Visible Empire: Science and Visual Evidence in the Hispanic World

This paper discusses the uses of natural history images as evidence in the Hispanic enlightenment. During the second half of the century, the Spanish crown funded almost sixty scientific expeditions throughout its vast empire. In addition to these large-scale projects, smaller local operations explored regional nature with combined imperial and colonial agendas. These explorations yielded rich collections of images—this paper will focus on five natural history expeditions held between 1777 and 1808, which alone produced thirteen thousand illustrations. Tracing the trajectories of these images as they traveled within and across cultures helps us explore how meanings were created and transformed in these movements.
I will argue that scientific expeditions constituted visualization projects that made the empire visible across distances, allowing for practices of collective empiricism. Traveling naturalists followed carefully articulated practices of observation and representation that defined epistemologies, methodologies, and communities of practitioners. The primacy of visual material, in the form of both observations and representations, speaks to the existence of a visual epistemology central to both the natural sciences and imperial administration. Far from being mere ornamental secondary products, and much more than symbolic expressions of imperial might, images represent the single most important instrument for scientific work, thought, and communication utilized by European and American naturalists and colonial officials. Images did not illustrate science: they were the science. Thus, we must understand these scientific expeditions as visualization projects that made imperial nature identifiable, translatable, transportable, and appropriable.