The Co-Production of Nature and Empire: Botanical Debate and the “Two Paths” for Exploiting Quina in the Spanish Atlantic, 1792–1801

Sheila Jasanoff in her edited volume States of Knowledge has proposed the term “co-production” as a idiom for capturing the ways in which the production of natural knowledge and social order are intertwined.  This presentation considers the applicability of this idiom to the history of botany in the Atlantic World in the late eighteenth century.  It does so by examining a debate between several prominent Spanish botanists over the classification of the cinchona tree, a South American tree whose bark was the most potent anti-fever medicament known in the early modern world.  While previous accounts have cast this debate as a purely intellectual and scientific affair, this presentation examines this debate in the broader sociocultural contexts of the Spanish Atlantic.  In particular, I argue that this case was one of co-production of natural knowledge of the cinchona tree and two competing visions of the imperial order in the late eighteenth century.  Significant political ideologies and commercial interests were at stake and Spanish botanists did little to stand above the world of ideology and interests.  Rather, they fully embraced it as a necessary part of the process of producing natural knowledge.  This case further suggests that, in the Spanish context, science and empire were more closely intertwined than in the other imperial and colonial enterprises of the Atlantic World.  Thus, this is a classic case of unintended consequences in which the integration of science into empire resulted in a politicization of natural knowledge at precisely the same time that Bourbon reformers were trying to de-politicize and centralize the structures of imperial governance.