On April 3, 1788, José Celestino Mutis wrote to inform Don Zenón Alonso, the Secretary of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, of his progress on the collection of Indigenous language texts from the region. One year earlier, the Spanish Crown had ordered each viceroy to assemble this linguistic material after King Charles III had agreed to assist the Russian Tsarina Catherine II with the creation of her universal and comparative dictionary of all of the world’s known languages. Mutis, who had been given the responsibility of gathering the Indigenous language texts for New Granada, was elated to inform Don Alonso that he had found the lost dictionary of the Achagua language, which meant that he had already acquired enough texts to satisfy the royal order. Despite this realization, Mutis concluded his short letter by reassuring Don Alonso that he and his team “would not cease to carry forward the work that they had begun with the ardor demanded of them.”Footnote 1 Though the royal order had only requested dictionaries in specific Indigenous languages and translations of a list of words, Mutis’s final collection contained twenty-one books and manuscripts, enough to fulfill the royal order for all of Spanish America with languages, including Achagua, that scholars in Madrid and Saint Petersburg had not known to request.Footnote 2 Why was Spain calling on an array of individuals to participate in a dictionary proposed by a competing empire? Further, why did the Viceroyalty of New Granada respond so enthusiastically?
Focusing on the Spanish response to Catherine’s proposed dictionary, especially from within New Granada, this article examines the creation of this collection of linguistic texts as a part of the Crown’s larger attempt at imperial revitalization.Footnote 3 In the six years that Spain participated in this project, bureaucrats in Madrid and a network of individuals within New Granada continually extended and shaped this language collection in order to expand Spain’s governing power within its own borders and improve its intellectual standing in Europe. Though the Crown issued the royal order to officially begin this collecting project in its colonies, Mutis, along with other officials and scholars, largely directed the project, drawing on the far-reaching web of contacts that he had assembled over the thirty years that he had spent in New Granada. This article argues that in the second half of the eighteenth century, individuals from within New Granada, informed by their private networks and personal enterprises, heavily directed and influenced imperial orders issued by the Crown. Though these individuals were living and working from within what was considered to be the imperial periphery, they still shaped these initiatives to expand the power, presence, and prestige of the empire there. This article emphasizes the ways in which this project, rather than a purely intellectual endeavor, was conceptualized as a tool of empire by individuals in both Madrid and Bogotá.
Thus far, this collection of linguistic materials has gained the most attention from historians of linguistics and ethnolinguistics. These scholars have examined the words that were collected in this project to better understand eighteenth-century developments in the study of language, the variations of methods of compilation and organization of words that scholars and missionaries used on the project, and the linguistic changes of specific Indigenous languages collected during this time, namely Quechua.Footnote 4 More recently, historians have used the project to examine the spread of knowledge in the eighteenth century. These scholars include Rebeca Fernández Rodríguez, who has argued that Catherine’s project “is an expression of early globalization when scholars … shared information for the greater good” and demonstrates the speed at which knowledge could travel between three continents in the eighteenth century.Footnote 5 Alberto José Campillo Pardo has also applied the methods of social network analysis to the collection to show that networks made up of Crown officials and intellectual elites existed in the Spanish Empire and allowed for the circulation of specialized knowledge.Footnote 6 Finally, Felipe Oropesa Oropesa has examined the documents that facilitated the creation of the collection to argue that the royal order was effective in acquiring materials from the Americas and to emphasize the role of both Catherine the Great and Charles III in the preservation of Indigenous language knowledge.Footnote 7
This article builds upon this scholarship to examine the creation of the linguistic collection in New Granada and the motives driving it. While the collection is undoubtably an example of the circulation of specialized knowledge within and beyond Spain’s borders, it was also conceptualized as a tool of empire, at both the local and the imperial level. Rather than viewing the linguistic collection as a purely intellectual enterprise, I argue that it became a project envisioned to meet the needs of the empire. Though this undertaking was instigated in Saint Petersburg, it still served Spain’s goals of gaining potentially useful information about its peripheries in order to both extend its governing power within its own borders and increase its intellectual standing in Europe. Similar to many of Madrid’s other collections of plants and objects created around this time, these dictionaries could display the vast reaches of Spain’s Empire as well as emphasize its intellectual place within Europe. Further, through its focus on New Granada, this article highlights the role of individuals in the territories who not only facilitated the collection of texts, but also guided the direction of the project to better serve the desires of the empire. Although the collection was ordered by Catherine and Charles III, what materialized from New Granada far exceeded their original visions as a result of the efforts of scholars, officials, and missionaries within the colony.
Instead of an isolated project designed only to further linguistic knowledge in a dictionary for the Russian queen, this language-collecting project was a part of the vast knowledge gathering initiatives that were deployed within the Bourbon Reforms. Focused on economic and intellectual revitalization, these reforms included an effort to expand natural science through collecting in the Spanish Empire. Recently, historians have used these ventures to shift the focus of the histories of science and the Enlightenment to include Spain and Spanish America.Footnote 8 Brian Hamnet has shown that the empire, similar to its European counterparts, contained multiple Enlightenments that were influenced by both Iberian and larger European traditions.Footnote 9 This historiography has also illuminated the ways in which the Enlightenment, and the scientific knowledge production associated with it, were entwined with political reform, and aimed to make Spain’s vast land holdings visible, governable, and profitable from Madrid.Footnote 10 Historians have increasingly brought together the metropole and the colonies into a single framework to examine the ways in which knowledge flowed and changed through imperial networks and the co-construction of eighteenth-century science and the Enlightenment.Footnote 11 This article further emphasizes these connections across the Atlantic and European imperial boundaries. Building on the work of these scholars, I take this linguistic collecting project not as an isolated intellectual initiative, but as a part of this larger group of enterprises that were aimed at expanding the Spanish Crown’s knowledge of the people and resources within its claimed dominions.
The degree of influence and autonomy exercised by Mutis when changing the parameters of the project highlights how figures within what Spain considered to be the periphery could shape and even extend imperial power and governance. Historians of Spanish imperial science and collecting have illuminated the tensions that formed between naturalists working in the colonies and those working in the metropole over the ways in which they claimed authority and even understood the local people, plants, animals, and environment.Footnote 12 This collecting project in New Granada complicates this tension. Historians have frequently emphasized a pattern of scholars in the colonies focusing on the complexity of the environment in the face of imperial attempts to simplify local factors for ease of understanding in the metropole. This project instead shows the ways in which scholars in the colonies used their knowledge of New Granada to expand the project to better serve the goals of the empire. Mutis and his compatriots adapted the royal directive according to the complex realities of New Granada in order to make the collection more useful to the Crown in Madrid.
Tracing the assembly of this collection of linguistic texts, this article shows how empire was shaped and expanded in surprising ways through seemingly intellectual pursuits by individuals like Mutis, who were working at some of the furthest places from the capital. It will begin by examining the proposal for the dictionary itself in Saint Petersburg, highlighting the intellectual ideas behind the project and its connections to Catherine’s own imperial ambitions. Next, it will move to Madrid to explore the creation of the Spanish royal order that initiated the collection of Indigenous language materials to show the connections between the goals of Spain’s participation in the project and the Bourbon Reforms. This article will then shift its focus to the response to the royal order from New Granada, examining the ways in which Mutis expanded the collection to further the intellectual and imperial goals of the Spanish Crown. Finally, it will return to Madrid and the reception of the collection in the capital to highlight the ways in which Mutis’s knowledge of New Granada was incorporated into imperial policy.
Catherine’s Proposed Universal Dictionary
Whether in Saint Petersburg, Madrid, or Bogotá, scholars and officials always understood this dictionary project as an intellectual and political undertaking that could serve their respective empires. As one of her many initiatives while the empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796, Catherine proposed the creation of a universal and comparative dictionary of all of the world’s known languages in 1784. This dictionary was part of a much larger intellectual program that was designed to elevate the status of Russian history and culture in Western Europe and to redraw what Vera Proskurina has called “the symbolic borders of civilization,” with Russia placed firmly inside of both Europe and the Enlightenment.Footnote 13 Coming to power through a coup that overthrew her husband, Peter III, in 1762, Catherine spent much of her thirty-four-year reign refuting the popular claims of contemporary European scholars that Russia was a “barbaric” place ruled by a line of indistinguishable despotic monarchs.Footnote 14 To improve Russia’s political and intellectual standing in Europe, and, as John T. Alexander has argued, to challenge her own domestic reputation as a usurper of the throne, Catherine supported and even participated in a number of cultural, literary, and educational pursuits.Footnote 15 Throughout her rule, she inaugurated a national school system that created six hundred free public schools, established the Russian Imperial Academy, and wrote essays on Russian history, a book on Russian government and laws, and even plays in Russian that were performed in Saint Petersburg theaters.Footnote 16 Catherine also maintained frequent communication with European philosophes, including Denis Diderot and Voltaire, and followed contemporary intellectual trends in order to cement her legacy as an “enlightened” monarch.Footnote 17 Often instituting her own version of the ideas of these philosophes to reform the Russian government, Catherine is also usually regarded as an example of an “enlightened despot.”Footnote 18
The creation of a universal dictionary aligned well with Catherine’s larger goals, as the comparative study of languages was the latest trend in linguistics during the eighteenth century.Footnote 19 Rather than examining languages independently, these scholars collected translations of words and phrases in different languages to be studied together. This tradition was inspired by the ideas of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who believed that through historical comparative linguistics he could trace the migrations of ethnic groups to determine their ancient origins and perhaps find a universal language.Footnote 20 As an advisor to Tsar Peter I, Leibniz became interested in Russia’s vast empire for its many languages and ethnicities, and encouraged the collection of linguistic texts from its farthest reaches in as early as 1716.Footnote 21 Creating a methodology which Catherine’s proposed dictionary later copied, Leibniz argued that languages should be compared through lists of their most basic vocabulary, which included numbers, family members, body parts, basic needs, plants and animals, and basic actions. This semantic organization differed from others working in this tradition, including the prominent Jesuit linguist Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, who published a book of translations of the Lord’s Prayer in more than three hundred languages in 1787.Footnote 22 Leibniz’s organization was also different from that of Hartwig Ludwig Christian Bacmeister, who began collecting vocabularies and a sample text to use to compare languages in 1773. A German scholar who was working in Russia, Bacmeister’s comparative linguistics project was abandoned after the start of Catherine’s proposed dictionary; however, his practice of requesting linguistic information from European cultural institutions and the vocabularies that he had previously collected were incorporated into her project.Footnote 23
Catherine’s dictionary began in an official capacity in 1784 when she commissioned Peter Simon Pallas, a Prussian naturalist working in Russia, to begin compiling and studying the linguistic material available through the Saint Petersburg Academy. Originally designed as a project to compare all of the languages and dialects within the Russian Empire, it quickly expanded to include other European, Asian, and African languages, making it the first attempt at a global study that included data outside of the Indo-European language families.Footnote 24 Pallas explained the importance of the dictionary as the largest comparative language work that had been attempted in his Avis au Public, a pamphlet that he circulated among European scholars to announce the project and potentially gain their participation.Footnote 25 Alongside this pamphlet, he also circulated the Modèle de Vocabulaire, which contained the list of 285 “most essential [words that were] generally in use among even the least civilized nations” that Catherine herself had selected and helped to translate into Russian, Latin, German, and French.Footnote 26 Catherine also called upon leaders directly, ranging from local administrators of Russian provinces to foreign heads of state, even using the Marquis de Lafayette to contact George Washington for information on the Indigenous languages spoken within the newly created United States.Footnote 27 Pedro Normande, Spain’s Minister to Russia, sent copies of the Avis au Public, the Modèle de Vocabulaire, and a list of solicited books on American languages with his letter to the Conde de Floridablanca that requested Spain’s participation in the project. Specifically asking for information about Spanish American languages and Basque, Normande stated that he “had no doubt that [after] knowing the purpose to which the work [was] directed and the high ingenuity that promote[d] it, any [Spanish] writers [would] gladly be employed to contribute to its completion.”Footnote 28
From the first proposals of the universal dictionary, scholars and officials understood the potential of this project to meet the entwined political and intellectual goals of their respective empires and the Enlightenment. Catherine’s dictionary used linguistics to follow the ideas of European philosophers who attempted to categorize the world in order to understand and improve it. Aside from her attempt to elevate the intellectual status of St. Petersburg, Catherine also used the project to gain more knowledge about her own territory through the collection of Russia’s languages in order to extend the presence of the state. The universal dictionary brought similar opportunities to other empires who participated in it, including Spain.
Spain’s Royal Order
In the hands of Charles III, the Russian dictionary project transformed into an opportunity to elevate intellectually Spain in Europe, and to gain more useful information about Spanish America and the Philippines. Upon agreeing to fulfill Catherine’s request, Charles III issued identical royal orders through Antonio Porlier y Sopranis, Minister of the Office of Grace and Justice of the Indies, to each Spanish American viceroyalty on November 13, 1787. This directive called on the viceroys to locate and send the notable books and manuscripts that were identified by Normande, which included vocabularies of twelve Indigenous languages from across Spanish America and the Philippines.Footnote 29 Viceroys were also instructed to collect the translations of an expanded 445-word list in these, or other known, Indigenous languages of their region.Footnote 30
Though unique in its connections with Russia, this dictionary project was not the first time that Spain participated in a multinational expedition to display its intellectual prestige in Europe. The Spanish-French Geodesic Mission of 1735 was a joint venture that included scholars of the Paris Academy of Science and two Spanish naval officers to measure the length of the equator in Quito and determine the shape of the earth. Both collaborative and competitive, this expedition resulted in publications by the French and Spanish participants to highlight their intellectual contributions and further Spain’s political agenda in both Europe and the Americas.Footnote 31 The order to collect Indigenous dictionaries was also one of at least twenty-two royal decrees issued from Madrid during the eighteenth century requesting colonial administrators to assemble information about the empire. The Spanish Crown had been issuing decrees of this nature since the sixteenth century; however, these eighteenth-century requests for information about the people, plants, animals, and resources of Spanish America were part of the larger reform-centered political policy of the Bourbon Monarchs.Footnote 32
Beginning during the reign of Philip V and reaching their height under Charles III and Charles IV, the Bourbon Reforms were increasingly focused on the reversal of Spain’s declining empire in relation to other European states, specifically Great Britain. Policymakers attempted to reform the existing bureaucracy, centralize power into the hands of the monarch and away from religious orders, and revitalize the economy across both Spain and Spanish America to deal with the financial and military encroachments of competing empires within their American landholdings.Footnote 33 As Gabriel Paquette has argued, this eighteenth-century “geopolitical struggle was waged not only from gunships and fortresses in the Caribbean, but from within the walls of the Royal Academy of History in Madrid as well.”Footnote 34
Alongside nearly a century of warfare in Europe and the Americas, the Spanish Crown was also fighting to improve its cultural and intellectual standing in relation to its imperial counterparts. To accomplish this, the king and his advisors authorized the writing of new narratives of Spain’s history, as well as the expansion of collections and studies of natural science. These new goals led to the foundation of a Royal Botanical Garden in 1755 and a Cabinet of Natural History in 1776, both in Madrid, which were designed to showcase the plants, animals, and an alleged favorable past of Spain’s vast empire to impress its European competitors. To fill this garden and cabinet, four imperial scientific ventures were also carried out in Peru and Chile, New Spain, the Philippines, and New Granada.Footnote 35 Beyond the expansion and display of imperial power, the primary goal of these related knowledge-collecting initiatives was the identification of plants, animals, and minerals that were potentially economically or medically useful for the empire to exploit as commodities. Alejandro Malaspina, the leader of the expedition to the Philippines, made this connection between scientific knowledge and imperial power clear when he argued that “without knowing America, how is it possible to govern it?”Footnote 36
When the order for Indigenous languages is examined in relation to the broader imperial goals that were guiding Charles III and his ministers, the changes and expansion of the project suggest that they intended to use the linguistic knowledge that was gathered for more than a purely intellectual contribution to the study of linguistics. Instead, there is some evidence that from the time that this first royal order was issued to the viceroys there were ulterior goals to use the knowledge collected to expand imperial control over Indigenous populations and to gain more useful information about the environment of Spanish America. Between November of 1785, when Pedro Normande sent Catherine’s request to Madrid, and November of 1787, when the Conde de Floridablanca created the official collecting order, Pallas’s original list of 285 terms expanded to 445 terms. The 160 terms added by officials in Spain were not only extensions of each of the semantic groups of Pallas, but they also contained words that would be useful to Spaniards attempting to gain information about the people, environment, and resources within parts of the empire where they did not have much of a presence. For example, the Spanish list had four more metals than the original Russian list, adding copper, iron, tin, and lead to the initial request of only gold and silver. The Spanish list also contained the cardinal directions, which would be important for communicating about the location of potentially useful objects or places, nine more terms relating to plants, including flower, seeds, berries, grains, and twenty-five more animal terms.Footnote 37 Though this could appear to be the Spanish Crown tailoring its list to the plants, animals, and materials that were in its empire, the practice of substituting the term for a similar object—“puma” instead of “lion” appears on translations of the list where regionally appropriate —was instituted separately by translators.Footnote 38 The Spanish list also contained an expanded number of terms related to social order and warfare. While the Russian list included only the words for war, soldier, fight, and victory, the Spanish list added the terms for helmet, shield, spear, friend, enemy, servant, king, prince, and law. Rather than the essential words that Catherine had selected for this project to compare languages to each other through common words, these added terms seem to be particularly useful vocabulary for understanding the political situation of Indigenous groups and imposing Spanish control.
Though the list issued by the Spanish Crown still met the intellectual goals of the universal dictionary, it is likely that the Spanish list was expanded to include terms that would be useful to government officials or naturalists who were attempting to extend their political control into the more peripheral regions of the empire or looking for potentially unknown or lucrative natural resources that could become commodities. It is unclear who in Madrid added these terms to the list that was issued to the viceroys, but this secondary use of the project did meet the goals of the Conde de Floridablanca, who was particularly concerned about the economic improvement of Spanish America and its defenses against invading European and hostile Indigenous nations.Footnote 39 The addition of 160 useful terms to this linguistic collection was also not the first time that the empire used Indigenous language knowledge to gain information about the resources and geography of Spanish America. Beginning in the sixteenth century, naturalists, specifically Francisco Hernández, began studying Indigenous languages to gain information about the characteristics of potentially useful plants and animals, as well as the local environment.Footnote 40 Bourbon reformers in Madrid may have been participating in a centuries-long tradition of using Indigenous languages to expand their knowledge of the empire.
The Response from New Granada
The next changes to this royal collecting order came primarily from inside the colonies, after the viceroys received the request to find and send the vocabularies of the twelve specified Indigenous languages and collect translations of the newly expanded 445-word list. As the king’s primary representatives on the ground in the colonies, these viceroys were expected to know which individuals within their borders had the capacity to carry out this request and were entrusted with the authority to endow whomever they selected with the leadership of the collecting project. Roughly seven months after the order was issued, the archbishop-viceroy of New Granada, Antonio Caballero y Góngora, sent word back to Porlier y Sopranis, Minister of the Indies, that he had given the project to José Celestino Mutis, who he viewed as “well versed in this type of study.”Footnote 41
An Iberian physician turned naturalist, Mutis had been in New Granada since 1760. Like so many other Spaniards in the colonies, Mutis was from Andalusia, where he had also studied medicine at both the College of Surgery in Cádiz and the University of Seville, before working at the General Hospital of Madrid. Arriving at the age of twenty-eight in the port city of Cartagena de Indias as the physician to Viceroy Pedro Messía de la Cerda, Mutis spent the next forty-eight years in New Granada until his death in 1808. While Mutis is best known for his leadership of the Royal Botanical Expedition of New Granada, he spent his first twenty years in the colony as a physician, a professor of math and astronomy at the Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Senora del Rosario, an administrator of two silver mines, and even became ordained as a priest. Outside of these official appointments, Mutis also dabbled in a variety of other scientific and intellectual pursuits, including the completion of an extended study of ants, participation in the construction of what is now the National Observatory of Colombia, and the collecting of various plants, animals, and books, before and during his leadership of the expedition.Footnote 42
It is unclear exactly how Caballero y Góngora determined that Mutis had linguistic experience—it is possible that he was selected to lead this collecting project due to the positions that he held at the local university, that Caballero y Góngora knew of the Indigenous linguistic texts that Mutis already possessed, or due to the wide web of informants that Mutis had previously established and called upon for his other scientific endeavors.Footnote 43 It is also possible that he was appointed because studies of non-European linguistic knowledge often fell within the purview of natural science during this period. Outside of his leadership of Catherine’s dictionary, Peter Simon Pallas was a naturalist who is better known for the botanical and zoological surveys of his scientific expeditions to Siberia, Ukraine, and the Crimean Peninsula, and the animals he identified that still carry his name today, including the manul, or Pallas’s Cat. Handwritten glossaries of Russian languages were also collected as a part of expeditions from the Russian Academy of Sciences to assess the geography, population, and natural resources of the empire beginning under the reign of Peter I.Footnote 44 Regardless of the reason for charging Mutis with another imperial project, Caballero y Góngora attached to his response two letters written by Mutis that detailed his revised vision for the initiative that would be carried out in the region over the three years that followed.
Instead of fulfilling the requests of the imperial order as they were written, Mutis proposed alterations to create a hybrid project that both served the requests of Catherine II and constituted a new venture that was better aligned to the needs of the Spanish Empire and Mutis’s own ideas of linguistic collecting. Immediately after receiving word of the proposed dictionary, Mutis responded that he already possessed the only two original manuscripts of the Chibcha or Mosca language.Footnote 45 In a second attached letter that was written one month later, Mutis signaled his expansion of the original initiative, stating that “the two original manuscripts (in the Achagua language) by themselves were enough to satisfy the royal commission,” but “they would not cease to carry forward the work they had begun.”Footnote 46 Aside from beginning a collection project that was already complete in the eyes of the empire, Mutis also proposed that multiple copies would be made of each manuscript, with one remaining in Bogotá, to ensure that nothing was completely lost to possible shipwreck on the way to Europe, and another copy that would stay in Madrid, to ensure that the linguistic knowledge would not be abandoned to foreigners in Russia.Footnote 47
Mutis’s request that copies be made of these books was quickly granted by the Crown. In a letter written just four months later on September 12, 1788, Antonio Porlier y Sopranis informed the archbishop-viceroy of the king’s approval that copies should be made “so that such precious documents are preserved.”Footnote 48 These changes were also fully realized for the entire imperial project two years later when an official in Spain wrote in the margins of a letter that the manuscripts sent from Spanish America would be kept in a library in Madrid, and that they planned to send only copies to Saint Petersburg.Footnote 49 Within months of receiving the royal order, the response of New Granada and the linguistic project for the empire had already been shaped by Mutis and his preexisting private collecting project. While officials in Madrid were already interested in this linguistic project for its potential uses to Spain both intellectually and politically, Mutis’s proposals expanded and changed the project to further benefit the empire by including more languages and creating a permanent repository of these languages for the empire’s later use.
The alterations that Mutis made to the royal order reflect the original goals of his private collecting project and the knowledge that he had acquired from his web of initial informants. In the first attached letter, Mutis revealed that “since [his] arrival in this Kingdom, [he had] plans to form a collection of printed and manuscript books in the languages of the Americas … to deposit in some academy of fine arts to contribute to the study of philology.”Footnote 50 To complete his small collecting project, Mutis had relied on a network of priests who were attempting to Christianize the Indigenous populations at the furthest edges of Spain’s claimed empire. By the eighteenth century, missionaries in Spanish America had a long history of collecting and using Indigenous languages. Since the Council of Trent’s insistence on the use of vernacular languages for religious instruction and a 1596 order of Philip II that the priests spreading Christianity in the Americas should “know the Indians’ language,” missionaries had attempted to learn and record Indigenous languages in order to proselytize in them.Footnote 51 Across the empire, missionaries used these languages to teach, administer confession, and preach, as both the Crown and the Church believed that it was the most effective way to convert Indigenous peoples.Footnote 52 It is for these reasons that many of the Indigenous texts collected were catechisms, some even printed in Mexico and Peru, or vocabularies compiled and preserved by Catholic Orders.
Through the connections that Mutis created with the priests of New Granada, he stated that in 1764, over twenty years before the imperial order was issued, he started his private collection of Indigenous language texts when he became the owner of the only two original manuscripts of the dictionary of the Cibcha or Mosca language. He acquired these texts when Fathers Manuel Román and Manuel Parada, two Jesuit priests, removed them from the library at the College of Tunja. Mutis referred to these texts in his letters as “priceless treasures,” as Chibcha had been the primary language of the Muisca Confederation, which had encompassed most of modern-day Cundinamarca and parts of Santander and Boyacá, but the language had largely been eradicated by the time that Mutis was writing in 1787.Footnote 53 Mutis also indicated that he had at least one other Jesuit informant, as he explained that he had been promised a grammar of the Saliba language, which was primarily spoken in the Orinoco River Basin near what is now the eastern border of Colombia, and had knowledge of a dictionary in the Achagua language, which was spoken in the modern-day Meta Department of east-central Colombia. At some point before the royal order was issued from Madrid, Mutis had even contacted Don Francisco Dominguez, the commissioner in this region, to request that he send the Achagua dictionary or any information on the language that could be found.Footnote 54 It was these texts, and the other “riches of the [Jesuit] archives and missions,” that Mutis feared had been lost with their expulsion from the empire in 1767.Footnote 55
Outside of the Jesuit Order, Mutis also called upon Friar Diego García Mejí for Indigenous linguistic texts both before and during the official imperial project.Footnote 56 A Franciscan priest from Cartagena, García had served as a traveling informant for both the archbishop-viceroy and the botanical expedition since 1783.Footnote 57 He is credited as supplying Mutis with an otoba plant, a collection of birds, caterpillars, and a live brown-throated sloth, as well as sending information on shells, snails, lead, animals, emerald mines, and the Indigenous peoples of Caquetá y Putumayo to the archbishop-viceroy.Footnote 58 From the final list of Indigenous texts collected from New Granada, it is likely that he contributed the vocabulary and catechism in Motilona, as that is the language of the U’wa informants who taught him the medicinal uses of the bark of the otoba that he sent to Mutis to cultivate for the empire.Footnote 59 It is also likely that he supplied the vocabulary in Andaquí, as he spent most of 1785 in the mountains of Caquetá y Putumayo to learn from the Andaquí about the canella tree and supply information to the archbishop-viceroy about the Indigenous people there.Footnote 60
Beyond his reliance on the informants of his original collection, Mutis used the opportunity of state sponsorship to further grow his networks. Due to the expansive nature of the project, the relatively short window of time envisioned by the Crown, and the need to collect, copy, and translate the necessary texts and words, Mutis gained two new assistants, Father Anselmo Álvarez, the First Royal Librarian of Santa Fe, and Don Diego Ugalde, a secular priest from Caracas who was serving as Caballero y Góngora’s Secretary of the Chamber at the Cathedral of Bogotá.Footnote 61 Although Álvarez and Ugalde were officially listed as assistants to Mutis, they had both been connected to the archbishop-viceroy before the project began and were called upon for their specific skills that would be useful in creating the collection. There is not much written about Álvarez’s contribution to this project, but he was appointed by the archbishop-viceroy to various other evangelization endeavors before and after his time assisting Mutis. Due to his position as the Royal Librarian of Santa Fe, he was also selected for this project because Caballero y Góngora thought that he would “be able to shed light on the books” needed to complete the collection.Footnote 62
Diego Ugalde, Mutis’s other assistant, also played a key role in the acquisition, expansion, and the compilation of the language collection. As the secretary to Caballero y Góngora at the Cathedral of Bogotá, Ugalde had been in contact with Mutis and the botanical expedition since at least 1786, after Caballero y Góngora had become confined to Cartagena during his final years in New Granada due to his poor health.Footnote 63 After receiving the royal order, the archbishop-viceroy immediately sent a copy to Ugalde, enlisting his help in assembling the collection and instructing him to “make use of those missionaries or persons of skill whom [he knows] have lived near the Indian nations” to acquire the requested books and translations of the word list in Indigenous languages.Footnote 64 Between February and April of 1788, Ugalde used his knowledge and connections to missionaries across New Granada to receive information about languages that were not requested by the Crown or found by Mutis, further expanding the project. In response to an initial report that Ugalde sent on his findings, Caballero y Góngora stated that he believed that with the materials collected by both Ugalde and Mutis, they would “have enough to more than satisfy the curiosity of those interested in this [linguistic] research, and especially the desire expressed by the king to please the Russian court.”Footnote 65 Ugalde also appears to have suggested that the archbishop-viceroy attempt to gain information about the languages used by the Indigenous populations of the Darién, as he was in contact with one of their governors.Footnote 66 In a letter from June of that same year, Caballero y Góngora reported back to Ugalde that he had gotten “some information on the general language of the Darién, but everything is nothing more than mere nomenclatures and the most common terms.”Footnote 67 He also further informed Ugalde that he was still looking for the Quechua dictionary that Ugalde had told him was in Cartagena among the papers of the late official Francisco Iturrate, but he would continue to search for it, since it was “truly useless to anyone who kept it there and very interesting to [them].”Footnote 68 Beyond the linguistic information that Ugalde learned from his contacts, he also acquired a sizable amount of linguistic material that was added to the collection. This material included multiple books and manuscripts that had to be sent back by the archbishop-viceroy to Mariquita, a group of documents that Ugalde carried himself to be combined with those acquired by Mutis, and even the Achagua dictionary that Mutis had thought to be lost.Footnote 69
Between May 26 and June 10 of 1788, both Anselmo Álvarez and Diego Ugalde arrived in Mariquita to assist Mutis in combining, copying, and cataloging the linguistic collection that they had created.Footnote 70 It was Ugalde who wrote the final list of texts that were sent as the official response to the royal order nearly a year later on April 4, 1789, after Caballero y Góngora had named him as the “person incharge of managing the request of Russia.”Footnote 71 Understanding the importance of this information and the lack of knowledge about these languages in Spain, Caballero y Góngora had also requested that this list be sent to Spain with “a precise explanation of the merit of each [language] and the circumstances that might make it interesting or valuable”; however, it appears that Ugalde ran out of time before completing these explanations, as only the inventory was sent.Footnote 72
Though many of the individuals who contributed to the collection are obscured by the final list Ugalde created, it does offer some further insight into the ways in which these materials were acquired. Beginning with books, the list contained vocabularies and Catholic texts written in languages spoken primarily outside of the viceroyalty, including Quechua, Aymara, and Maya. Though none of these books were the specific editions solicited in the order, there is overlap between some of the requested languages and those sent, namely Quechua and Aymara. It is unclear exactly how each of these texts was collected in New Granada, but the vocabulary of Quechua was likely the copy that Ugalde had instructed Caballero y Góngora to retrieve in Cartagena. Nearly all of the books sent were also printed in either Peru or Mexico, which indicates some intra-American book circulation. Ugalde also inventoried the manuscripts that were collected, which far exceeded the dictionaries of Chibcha and Achagua that Mutis had previously acquired to include those of at least ten other languages. As indicated by Ugalde, most of these texts were collected from missions, likely through his own connections, and came from almost every region of New Granada, from the western Andes to the northern coast of what is now Guyana.Footnote 73 Though many of these manuscripts are credited to the priests who wrote them, it is unlikely that they were the same individuals who were in contact with Ugalde.
Also left uncredited in the final list of texts are the Indigenous individuals who created and contributed the languages that made this collection possible. While the manuscripts on the list are attributed mostly to priests, it is highly unlikely that these recognized authors worked alone or, in some cases, were even proficient in the languages indicated.Footnote 74 Instead, this collection depended on the contributions of Indigenous individuals who, whether through coercion or willing collaboration, had learned Spanish and instructed members of the Church on their native languages at some point during Spain’s colonial occupation. These Indigenous individuals taught the priests who were trying to convert them their native languages and served as interpreters for the missions. Indigenous collaborators were considered integral enough to the evangelization process that members of the Franciscan Order even considered creating a group of Indigenous missionaries who could preach and spread Catholicism in their native languages.Footnote 75 The acquisition and use of local Indigenous languages by the Church was an uneven process that occurred throughout the entire Spanish colonial period. By the eighteenth century, widely spoken languages that were used in regions with a strong Spanish presence, such as Quechua in Peru and Nahuatl in Mexico, had been collected and passed down by priests, often making up the Indigenous language training that missionaries received before serving in Spanish America. In parts of the empire where these languages were not spoken, including New Granada, Indigenous collaborators were still essential to the process of evangelization. For the linguistic texts on Ugalde’s list, Indigenous collaborators who had learned Spanish had likely provided the information and labor that was necessary to create these manuscripts.Footnote 76
Indigenous, mixed-race, and both free and enslaved Afro-descended individuals also likely provided other forms of labor that has been obscured by the documents recording the creation of the collection. While Mutis did consult more individuals who were not Creoles in his work as a naturalist, especially to collect plants, animals, and information about the local knowledge of the environment, he never credited these collaborators as naturalists or believed that they could possess what he understood as a scientific understanding of these plants and animals. Instead, the non-Creole informants who were integral to Mutis’s collecting projects usually received little acknowledgement for their work and were referred to as rustics, herbalists, and even laborers or servants. Andrés Ribero, who provided Mutis with collections of plants, usually that Mutis had never seen before, as well as knowledge about the common names of these plants, their qualities, and their local uses, is an example of one of these many informants who Mutis simply called his rústicos.Footnote 77 Though Mutis and Ribero worked together for years and Mutis was largely reliant on the knowledge and work of Ribero both before and during the expedition, he still did not see him as possessing a scientific understanding of plants and animals, even referring to his ideas as the “reasoning of rustic philosophy.”Footnote 78
The enslaved individuals whom Mutis relied on for information and labor also received little recognition within all of his botanical, mining, and collecting projects. As Liliana Angulo has shown, enslaved individuals like Cayetano Quesada served as informants and couriers of objects and information within this network, so it is likely that Mutis relied on enslaved people for their knowledge or to transport the linguistic materials in this collection.Footnote 79 It is also possible that enslaved individuals provided labor for the linguistic collecting work that was directed by the secular clergy, as there is evidence that the Archbishopric of Bogotá claimed ownership of enslaved individuals. Emeterio, an enslaved man, was forced to work for the Church of Nuestro Señor Sacramentado in Tunja before being sold by the archbishop-viceroy in January of 1787.Footnote 80 Further, a man named Varo was ordered by the archbishop-viceroy “to be at the service [of Ugalde] for whatever may be required” to finish the linguistic collection; however, there is no information about Varo, so his status, background, and the labor that he provided for the project are all unclear.Footnote 81 Though the only individuals credited in the creation of this collection were white Iberian Spaniards and Creoles, these individuals did not invent the linguistic knowledge that they gathered or carry out this labor alone.
The individuals who received the most recognition for their work on New Granada’s collection were Mutis, Caballero y Góngora, and the two Creole secular priests who assisted them. For Diego Ugalde, whose own religious connections played a central role in the acquisition of the texts for the collection, the project granted him the favor of Charles IV and a new position as the secretary to Caballero y Góngora at the Cathedral of Córdoba, Spain which included a monetary stipend.Footnote 82 While less is known about Anselmo Álvarez, it appears that his work compiling and copying the books in the collection inspired Caballero y Góngora to place him in charge of converting the Miskito people in 1788.Footnote 83 This role would have been incredibly important at the time, due to the necessity of securing this region from the threat of the British. It also appears that Álvarez remained in contact with Mutis and the Royal Botanical Expedition after the conclusion of the project.Footnote 84
The deviation of New Granada’s collection from the original order and the expansive vision for the project are also indicated by the results inventoried. Just two years after issuing the request for texts and translations in just twelve Indigenous languages from the entire empire, Porlier y Sopranis received the inventory and word from Caballero y Góngora that he would be bringing twenty-one texts and manuscripts with him on his return to Spain.Footnote 85 Despite having already collected more than enough information to meet the request from the entire empire, Ugalde indicated at the end of his inventory that they were still hoping to acquire at least three more texts. Within this note, Ugalde mentioned the Saliba language and at least two more languages that were unspecified. He stated that Mutis was “still waiting for papers of this nature” from Doctor Don Mariano Grijalva.Footnote 86 Grijalva, who was a Creole physician and rector of the Colegio Seminario San Francisco de Asís in Popayán, appeared in Mutis’s other writings as someone whom he had known and corresponded with, but had never met. It is likely that Mutis contacted Grijalva because he possessed a library with his own collection of language books.Footnote 87 The final book that they were still hoping to acquire was a “very old dictionary” that had been promised to them by José Fermín Minaya, who was a previous informant to the royal botanical expedition.Footnote 88 While it does not appear that either of these books ever joined the collection, the presence of these two connections of Mutis, alongside the missionary connections of Ugalde that are apparent earlier in the inventory, help to shed some light on the way in which both of these men enlisted their previous contacts to create a linguistic collection that far exceeded the one envisioned by the Crown. Ugalde’s note at the bottom of the inventory also indicates that though they had already surpassed what was asked of them in the royal order and run out of time to send these texts to Russia, they, or at least Mutis, were still planning to continue collecting these materials for the use of the Spanish Empire.
The impact of Mutis’s vision for this language collection is clear in comparison to those of the other viceroyalties, such as Peru, which in the same amount of time collected and sent only nine texts, written in Quechua, Aymara, Moxa, and Chilena.Footnote 89 Though significantly fewer manuscripts were collected as a part of this project in Peru, the result was still an extension of the original list of requested texts, which only included grammars of Quechua and Aymara.Footnote 90 The royal order to compile these texts was also carried out differently in the Viceroyalty of Peru than in New Granada. Though the eleven-year Royal Botanical Expedition to Peru and Chile was concluding when this order was issued, it was not completed by naturalists. Instead, the Jesuit scholar and humanist Ignacio de Castro contributed some knowledge of Quechua; Tomás Sánchez, a traveling surgeon, contributed a translation of the word list in Aymara; and the majority of the collection was provided by José Joaquín Ávalos Chauca, a chaplain and a professor of Quechua at the University of San Marcos in Lima.Footnote 91 Ávalos, who Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz has argued could have been a native speaker of Quechua, provided linguistic texts, a translation of the word list in Quechua, and an introductory essay providing information on the Indigenous languages of Peru, which is where Chimu and the language of Chile were mentioned for the first time as a part of this project.Footnote 92
Though the differences in the assembly and results of the project in these two viceroyalties could have been coincidental, they could also be a representation of the political realities of these two regions and the imperial goals of the project. Officials and scholars within the Viceroyalty of Peru would not have needed to use naturalists to collect this linguistic information as a part of projects designed to survey the environment, as Lima’s political apparatus was much older and more effective than the government in Bogotá. The reforms of the eighteenth century also proved significantly more effective in Peru, as six intendancies were successfully established in 1776 and officials were able to capitalize on the riots and rebellions against these reforms, including that of the Cacique Túpac Amaru II, to reassert Spanish control over local Creole and Indigenous elites.Footnote 93 In contrast, New Granada was only elevated to the status of viceroyalty in 1739 as a part of a larger attempt to reduce contraband in the empire and was still considered to be an imperial periphery due to its lack of economic development and isolated population.Footnote 94 Here, many of the political and economic reforms that had found eventual success in Peru either met with failure or did not have any lasting impact on the region’s economy. These initiatives included the first attempt to establish a viceroyalty in 1717, the placement of tobacco production under direct royal authority, and an attempt to institute the intendancy system, which famously resulted in the Comunero Revolt in 1781.Footnote 95 New Granada’s Caribbean coast also made it a constant target of imperial encroachment, illegal trade, and even direct military attacks and occupations.Footnote 96 For officials in both Bogotá and Madrid, the vast array of Indigenous languages that were collected by Mutis were new to them and could aid them in improving the political and economic situation of New Granada.
Despite making alterations to the royal order, Mutis’s expansion of the project still aligned with the larger political goals of the empire. Within both the private collection and the imperial project that Mutis envisioned, he used his knowledge of the people and environment in New Granada, as well as his extensive network of informants, to expand the reach and prestige of Spain. In the first letter that Mutis wrote in response to the royal order, he explained that his desire to begin collecting these texts came from his thought that it would be disappointing to know that these languages had once existed and been lost with the people of these “barbaric nations.”Footnote 97 This was also not the first collecting project that Mutis created on his own for the benefit of the empire. In 1763 and 1764, he had personally petitioned Charles III for a state-sponsored botanical expedition. In these two letters, Mutis claimed that Spain had a “profound forgetfulness” towards the natural knowledge and treasures in their American colonies and argued that “immortal glory that would result to [the king] from this glorious enterprise … [as] no other nation is so much interested as the Spanish in knowing and learning about the admirable products with which Divine Providence has enriched the extensive domains … in this New World.”Footnote 98 Until the creation of the Royal Botanical Expedition in 1782, Mutis completed his own private botanical collecting work without the resources of the Crown.
Long before this imperial language project had been officially sponsored, Mutis used his knowledge of New Granada to understand the importance of this type of collection, not for any reverence toward the Indigenous speakers of these languages, but for the intellectual value that these texts could provide to the study of Spanish philology. Despite Mutis’s proximity to the Indigenous speakers of these languages that he was interested in collecting, he made no mention of the people themselves in his correspondence and relied on Creole missionaries as his informants and linguistic experts. Mutis understood the languages collected during this project in ways comparable to the local knowledge that he received as a naturalist. In both cases, only educated Iberians or Creoles had the authority to interpret this knowledge, which was then only valuable once it had been catalogued for further study. In this way, the knowledge of languages that Mutis had been collecting became a commodity to elevate Spanish intellectual standing in Europe, regardless of the fate or consent of the Indigenous speakers of these languages.
The insistence of Mutis that only copies of the texts collected should be sent to Russia also emphasizes the way in which his goals for the project were ultimately in support of the intellectual prestige of the Spanish Empire. Rather than focusing on the advancement of linguistic knowledge across Europe, Mutis argued that these texts should not be abandoned to foreigners and that the dictionary of Chibcha was the “most precious thing that [they] could send” because it was unknown to Russian linguists.Footnote 99 Though Mutis maintained transnational communications with scholars throughout his life, he was always concerned with the intellectual perception of Spain in Europe. Even before his arrival in New Granada, Mutis had written that “wise and curious men, travelling through all the courts in Europe, hoping to find in Madrid a sumptuous and magnificent garden and cabinet of natural history, splendidly ornamented with all of the plants and precious bodies produced by the New World, admire nothing but the shadows of a garden and a cabinet.”Footnote 100 With these ideas in mind, Mutis began petitioning for and partaking in collecting projects that would make the colony more visible to Madrid within his first few years in New Granada. When creating his unique system for botanical images, he stated “that any image coming from [his] hands will not need any retouching by those who came after [him], and any botanist in Europe will find represented in it the finest characters of fructification … without the need to come see them in their native ground.”Footnote 101 When collecting in New Granada, Mutis found it important to be able to emphasize the complexities of the region in a way that could be studied, understood, and displayed in Madrid.
The Collection’s Reception in Spain
Back in Madrid, Crown officials embraced Mutis’s changes to the royal order, further demonstrating that his vision for the project supported the larger goals of the Bourbon Reforms. Rather than enforcing the original decree, the Crown followed Mutis’s suggestion to copy all of the linguistic texts, creating a separate collection for the empire in Madrid that would not be sent to Saint Petersburg. The importance of the collection for the Crown and the institution of the changes suggested from New Granada are indicated in a letter to the archbishop-viceroy from August 15, 1789. In this letter, Antonio Porlier y Sopranis wrote that the king had “resolved that all of these books be kept in the Library of this Secretariat (of State) from where the copies that are requested will be sent.”Footnote 102 A note written three years later, after the project had concluded, indicated that the books were still in this library, as “Antonio Porlier y Sopranis resolved that they should be kept [there] because they are extremely rare and that if they were requested, then they would be presented to the king.”Footnote 103 The placement and continued storage of this collection within the Library of the Secretary of State highlights a change in the way these books were viewed by the Crown in Madrid. Rather than a collection created for a purely intellectual undertaking by a foreign queen, these texts were seen as valuable to the state and were kept in a location that made them easily accessible to the king should he want to utilize them for the empire.
This new collection would have been seen as useful to Spain, as the second half of the eighteenth century was a time of fierce geopolitical competition between European powers, resulting in both military and intellectual clashes. As Cynthia Hyla Whittaker has shown, Catherine II was known to wage war by purchasing grand collections and important pieces from other European countries, even during times of actual military conflict. Catherine created the Hermitage as a way to display the wealth and enlightenment of Russia, “understanding that, in the eighteenth century, a great art collection was as much a sign of power as a great army.”Footnote 104 The Spanish Crown was very much involved in this competition and emulation of the policies of its imperial counterparts, as it attempted to reverse what many reformers saw as an empire in decline.Footnote 105 Though it has been argued that not all outside commentaries on the Spanish Empire were negative in this period, European depictions of Spain were still deeply rooted in the ideas of the Black Legend.Footnote 106 This historical narrative developed in the late sixteenth century portayed Spanish colonial rule as more tyrannical and barbarous, especially towards the Indigenous populations of the Americas, than those of other European powers, specifically Britain. Also popular during the eighteenth century was the idea that Indigenous individuals within Spanish America guarded their knowledge, usually of medically useful plants, from only the Spanish due to their “revulsion against the barbarism of their conquerors.”Footnote 107 Spanish reformers and scholars continually attempted to refute these depictions and other claims of backwardness and decay with the creation of their own historical narratives and intellectual projects that showcased Spain’s conduct in the Americas as benevolent in comparison to that of its rival states.Footnote 108 As Neil Safier has argued, even Jorge Juan and Antonio Ulloa’s Relación histórica del viage a la América meridional is an example of the Crown’s attempt to gain prestige in Europe and showcase the “enlightened management” of its overseas territories.Footnote 109
The unknown and nearly extinct Chibcha language would likely be something that scholars and reformers in Madrid would want to retain for its potential intellectual value to history or philology, alongside showcasing it as a contribution to Russia’s universal dictionary. Spanish officials and intellectual elites had long viewed Russia as an inferior nation that was suddenly becoming an imperial rival throughout the eighteenth century, as Russian elites gained recognition in the arts and sciences and explorers attempted to expand settlements on the Pacific Coast of North America.Footnote 110 The expanded presence of languages Indigenous to Spanish America within this intellectual project under Russian directorship would be seen as an opportunity to display the superior knowledge of the Spanish Empire and perhaps be used as a way to refute the narratives of its treatment of Indigenous populations.
Bourbon officials also embraced Mutis’s request to acquire the vocabulary of the Saliba language. This manuscript, which Mutis had mentioned in his first letter, had been created by the Jesuits decades prior and was referenced in El Orinoco ilustrado, a book published on the region by Father Joseph Gumilla in 1731.Footnote 111 Despite the fame of this manuscript, it became increasingly difficult to acquire after 1767 and appeared only as a potential text that Mutis was hoping to receive from a priest in Popayán at the end of Ugalde’s inventory of the collection.Footnote 112 Instead of abandoning this text, which had not originally been requested by scholars in Saint Petersburg or Madrid, Porlier y Sopranis sent a letter to Bogotá on October 21, 1789, that celebrated the conclusion of the imperial project while also specifically insisting that the Saliba manuscript still be located and sent to Madrid.Footnote 113 According to the new Viceroy José de la Espeleta, the vocabulary of the Saliba language was finally forwarded to Madrid in July of 1790 after it had been found through the Order of Augustinian Recollects.Footnote 114
Though Porlier y Sopranis did not state the reason why the Crown wanted this Saliba manuscript, his request that it still needed to be sent after the conclusion of the collection indicates that this text, and perhaps the others, were not only intended to be used in Catherine’s dictionary. It is possible that reformers thought that the Saliba manuscript would be useful for the further colonization of the Orinoco River Basin, to bolster Spanish claims to the region, or to symbolically ensure that the Crown, and not the Jesuits, possessed the linguistic knowledge of this area. Throughout the eighteenth century, this region, though claimed by Spain, had remained largely outside of imperial control, populated by a variety of Indigenous peoples and only a handful of Jesuit missions until their expulsion. The Orinoco River Basin was also under constant British, French, and Dutch threat and had been identified by Gumilla as a valuable place of potential Spanish commercial expansion and settlement due to the profitable crops that could be cultivated there.Footnote 115 Any knowledge of the Orinoco River Basin, including the Saliba language, would have been valuable for the empire as it attempted to strengthen its control over the region. The creation of the second royal request after the conclusion of the linguistic collection also highlights Mutis’s impact on imperial policy. When Porlier y Sopranis issued this second order, he used Mutis’s knowledge of New Granada to expand the collection beyond the empire’s original order.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the collection of linguistic material that was amassed in New Granada and the rest of the Spanish Empire never arrived in Saint Petersburg, as Catherine abandoned her universal dictionary project by 1791. Peter Simon Pallas completed and published a first edition of the dictionary in a two-volume set between 1787 and 1789. Written in both Latin and Russian, this edition contained Catherine’s 285-word list translated into 200 languages from Europe and Asia.Footnote 116 As the Academy of Science had continued to receive lists in more languages after 1789, Catherine ordered a second edition of the project that contained 272 languages and was published only in Cyrillic Russian in 1791.Footnote 117 Fëdor Jankovič de Mirievo, a reformer of the Russian schools, completed this four-volume edition, which did include some languages of Africa and the Americas, but these translations were not sent by the Spanish Crown.Footnote 118 Mirievo also did not follow Catherine’s semantic order, and instead arranged the terms alphabetically, which no longer emulated the trends of European comparative linguistics.Footnote 119 Catherine ultimately suppressed the publication of the second edition, likely due to its structure, which would not have helped to establish Saint Petersburg as an enlightened center of linguistic study.
Despite the anticlimactic outcome, the study of failed projects, including this dictionary, is still valuable. The acquisition of these linguistic texts provides a window onto eighteenth-century intellectual and scientific collecting, as well as its connections to Spanish politics and empire building. In the late 1780s, Catherine’s proposed dictionary had the potential to be seen as one of the most important intellectual triumphs of the century, as the tradition of comparative linguistics was well-regarded by Enlightenment scholars.Footnote 120 Having offered to produce Diderot’s still-renowned encyclopedia, Catherine was closer to creating a legacy-building literary project than it may now seem.Footnote 121 Charles III and his ministers could have never known that in the end the goals of this dictionary would never be achieved due to the outbreak of the French Revolution and Catherine’s own suppression of its publication.Footnote 122
Occurring in a period of Spanish imperial reform and revival, the process and outcome of this collecting project highlights some of the methods used by the empire’s elites to reassert Spain’s intellectual standing in the face of rising European competition. In the same way that empires formed alliances and waged wars to improve their geopolitical standing in relation to each other, they also leveraged their intellectual resources to gain power. As Spain, and even Russia, fought charges of backwardness levied by the scholars of fellow European empires, this dictionary, if published, would have helped to refute these claims and prove that Russia and Spain had the same intellectual potential as Britain or France. For Spain, this dictionary would not only demonstrate its intellectual collaboration in a transnational project, but the wide array of Indigenous languages would highlight its vast landholdings and imperial power. If Catherine intended to use her dictionary to redraw the borders of Europe and the Enlightenment, Charles III and his ministers wanted to make sure that Spain was included.
Rather than an isolated endeavor focused only on furthering developments in the study of linguistics, this project was also used as an opportunity for the Crown to gain more useful knowledge about its landholdings, especially those, like New Granada, that it still considered to be peripheries. Issued as a part of the vast knowledge-gathering initiatives of the Bourbon Reforms, the royal order reflected the broader goals of this period, as Spain attempted to centralize power in the hands of the monarch, increase control of its territories, and improve its economic standing. The extension of the list of words to be translated included terms that would be helpful in meeting these goals, specifically in relation to potentially valuable natural resources and the understanding of local politics.
Finally, this linguistic project shows that collecting was not a linear process that responded directly to state initiatives in the empire. For New Granada, the final collection that materialized was largely driven by the ideas of Mutis, the vision for his preexisting project, and the influence of the intricate network of informants that he had already established during his thirty years in the colony. This collection also highlights that projects begun outside of the state apparatus and within the colonies themselves could impact these official orders. The vision that Mutis had for this collection altered the results of the imperial initiative for the rest of Spanish America and led to the creation of a new and expanded project from Spain. Mutis and his collaborators used their knowledge of New Granada to extend and improve the imperial project to benefit the empire in ways that reformers in Madrid could not have imagined. Despite the knowledge that Mutis, and perhaps his Creole informants, had of the Indigenous languages of New Granada, their appreciation of these languages did not transfer over to the people who used them or change their motives for collecting them. In the end, it was not the people who created and spoke these languages that the empire was interested in, but rather the rewards that the knowledge and display of these languages could bring to Spain. For Mutis and his assistants, these languages needed to be recorded, studied, and protected within Spanish institutions, separated from their everyday use, to facilitate the expansion of the knowledge, power, and prestige of the empire.
Author Biography
Audrey Rankin is a PhD candidate in History at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her dissertation focuses on the individuals involved in private and imperial scientific collecting projects in the Viceroyalty of New Granada during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Her research has received support from the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Science History Institute and the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy.
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