Visible Empire

“Lavishly illustrated and lucidly written. . . . Bleichmar’s arresting Visible Empire contributes to the ongoing recovery of the formative—but hitherto little-known—role that Spain and its colonies played in this crucial period in the history of science.”

“Bleichmar uses this vast (and gorgeous) archive of botanical images assembled by Spanish natural history expeditions to explore the connections between natural history, visual culture, and empire in the eighteenth century Hispanic world. In beautifully argued chapters, Bleichmar explores the ways that eighteenth century natural history expeditions were grounded in a visual epistemology where observation and representation were powerful tools for negotiating both scientific and imperial spheres.”

“This exciting book studies the visual contexts of empire from a natural history perspective. . . . Visualizing, collecting, classifying, and transporting nature and human culture are all examined here in a historical and philosophical context that sheds new light on science, art, and society. Highly recommended.”

“Visible Empire explores an important yet virtually unexplored chapter in the history of Spain’s eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It was then that the country’s Bourbon monarchy, for reasons both commercial and scientific, set out to discover, record, and systematically classify the botanical riches of the New World. This ambitious project resulted in thousands of botanical illustrations of extraordinary originality and quality, many of which are reproduced in this handsome volume for the very first time. Bleichmar’s approach to these images is imaginatively interdisciplinary, as she examines the circumstances surrounding their production; the artists, native as well as Spanish and creole, involved; together with the thorny aesthetic issues that representing nature necessarily entails. She also situates these images within the broader context of the Enlightenment’s quest to understand the mysteries of the natural world. Visible Empire is an extraordinary achievement, and definitely one that deserves a wide audience.”

“Daniela Bleichmar finds a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Hispanic world, not overstretched and reeling upon its ‘last legs’ of empire, but rather fired by the prospect of revealing a vast and valuable nature within its realms, and thus newly ambitious, interconnected, and fervently in motion. With elegance and precision, she shows how the travels and labors of a startling array of investigators, botanists, and artists converged to make empire not only viable but visible. Their global enterprise, and the knowledges, realizations, and values they produced, are still very much with us today.”