially a massive number of litigation cases. Those who successfully answered these questionnaires then implicitly represented themselves as reliable producers of knowledge valuable to the Crown. They also showed themselves powerful enough to tap into local knowledge about places produced by people of diverse ethnic backgrounds, for instance, to know the meaning of native toponymies. In this sense, the Relaciones can be considered selective narrations that may distort the complexity of town life, yet they also show how different communities participated in producing knowledge elicited by Crown questionnaires. These complex dimensions are what make the Relaciones valuable as historical documents.

The Relaciones enable comparisons between distant towns thanks to the questionnaire’s structure. They also offer historical snapshots for hundreds of tiny municipalities in regions lacking documentation, such as the Caribbean basin. Many show valuable information in the indigenous lexicon. We can learn much about early modern ways of knowing nature and humans from reading the Relaciones on their own terms and interrelatedly. The knowledge created was similar to what we now label “modern science”: empirical, organized, participative, and consensual. Currently, my research efforts point towards thinking about a systematic way to show, analyze, and compare these sources through digital and cartographical tools.

To conclude this personal and analytical trip through the Relaciones, I would like to invite the readers of Not Even Past to join the discussion of these sources that will take place next February 2022 in the Lozano Long Conference in honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection: “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” In that event, we will have a panel called “Modern Institutional Networks Visualizing Early Modern Archives: The Case of the Relaciones Geográficas y Topográficas,” which aims to explore the archival and digital possibilities of cooperating in facilitating the access and analysis of these documents. We have invited digital humanities practitioners and archivists who have worked with or have custody over these manuscripts and maps in different archives and collections worldwide. We encourage anyone who is intrigued by these sources to attend this event that will take place virtually.

Rafael Nieto-Bello is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at UT Austin. He obtained a double B.A. in History and Political Science and a double minor in Philosophy and German Language in the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia, 2018). In 2021, he was awarded the Fellowship on “Race and Caste” from the Institute of Historical Studies (IHS) for preparing a grant proposal. Additionally, he obtained the Lozano Long Centennial Fellowship from LLILAS Benson for the coordination of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” His research is a history of knowledge from the 16th-century Spanish municipalities. He explores how town communities from diverse ethnic backgrounds described and claimed to know their populations and environments through corporate efforts placed on the local councils.

DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND ARCHIVAL CATALOGUES

LLILAS Benson Relaciones Geográficas Collection:

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=1fcabf740a844d9d80d5bf0248416f47

New World Nature: https://nwn.dhinitiative.org/

Unlocking the Colonial Archives: https://unlockingarchives.com/

KEY BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

Campos, Francisco Javier. “Las Relaciones Topográficas de Felipe II: Índices, Fuentes y Bibliografía (Separata).” Anuario Jurídico y Económico Escurialense2 36 (2003).

Cline, Howard F. A General Survey: The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1586. A General Survey: The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1586. HMAI Working Papers ; 39. Washington, n.d.

Jimenez de la Espada, Marcos. Relaciones Geográficas de Indias. Peru. Madrid, 1897.

Konyushikhina, Nadezhda. “The Past in Everyday Perception of the Spaniards of the 16th Century (Based on ‘Relaciones Topográficas de Felipe II’).” Istoriya 9, no. 10 (74) (2018). https://doi.org/10.18254/S0002503-2-1.

López Gómez, Julia, and Antonio López Gómez. “Cien Años de Estudios de Las ‘Relaciones Topográficas de Felipe II’ Después de Caballero.” Arbor, no. 538 (October 1, 1990): 33-.

Mundy, Barbara E. The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Nichols, Madaline W. “An Old Questionnaire for Modern Use: A Commentary on ‘Relaciones Geográficas de Indias.’” Agricultural History, no. 4 (October 1, 1944): 156-.

Nieto-Bello, Rafael David. “Descripciones Para El Buen Gobierno y Provecho de La Tierra, Vecinos e Indios Samarios: Conocer Las Provincias de Santa Marta a Través de Las Relaciones Geográficas de Indias (1577-1582).” Universidad de Los Andes, 2017. https://ezproxy.uniandes.edu.co:8443/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat07441a&AN=cpu.795129&lang=es&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Tovar Pinzón, Hermes. Relaciones y Visitas a Los Andes / Hermes Tovar Pinzón. Relaciones y Visitas a Los Andes. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2010.

Vallina Rodríguez, Alejandro, and Nadezhda Konyushikhina. “Los Interrogatorios de Los Catastros Españoles de La Edad Moderna: Fuentes Geohistóricas Para Conocer Los Paisajes y Las Sociedades.” Catastro, no. 89 (2017): 39–62.

[1] Among pioneer works produced at UT Austin, we can highlight these ones: Nichols, “An Old Questionnaire for Modern Use: A Commentary on ‘Relaciones Geográficas de Indias’”; Cline, A Gen. Surv. Relac. Geográficas Spanish Indies, 1577-1586.

[2] Nieto-Bello, “Descripciones Para El Buen Gobierno y Provecho de La Tierra, Vecinos e Indios Samarios: Conocer Las Provincias de Santa Marta a Través de Las Relaciones Geográficas de Indias (1577-1582).”

[3] Jimenez de la Espada, Relaciones Geográficas de Indias. Peru.; Tovar Pinzón, Relaciones y Visitas a Los Andes / Hermes Tovar Pinzón.; Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas.

[4] “Instruction and Memory of the Relaciones to describe the Indies’ provinces […] for their good government and ennoblement.”

[5] “Instruction and Memory of the Relaciones for the description and history of the towns of Spain for the honor and ennoblement of these kingdoms.”

Support the Benson Centennial! Visit benson100.org to learn more.

IHS Podcast – The social history of 16th and 17th century Andean “ethnographic” knowledge, bottom-up or top down?

October 6, 2021

IHS podcasts are a new podcast series initiated by the Institute for Historical Studies’ Director, Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. They are paired with weekly workshops and are designed to foster discussion between graduate students and distinguished scholars in the field. Along with graduate students and guests, each episode features Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra and Ashley Garcia, a PhD Candidate in History at UT Austin. This podcast is recorded in connection with a roundtable, The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Caribbean: Local Knowledge on Human Populations in the cabildos of Santa Marta, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico (c. 1570-1590), presented by Rafael Nieto-Bello University of Texas at Austin, on October 11th. Details can be found here.

Introduction

In this podcast with Jose Carlos de la Puente, we explore the ways in which a cadre of indigenous paralegal natives created much of the “ethnographic” knowledge in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial central Andes (Peru), usually attributed to European elite intellectuals.

Most knowledge (ethnographic or not) emerged in the context of factional conflict and legal squabbles. We explore the origins of the Huarochiri manuscript (an indigenous colonial bible for the regions of Huarorchiri, not unlike the colonial Popol Vuh (for the Maya) in squabbles among factions of indigenous cabildos that used inquisitorial probes (extirpation of idolatry) to denounce potential and actual rival factions. We have long attributed ethnography to Jesuits, yet it was indigenous scribal knowledge produced among rival cabildos that generated this and other ethnographic religious texts.

De la Puente sheds abundant light on the vast encyclopedia of ethnographic knowledge that is Guaman Poma’s Primera nueva cronica y buen gobierno. Based on extensive archival research, De la Puente has reconstructed the many ways in which Guaman Poma collected both information and experience in various types of colonial paperwork and administrative roles, participating since the 1560s as a paralegal of the church (extirpations of idolatries) and the lay state of corregidores and viceroys (land conflicts and litigation).

Guaman Poma got also involved as administrator of indigenous commons in regions like Huamanga, allegedly representing the interest of commoners vs curaca—cacique elites. Guaman Poma’s role as administrator of commons gained him access to information on all types of tribute as well as on new types of property and financial instruments. Guaman Poma, the “Indian”, was thoroughly familiar with the everyday paperwork and financial instruments of communities and the “Spanish” colonial bureaucracy. His ethnographic knowledge was the result of his scribal bureaucratic role and is a reference to current indigenous practices not ancient traditions.

Finally, De la Puente explores how legal and ethnographic categories scholars have attributed to top down colonial mandates by corregidores, viceroys, oidores, council magistrates, and ultimately monarchs were rather the product of local conflict within communities. The new terms emerged in the testimonies of factional parties in legal conflict.

~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Guests

Dr. Jose Carlos de la Puente is a scholar of native Andean peoples and the Spanish empire. The bulk of his work is devoted to understanding the formation of colonial indigenous legal, political, and literate cultures. His scholarship has made interventions in several interrelated fields, including native accounting technologies, the colonial Inka nobility, indigenous intellectuals and intermediaries, and colonial systems of land tenure and territorial representation. His current book-length project reexamines the history of the Andean colonial commoning and uncommoning practices through the lenses of land and tenure. Andean Cosmopolitans, his latest book, reconstructs the world of native litigants and favor seekers at the royal court of the Spanish Habsburgs. His earlier monograph, Los curacas hechiceros de Jauja, centers on witchcraft accusations launched by indigenous lords against their political rivals in late-seventeenth-century Peru.

Hosts

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Institute for Historical Studies.

Ashley Garcia is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research includes 19th century political history, American communitarianism, and American political thought. Her dissertation, “An American Socialism: The Associationist Movement and Nineteenth Century Political Culture,” explores America’s most popular utopian socialist program: the Associationist movement of the 19th-century. Ashley has also completed a Portfolio in Museum Studies as her secondary PhD field.

Institute for Historical Studies, Race and Caste Research theme, 2021-22

August 25, 2021

Not Even Past is delighted to collaborate with the Institute for Historical Studies and its innovative Race and Caste research theme in 2021-2022. Under the leadership of a new Director Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, the Alice Drysdale Sheﬃeld Professor of History, the Institute’s program this year centers on the work of nine junior and advanced graduate student Fellows from the History Department at The University of Texas at Austin. Each student will develop either an essay for submission to a scholarly publication, or a proposal for a grant application.

Each piece will be workshopped twice during the year. Fellows will present the first draft of their work virtually via Zoom in the Fall semester, and a revised version of the essay in Spring in-person on campus. They will receive two rounds of critical feedback and crucial guidance on their projects from leading scholars in their fields joining from UT and across the globe. At each workshop, the student will be in conversation with three scholars– two from outside of the university and one UT affiliate. With their final, polished essays at year’s end, Fellows will submit their works to scholarly publications in their field, or to grants organizations.

“The intention here is to guide the student on how to transform a good essay into a great essay,” said Cañizares-Esguerra. “There are no formulas, of course. We want discussants to help Fellows identify blind spots in their arguments and in the structure of the essays, if there are any. Each respondent brings a different expertise to bear. That is the beauty of this exercise.”

The Race and Caste cohort has already participated in intensive discussions around the mechanics of essay writing. Last July, Cañizares-Esguerra invited a roundtable of accomplished UT History alums to speak about their publications, and to define how a “great” article follows particular structures. As graduate students, these alums submitted pieces to leading journals, including American Historical Review, The Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Renaissance Quarterly, and The William and Mary Quarterly.

“The basic structure we concluded,” Cañizares-Esguerra said, “is to bring two, and sometimes more, separate, unrelated historiographies to bear on a third subject, thus changing perspectives on all three areas at once. To do this, one needs a command of the interventions these historiographies are seeking to make. We need students to do the historiographical work daringly and explicitly.”

In addition to workshopping their essays, Fellows will host podcasts with their respective respondents to explore and engage with the external scholar’s work in relationship to the Fellow’s research. Fellows will also write short articles examining respondents’ publications, particularly those works that speak most closely to the students’ areas of study. Recordings of the workshops, podcast episodes, and short written pieces will all be featured on UT History’s public history resource, Not Even Past. The first podcast is available here.

Launching the Race and Caste workshop series on Monday, September 13 at Noon, Fellow Alexander Chaparro-Silva will present “Democracy and Race in the Americas: Readings of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America South of the Rio Grande” in conversation with three prestigious scholars working in his field: Dr. Lina del Castillo (Associate Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin); Dr. Nicola Miller (Professor of Latin American History, University College London); and Dr. James Sidbury (Professor of History, and Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Rice University). Chaparro-Silva is an intellectual historian and doctoral student in History at UT Austin. His dissertation analyzes how Latin American intellectuals came to the US, offered a sophisticated comparative reflection on democracy and race relations in both Americas, and crafted racialized continental differences during the nineteenth century. His research is supported in part by The Conference on Latin American History and The Tinker Foundation. He coedited a book about print culture in Spanish America during the Age of Revolutions and has published several peer-reviewed articles in the US, Colombia, and Argentina. Register to attend this workshop and receive the pre-circulated paper here, and save the date for his second workshop taking place January 24, 2022, at Noon (details forthcoming).

Read about this year’s Race and Caste Fellows and their projects:

“The Mexican Empire under Agustin de Iturbide and Indigenous Texas”

By Sheena Cox

Sheena Cox is a Borderlands Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is focused on the Liberal Enlightenment in Texas, and its impact on Indigenous relations with Tejanos and Mexicans, 1810-1839. In addition to her dissertation research, Sheena is also dedicated to public history and historic preservation through projects with the Bullock Texas State History Museum and the Texas Historical Commission. From 2019-2021, Sheena worked as the coordinator for TSHA’s annual meeting program. She has served as a graduate research assistant for the Handbook of Texas, and as an assistant editor for the Handbook of Texas Women and Handbook of Dallas Fort-Worth Handbook projects.

“Pacific Soundings: Race, Abolitionism, and the Birth of Mexican Citizenship”

By Gary Leo Dunbar

Gary Leo Dunbar is a doctoral candidate in Latin American history. His research examines the history of slavery, abolitionism, and citizenship in the Americas with a specific focus on Pacific Mexico. Gary holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Oregon and completed his master’s work at Central Michigan University (CMU) in the U.S. and Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) in Mexico. His research has been funded with grants from the U.S. Department of Education, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, and UT’s history department and College of Liberal Arts. He is the recipient of a President’s Award for Best Conference Paper at the International Graduate Historical Studies Conference, a Graduate Paper Prize from CMU’s College of Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences, and an Outstanding Graduate Thesis/Project Award from the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at CMU for his master’s work. Gary is currently at work on the second edition of Thomas Benjamin’s The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and their Shared History, 1400-1900 for Cambridge University Press.

“Reimagining Borders: Triangular Transnationalism and Chinese Mexicans”

By Jian Gao 高堅

Jian Gao is a third-year PhD student at UT Austin. My primary research focuses on the transnational history of the Chinese in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, and my secondary research focuses on the global dynamics of Latin America during the Cold War era. My works have appeared in The Latin Americanist, Asian Journal of Latin American Studies, and International Report on Drug Studies. My papers won multiple awards from Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies (RMCLAS), Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS), and the World History Association (WHA).

“Relaciones in Response to a World of Questionnaires: Community Knowledge, Ethnicity and Legal Culture from the Spanish Empire’s Towns (c. 1570-1590)”

By Rafael Nieto-Bello

Rafael Nieto-Bello is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at UT Austin. He obtained a double B.A. in History and Political Science and a double minor in Philosophy and German Language in the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia, 2018). In 2021, he was awarded the Fellowship on “Race and Caste” from the Institute of Historical Studies (IHS) for preparing a grant proposal. Additionally, he obtained the Lozano Long Centennial Fellowship from LLILAS Benson for the coordination of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” His research is a history of knowledge from the 16th-century Spanish municipalities. He explores how town communities from diverse ethnic backgrounds described and claimed to know their populations and environments through corporate efforts placed on the local councils.

“Skiing on the Sacred: The San Francisco Peaks, Indigenous Rights, and the U.S. Ski Industry”

By Jesse Ritner

Jesse Ritner is a Ph.D. candidate studying U.S. environmental history. His dissertation “Elegy of a Dying Sport: Snow, Technology, and the Rise of the North American Ski Industry” explores how science and technology were used to build a weather-dependent sport in climates that lacked the reliable snowpack needed for alpine skiing. His project then traces how new technologies created new classed and racialized relations between the ski industry, skiers, laborers, and the non-human world. “Skiing on the Sacred” is closely related to the final chapter of his dissertation which looks at the ways in which technology created a dependent relationship between the ski industry and the Forest Service at the expense of nearby populations. The article “Skiing on the Sacred” in contrast focuses on the ways in which laws, the Forest Service, and the ski industry systematically invalidated Indigenous claims to the San Francisco Peaks. Jesse has received several grants and Fellowships for his research, including an especially generous grant from the American Meteorological Society. Along with studying history, Jesse is also an avid skier.

“Covarrubias’ Crossings: Picturing the New Negro and the Making of Modern Mexico”

By Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié is a writer, photographer, and doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar and a Contex Doctoral Fellow. His work explores the interconnections between the histories of photography, science, and anthropology. I trace the tensions between the making of ethnography and the development of new visual methods of representing otherness—photography, painting, sketching, and writing. In 2018, nexos awarded my essay “Testigo (in)voluntario: la muerte de Kevin Carter” with the Carlos Pereyra Essay Prize. I was born and raised on the outskirts of Mexico City, where I worked in various filmmaking and music projects. I graduated in Politics and Public Administration from El Colegio de México. Learn more about his work at www.rsmoulinie.comm and follow him on Twitter at @rsmoulinie.

“’They Have Always Worn Spanish Clothes:’ Indigenous Elites and Sumptuary Legislation in Seventeenth-Century New Spain”

By Haley Schroer

Haley Schroer is a Ph.D. candidate in colonial Latin American history. Her work focuses on the intersection of race and material culture in colonial Latin America. In particular, her dissertation examines the rise of racialized clothing laws in the Spanish Empire throughout the seventeenth century. Her research has received support from the Fulbright Program, The Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program, the P.E.O. Sisterhood, and The Conference on Latin American History’s James R. Scobie Award. Schroer received a B.A. in History and Spanish, Summa Cum Laude, from Texas Christian University in 2016. She earned her M.A. from UT-Austin in May 2018 where her master’s report, “‘Scandalizing the Public’: Clothing and Perception in Mexico City’s Seventeenth-Century Inquisitorial Sumptuary Trials” won the 2019 Perry Prize for Best Master’s Thesis/Report. She is currently completing her dissertation under the direction of Susan Deans-Smith and Ann Twinam.

“‘Whether We Bore The Resemblance of Indians’: Kinship and Coalition Building in Black and Indigenous New England”

By Alina Scott

Alina Scott is a History Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores eighteenth and nineteenth-century Native intellectual history and literature, digital humanities, critical race theory, archival studies, gender and sexuality, and religion. Her dissertation,”Murder by Inches: Indigenous Intellectuals, Land, and Sovereignty in Wampanoag Petitions, 1820-1850″ examines Indigenous petitioning campaigns and protests throughout the nineteenth century. Alina has served as Associate Editor and Communications Director at Not Even Past and a managing editor for Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal. She hosts the weekly 15 Minute History Podcast, part of the University of Texas’s Podcast Network. Her research has been supported by Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, the McNair Scholars Program, Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin, National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Georgetown Humanities Ambassador Fellowship, and the Institute For Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin.

Review of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 by Nükhet Varlık (2017)

March 8, 2021

By Rafael David Nieto-Bello

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600. By Nükhet Varlık. New Jersey: Rutgers University, 2017, vii-xviii, Pp. 336. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.99 (paperback).

The historiography of the Black Death has tended to cast the Ottoman Empire as the “sick man of Europe.” Nükhet Varlık does admirable work in breaking down this Eurocentric view by tracing the Black Death’s history during the rise of the Ottoman Empire, a history she considers as a long process of recurrent outbreaks rather than an isolated event. Varlık frames her work within the historiography of diseases, creatively intertwining environmental history, the history of science, and imperial political history. Moreover, she models how historians can work with up-to-date scientific research, including recent studies in epidemiology, genomics, ecology, and bioarchaeology.

Varlık argues for a correlation between the plague’s epidemiological patterns and the empire’s consolidation, which is visible through the interaction among ecological zones as human and nonhuman mobility increased. These mobile nonhuman agents included fleas, lice, rodents, and the pathogenic bacteria Yersinia pestis, and they determined the plague’s expansion and waves of recurrence.While ‘global’ histories of disease tend to flatten social difference and take connections for granted, Varlık builds upon the idea of a ‘network’—a dynamic set of relationships that assemble the asymmetrical flow of ideas, humans, goods, animals, as well as pathogens.

Plague and empire focuses on what conventionally has been called the “second plague pandemic” (the Black Death) —the first being the Justinian plague and the third the East Asian plague. Nevertheless, the second pandemic was not a single discreet event that took place in 1348. It consisted of several waves of epidemics over 250 years. It is no coincidence, Varlık argues, that this period coincided with the transformation of the Ottoman semi-nomadic regime into an extensive empire in the eastern Mediterranean. Therefore, she situates the Ottoman epidemic cycles within the context of imperial expansion and the conquest of cities like Edirne and Istanbul as trade connections with Europe and Asia increased. Thus, she overcomes a variety of historiographic fallacies, including the “westward diffusion of the plague,” Turkish indifference to the Black Death (fatalism), and “epidemic boundaries” between the Christian and Muslim Mediterranean worlds.

*The Black Death: Map of the World with vignettes, watercolor by Monro S. Orr. Source: Wellcome Library*

Varlık synthesizes historical primary sources with current scientific research on the etiology of the plague, including new understandings about the interaction among hosts (such as rodents, humans, and other mammals), vectors (fleas and lice), and the pathogen (Yersinia Pestis). She also explains how the disease remained “inactive” in wild foci of animals––that is, groups of infected animals that became plague reservoirs. Moreover, she suggests that climate played a role in the migration of some of these hosting species.

The book employs a wide range of documents such as medical treatises, travel accounts, and official reports, not only from Turkish sources but also from Arabic, Byzantine, Italian, and Iberian sources. Although there is an apparent absence of the plague in early Ottoman sources, she explains that it does not mean a real absence of the disease. Instead, she argues that the plague gradually became significant enough to register in Ottoman culture as the empire urbanized and its officials moved between territories. Thus, environmental factors became entangled with perceptions and knowledge about the plague and governmental measures for controlling outbreaks.

Despite its broad regional scope, Plague and Empire centers on Istanbul. Methodologically, this choice makes sense, particularly after its conquest by the Ottomans in 1453, because this new capital became the primary node where imperial and epidemic networks converged. Varlık’s focus on connections helps us understand how Istanbul was not isolated, but the core of governmental processes and the catalyst of epidemic waves in the Western Mediterranean.

Varlık’s model of intertwining imperial history and the flow of disease could productively be applied and tested in other contexts, including different epidemics. For instance, thinking about smallpox epidemics in the Conquest of America––simultaneous in time with this long Black Death––could be a fruitful comparison. Another case to think about is our current context of dealing with COVID-19. Considering its zoonotic origins, environmental drivers, post-modern circulation networks, and the state’s crucial role and supranational institutions to control its spread, we have much to learn from Varlık’s approach.

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World constitutes a bold and reliable approach to the history of diseases in imperial and globally-connected perspectives. It incorporates current scientific research in ways that make it relevant across disciplines. Varlık carefully links social, political, and environmental analysis. As a result, the book offers not only a crucial addition to the new historiography of diseases but also makes a contribution that is relevant to our present pandemic experience.

IHS Climate in Context – Book Roundtable on The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant (1980)

November 4, 2020

By Atar David, Khristián Méndez Aguirre, and Rafael David Nieto-Bello

In 2020-21, the Institute for Historical Studies will convene a series of talks, workshops, and panel discussions centered on the theme “Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented”. As part of that, we are delighted to publish this roundtable discussion consisting of three reviews focused on Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, a classic work in environmental history and the history of science. These reviews come out of Dr Megan Raby’s class, History Of Science And The Environment.

Nature’s Death or the Killing of Nature? Review by Atar David
A Predecessor to Intersectional Eco-Feminisms Review by Khristián Méndez Aguirre
Reviving The Death of Nature: Female presences in the configuration of the Early Modern cosmos Review by Rafael David Nieto-Bello

Nature’s Death or the Killing of Nature?

Caroline Merchant’s the Death of Nature (1980) challenges the heritage of progress often associated with the scientific revolution. Forty years since its first appearance, it is more relevant than ever. Rather than blindly accepting the fact that the scientific and intellectual developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fostered progress for all, Merchant asks “progress for who?” as she examines how ideas about nature and scientific innovations brought, in addition to economic and intellectual development, social repression. She suggests an “ecosystem model of historical change,” which “looks at the relationship between the resources associated with a given natural ecosystem… and the human factors affecting its stability or disruption over a historical period” (p. 42-43). For her, nature and culture are deeply connected. Analyzing rich source material, ranging from fiction to scientific writing, Merchant reconstructs the process through which the scientific apparatus recognized alleged problems of disorder with both nature and women, subjugated and regulated the two, and finally institutionalized this intellectual tradition through modern science.

Merchant begins her inquiry by identifying an intellectual tradition that began in ancient Greece, which associated the concept of “nature” with feminine qualities and projected a dual image of both nature and women. On the one hand, the earth was a “nurturing mother” who provided her children – humanity – with products and resources. Such was also the image of the mother/wife who held an important social role in maintaining the household and held key social positions in society. At the same time, nature/woman could be cruel, unpredictable, and chaotic, holding not only the power to build and nourish but to destroy. Some even went as far to present women as witches. Both nature and women posed a challenge for those who aspired to reorganize society according to scientific principles.

Merchant then moves on to describe how both nature and women were subjugated through the intellectual effort and the technological invasions of the scientific revolution. At the core of this revolution stood the idea that nature, which in the past was understood as a holistic organism, was actually a manageable system that can be taken apart and then reorganized to benefit human needs. The idea of a “mechanism,” according to which both nature and the human(feminine) body were seen as machines, allowed a reconfiguration of the two according to scientific as well as economic ideas and interests. The subjugation of nature reached its peak during the seventeenth century with Newton and Leibnitz, whose works helped institutionalize these ideas and created the basis of modern science.

Highly acclaimed for her intervention in both environmental and feminist historiography, Merchant should also be praised for her unique contribution to understanding the power structures that fostered the scientific revolution. Her analysis begins with a Marxist reading of natural changes, where a capitalist struggle over the fenlands, farms, and forests of England (the means of production) resulted in the reconceptualization of “nature”, and later during the seventeenth century, of women as an economic resource. The realization that to maximize revenues and increase surplus value nature needs to be reconstructed and regulated was one of the main catalysts for the scientific revolution. The deterioration in the status of nature and the scientific/capitalist desire to control it was followed by attempts to subjugate women of various social classes. Scientific measures of experiment and regulation were used to control the behavior of lower-class women, while their middle- and upper-class contemporaries were stripped from their production and reproduction of social place and became passive, and therefore dependent on men’s support.

For Merchant, the “death of nature” was not only due to the dramatic ecological changes that followed the scientific revolution, where meadows turned into fields and forests to timber. Nature’s death was first and foremost the result of the collapse of the concept itself. Nature, once a complex ecosystem built on interdependence and equilibrium, became an economic resource, stripped from its core values, turned into a machine in the service of men, a market worthy of man-made regulation. The process described in the book is not so much the “death” of “natural causes”, but rather the killing of it by the hands and minds of men and women who sought to subjugate it, transforming the once vivid system to a passive one. Merchant calls to restore equilibrium to the ecosystem and suggests possible solutions for some of our contemporary ecological and social challenges such as climate change and women’s oppression. The Death of Nature can be read not only as a description of the past, but also as a prescription for a better, more balanced and equal, future.

Atar David is a Ph.D. student in the History department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the socio-economic history of the modern middle east, with special emphasis on food, agricultural, and resource allocation.

A Predecessor to Intersectional Eco-Feminisms

Although Carolyn Merchant’s current research is focused on American Environmental history, her first and most influential publication had a much different geographic scope: 16th and 17th-century Europe. The Death of Nature is a text that remains at least as important today as it was following its original publication. Her scholarship explored parallels between women’s movements and ecological movements –both of which sought complementary kinds of liberation in the 1960s. It was also heralded by much more pointed events, like the Three-Mile Island reactor accident in 1979 Harrisburg, PA. More and more, it began to seem like the mastery over nature and women also meant their suffocation and demise. And so Merchant went to work. Her proto-ecofeminist arguments are perhaps even more relevant today, as the backdrop to both environmental activism and scholarship that foregrounds how the impact of environmental degradation is worse for different sectors of the population based on their gender and other forms of identity.

The book details the philosophical, political and economic transitions into modern capitalism and away from a more –to use her term– ‘organic’ understanding of nature. Merchant describes the dissection, control, management, capture and ultimate attempted mastery over nature that also paralleled an equally violent re-conception of women and their control, management, and subjection. Both nature and women, Merchant argues, have become increasingly (but never completely) subjected to man’s mind, his technology, and his theorization of their role in an ideal world. Her examples of violence to the (female) earth and women themselves range from mining to the execution of women accused of witchcraft and the use of forceps to do what men believed midwives could not. Notable men wrote philosophical treaties, supported them with (or used them to justify) capitalist economic systems, and developed physical and conceptual machines and instruments to achieve their progressive mastery over nature and women.

The scope of the book is wide. She foregrounds the role that the environment played in the history of European capitalist societies, like Dutch organic farming and early British technocratic farming during the 16th and 17th centuries. She also identifies the patriarchal philosophical traditions that envisioned organic quasi-egalitarian utopias (like Campanello’s City of the Sun) but also those with sexist and oppressive ones (like Bacon’s New Atlantis). Finally, she situates particular machines, like the clock, in the mechanization of nature. Through wide-ranging sources and methodologies, Merchant firmly establishes her argument within philosophy, environmental history and history of science.

The writing is detailed, but her sections are scaffolded and easy to follow. This makes the text both accessible to a more general audience and worthy of inclusion in any academic study. Some sections contain intriguing and powerful illustrations with historical woodcuts, etchings or drawings. The visual quality of these images provides bold visual references and forceful characterization to her subject: the patriarchal ideas about mastery of nature weren’t only abstractions, but realities experienced by women’s bodies.

As a robust argument for the relationship between the domination of nature and the domination of woman, The Death of Nature paved the way for other kinds of histories of science vis-a-vis particular identities. For example, Merchant’s ‘historicizing ‘the theory of female passivity in reproduction’ during the 16^th century, likely influenced –if not all together enabled– the histories that detail the medical experimentation on Black women slaves in the American south during 19^th century (such as Deirdre Cooper Owens’ Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and The Origins of American Gynecology (2017)). In summary, the text remains ambitious, rich in sources and approaches, and opened many doors for scholarship to follow its footsteps.

Khristián Méndez Aguirre is a theatre-maker and arts-based researcher, currently a second-year PhD student in Performance as Public Practice in the Department of Theatre and Dance. His research focuses on the relationship between theatrical performance and climate change in the Americas. He holds a B.A. in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME, USA) and an MFA in Performance as Public Practice.

Reviving ***The Death of Nature*: Female presences in the configuration of the Early Modern cosmos**

Forty years ago, Carolyn Merchant published The Death of Nature which aimed to critically reassess the Scientific Revolution by considering changes in the conceptions of nature in Renaissance Europe. Merchant embraced an ecofeminist perspective, associating images of nature with feminine allegories and metaphors that were popular in intellectual spheres. She linked the consolidation of mercantilist capitalism to environmental transformations and scientific reflections of an expanded canon of thinkers (including women, utopians, and magicians).

She argued that precapitalist nature was understood as a living nurturing feminine organism before the Scientific Revolution, before being gradually transformed into a feminine wild or inert mechanism. That new conception of nature demanded to be controlled and exploited for human benefit and progress. The triumph of mechanism condemned to a secondary role the images of nature, earth, and cosmos as holistic or vital systems, although twentieth-century ecology tended to recover some of those ideas with a certain degree of reductionism.

This book lies halfway between the history of science and environmental history, carefully considering the discourses of thinkers and the concrete processes of land-owning, usage, and exploitation. Because of that, the author analyzed processes of farming, deforestation, famines, fens-drainage. Regarding Francis Bacon, she described how his works illustrate the triumph of mechanism and exploitation of nature, based on the development of crafts and sciences to know and claim power over the female nature. Merchant discovered that the “penetrations” and “inquisitions” of the new Baconian method were related to the language used in witch trials, observing the overlaps in their sexist biases.

The book organizes its narrative and argument around the correspondences between nature and women. Thus, the changes in women’s reproductive and productive roles in a mercantilist world were analogous to the “death” or mechanization of nature. Notable examples of this were the subjugation of early modern women to housework and the end of traditional midwifery. Furthermore, she examined alchemical and philosophical approaches to the conciliation of feminine and masculine aspects of the cosmos and charted the role of female thinkers in the preservation of holistic perspectives of nature. For instance, she studied Margaret Cavendish, a literate and naturalist closely related to the Royal Society of London, and Anne Conway, a cabalist and natural philosopher who was close to Leibniz.

This is a militant book that emphasized the normative condition of the relation between humans and nature. This in no way undercuts the strength and relevance of its purpose. Merchant’s style and arguments were deeply empowered by ecofeminism, and her intentions were not merely descriptive. She was denouncing the moral implications of the transformation in the conceptions of nature and woman in modernity (which were still relevant to her and our time). In a late-Cold War age, she supported an ecological critique of capitalist progress and mechanist sciences from the academic sphere but also engaged as an intellectual in the effort to bring closer the social movements of environmentalism and feminism, very active during the second half of the twentieth century.

Merchant engaged in a context of growing academic criticism toward the technical rationality of modernity, following the legacies of Heidegger and Marcuse. Besides, the influence of the Annales School (a historiographic trend) seems clear when it comes to her effort in connecting geographical and ecological concerns with social history. Additionally, she was committed to Bookchin’s anarchic-communism, shaping her analysis of late-medieval communal peasantry and their organic interactions with nature and also her ideological support to communitarian projects which understand nature as a holistic system rather than as a resource (Mitman, 2006). Nevertheless, she did not advocate for a return to premodern conceptions of nature.

A few critiques can be suggested: she still believed in the existence of a modern Scientific Revolution (Park 2006) and overestimated the agency of intellectual sources to explain concrete environmental changes, instead of focusing on practices. Moreover, the relative omission of the Iberian discovery and conquest of the New World, seems glaring in retrospect (Park 2006). However, her work has brought new opportunities for the scholarship to reframe the relationship between Iberian naturalists and the New World starting from their considerations of nature as wild or profitable.

This book is, despite the latter critiques, a milestone in ecofeminist approaches to the histories of science and the environment. This book should interest readers concerned with natural philosophy, political thought, feminism, and environmentalism. Merchant was important in reframing a predominantly patriarchal history of early modern science and providing a nuanced and source-rich testimony of how gender problems and real women were always present and active in this long story.

Rafael David Nieto-Bello is a first-year Ph.D. student in the History Department. He holds a BA in Political Science and History from the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogota, Colombia). His research interests include the history of social knowledge, Latin America’s intellectual history, ethnohistory, and history of science in the early modern Atlantic. He is currently working on the Relaciones Geográficas’ concern on depicting Spaniards and indigenes’ customs and the configuration of social knowledge to “govern better” the Spanish Atlantic empire.

References

Mitman, Gregg. 2006. “Where Ecology, Nature, and Politics Meet: reclaiming The Death of Nature.” Isis, no 3 (September): 496-504.
Owens, Deirdre Cooper. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. University of Georgia Press, 2017.
Park, Katharine. 2006. “Women, gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science.” Isis, no 3 (September): 487-95.

Image Credit | Image 1: Cover of Death of Nature; Image 2: Photo by Tom Fisk from Pexels; Image 3: Portrait of Francis Bacon via Library Company of Philadelphia.

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Nature’s Death or the Killing of Nature?

A Predecessor to Intersectional Eco-Feminisms

Reviving The Death of Nature: Female presences in the configuration of the Early Modern cosmos

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Reviving ***The Death of Nature*: Female presences in the configuration of the Early Modern cosmos**