“What happens to knowledge when it crosses geographical or political borders? This book gives an engaging account of how knowledge about South American cartographic and geodetic measurements, ethnographic observations, and botanical specimens and their medicinal applications traveled across the Atlantic, subject to various translations and transformations on the way to presentation to European audiences and readers. Safier shows how travelers, writers, and readers fashioned knowledge to their own purposes, often erasing the contributions and even the existence of local informants. His meticulous analysis of many kinds of sources leads him to problematize the heroic image of the scientific traveler, devoted to the transparency of empirical truth above all. The book gives us a novel and original interpretation of the place of South America in European perceptions of the globe and its inhabitants in the Enlightenment.”—Mary Terrall, University of California, Los Angeles
“Safier paints a dazzling picture of the gathering, formatting, circulation, and negotiation of South America in the Enlightenment. Measuring the New World will be a point of reference for scholars in history, literature, cartography, and theory in the years to come.”—Tom Conley, Harvard University
“In this enlightening book, Neil Safier sees with clarity through the Empire’s New Clothes of raw empiricism, astronomical measurement, and celestial observations that promise unified methods to eighteenth-century science. Safier tells how La Condamine effaces the maps, manuscripts, histories, and local knowledges that, in fact, provide the unruly stuff from which the French academician spins his seamless ‘eyewitness’ accounts of the New World. Unmasked, unclothed, we will never see La Condamine the same again.”—Londa Schiebinger, Stanford University
“Writing with imagination, sympathy, and erudition, Safier offers a truly transatlantic account of one episode in the making of the ‘epic’ and ‘romance’ of early modern, European metropolitan science. He deftly demonstrates that for these narratives to emerge, the voices of countless participants in both the Americas and Europe had to be either systematically silenced or edited beyond recognition. This is a splendid contribution to the literatures on science and empire and on the global Enlightenment.”—Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin
"A deft, thoughtful examination of what happened to European Enlightenment science in an American setting, and of how South America was depicted in Europe as a result of this exploration. What makes Safier's book stand out . . . is the way in which he masterfully expands the range of sites, practices and participants. This is not the story of an expedition, but rather a study of the stories the expedition yielded through words and images."—Daniela Bleichmar, American Scientist
"Engaging and illuminating. . . . The book is indispensable reading for anyone interested in fresh interdisciplinary approaches to the science and intellectual history of this era."
"Measuring the New World beautifully dissects the 'social and material practices that comprise' what Safier calls 'transatlantic scientific commemorations'. We are fortunate that the University of Chicago Press has produced a book with some 20 color plates and nearly 60 figures that wonderfully illustrate and illuminate Safier’s sophisticated arguments. We are indebted to Safier for helping enlighten scholars of both Europe and the Americas on the role of the New World in the construction of modern science and the European Enlightenment."—Marshall C. Eakin, The Americas
"Safier’s engaging and significant book is several narratives in one. It is an important contribution to recent historiographical revisionism centring around geographical readings of (the) Enlightenment. . . .This is an account, finely told throughout, of mapping in the field, of mapping as an uncertain form of topographic depiction and measurement—and of ethnographic classification, since later commentators sought to ‘fix’ Amerindians as native ‘others’ even as they were dependent upon them as guides and informants—and of the ways in which eighteenth-century mapmakers had to reconcile different epistemological standards in order to make distant worlds portable in map form. Safier’s book is an important addition to case studies in the social and technical history of Enlightenment mapping as a process that had less to do with the unproblematic extension of European certainty and more with the contingencies of geography, locally, nationally and as networks of transnational exchange and interaction."
"This is a well-written book, and Safier displays remarkable skill in analyzing manuscripts and printed works in many languages. A meticulous reader, the author is perhaps best at picking apart and cross-referencing widely scattered narratives, letters, commentaries . . . . [Measuring the New World] helps restore the value of Ibero-American Enlightenment science."
"Safier's meticulous narratives create an impression of the fragility of the networks by which natural knowledge was built in the early modern period. . . . [His] book calls into question the notion that the sciences worked through rigid and efficient systems integrated with the structures of imperial power. . . . He shows how--when we follow objects, people, and texts in their unpredictable peregrinations--we can tell a much more interesting story."
"[This] breakthrough study reconstructs this important historical moment and reminds readers that cartography consisted not only of projection on maps. . . . In uncovering this human agency, Safier provides scholars in history, literature, and cartography with many new directions upon which to embark in the study of the European Enlightenment and its legacies througout the transatlantic world."
"Measuring the New World offers a refreshing perspective on some of the hidden layers of knowledge production and truth-making in mid-eighteenth-century France and Spain. Neil Safier's study is a tour de force. . . . A valuable ontribution to the understanding of Enlightenment science in a broader, but intimate sense and the geographies of reading and writing in particular."
“A magnificent example of the new science history, informed by cultural and social history and literary theory, and in which ‘great men’ have to share space with the many more humble people, male and female, European and indigenous, who played a central role in the production of scientific ‘knowledge’ in the early modern era.”—Terrae Incognitae
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