These two path-breaking books, published by the University of Nebraska Press, make it clear that the history of science and knowledge in ex-colonial, nineteenth-century Latin America is finally coming into its own. As our authors betray in some detail, it has been an uphill battle. It is not only that the documentary base is often frustratingly thin if not altogether ‘missing’. It is also a question of academic legitimacy. Long dismissed as a backwater of ineptitude and chaos awaiting the arrival of European lights and order or, at best, as primary scenes for the heroic flights of solitary national geniuses (a variation on the same theme), these monographic studies reveal instead that the region generated hidden institutional histories of experimentation and invention. Indeed, both books document pioneering – if later frustrated – efforts to construct new orders and platforms of theoretical and practical knowledge.

Lina del Castillo's study of the scientific crafting of the Colombian republic emphasises the strategic importance of the postcolonial invention of a ‘colonial legacy’ of Spanish ignorance and cruelty. This invention served to legitimise a consensual, scientific project of nation-building that would open the new republic of Colombia to the world on its own terms. Driven by print media, republican propaganda would negate and finally erase the vanguard, Hispanic enlightenment of the eighteenth century. In turn, this pioneering postcolonial project would be buried by subsequent dependentista discourses that painted and indeed still paint republican Creole elites as backward, Europhile racists. As del Castillo documents with several apposite case studies of experimental reform, republican Colombians did indeed pursue a civilising, scientific project with universalising pretensions. But both the means and ends of that project were far too complex and contingent to support the standard dependentista narratives of ‘neocolonialism’ and ‘racism’ that have come to dismiss it.

For example, the surveying project to map and privatise the resguardos or commons in an equitable fashion among newly invented ‘indígenas’ produced not only new knowledge about the terrain and history of land use but indeed a ‘gendered revolution in land tenure’ (p. 137), with women household heads coming into the plots once reserved for male heads of kin groups. Although it has been established in the literature on Peru for more than two decades, this is an important intervention in the Colombian historiography. Del Castillo's reading of the invention of resguardo natives in Colombia claims that the category of ‘indígena’ was coined by Bolívar, who in his 1820 decree abolished ‘tribute’ and the ‘resguardo’ that sustained it. This is certainly true to the extent that the Colombian Congress thought so and cited the precedent. But the abolition of ‘tribute’, del Castillo notes in passing, was previously decreed by the enlightened Cortes de Cadiz in 1812. This too is true. But the author apparently fails to realise that there was an earlier precedent that complicates but ultimately confirms the wider argument. Indeed, both the name of ‘Indian’ and the ‘Real Tributo’ were abolished by the Bourbon regime as part of a series of administrative reforms carried out in the 1790s. It was the Bourbon reformers, not Bolívar or the Colombian republicans, who invented the ‘native’ and the ‘contribution’. Here again we are confronted with yet another invention that, although skipped here, actually supports this book's overall argument that ex-colonial Colombians negated the Hispanic enlightenment and then remade it as their own.

The larger point is, however, surely true: that ‘resilient resguardos’ built the ‘postcolonial state’ not only makes sense but it agrees with what is already known about Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia for the same period. Such popular, ex-colonial republican experiments as the redistribution of Indian lands are surely out of place in the standard textbook storyline of colonialist or nationalist ‘conservatives’ resisting Europeanising ‘liberals’, or of heroic and nationalist ‘peasants’ resisting an elite-driven ‘transition to capitalism’. Instead, del Castillo paints a more ambivalent canvas of contingencies. These contingencies expressed themselves in many republican experiments, including notable ones in cartography, political economy, ethnography, historiography and what was called ‘constitutional science’, or political sociology. These ‘inventions’ produced many new possibilities for social and political life that the historiography is only now catching up with.

In Mexico, Miruna Achim traces the long and troubled ‘invention of Mexican antiquities’ via the early career of the chronically underfunded if not altogether ‘neglected’ National Museum. The well-intentioned directors and keepers of the nation's museum fought wars on two fronts. Domestically, they confronted an uninterested if not frequently crippled state, with no funds for expeditions, acquisitions, storage or displays. On the international scene, they resisted a North Atlantic scientific consensus that deemed Mexicans unworthy heirs of the ancient past of their own land. Indeed, many savants thought modern Mexicans were quite probably not the heirs of that past since those ‘lost’ civilisations were likely founded by foreign races, quite possibly, as the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt had strongly suggested, ‘Asiatic’ ones.

That is, before ‘antiquity’ in the region could become solidly and centrally ‘Mexican’, eventually giving rise to today's world-class National Museum of Anthropology and related research and conservation institutions such as the National Institute of Anthropology and History (both heirs to the mantle of the National Museum), the whole question of the how and why of knowing the archaeological past in Mexico was up for grabs (and sale). Often, Mexican curators and scholars were obliged by circumstances to join or at most ‘edit’ and critique Anglo-American and European works and expeditions that otherwise sought to ‘conquer’ the Mexican past for themselves (William Prescott's Conquest of Mexico of 1843 was a good example) and their scientific and civilising projects, all of course in the name of ‘lifting up’ the Mexicans. In part for this reason, Mexican ‘antiquities’ ended up in the Louvre or the British Museum, if not in private collections, where many remain today. Still, Mexicans milked this cow of unequal exchange to make some small gains that, when circumstances changed, eventually paid off.

For example, Achim rescues the brilliant critic and keeper José Fernando Ramírez (1804–71), later dismissed by Mexican nationalists for having collaborated with the Emperor Maximilian. Ramírez's erudite and relentless criticism of European ‘system’ or armchair theory, coupled with his experience of exile in Europe, allowed him to gain a greater understanding of foreign motives and thus better protect Mexico's antiquities in the face of the onslaught of well-funded museums and collectors. Overshadowed perhaps by eighteenth-century ‘Creole patriotic epistemologists’ on the one hand and by twentieth-century cultural figures on the other, Ramírez and his generation emerge from these pages as fascinating figures who invite further research.

What distinguishes the scholarship of both these works is the careful attention to contingency and a certain reluctance to accept the collective wisdom, narrative or ‘system’ of the historiography. For del Castillo, this means unravelling the ‘colonial legacy’ for what it was and perhaps still is: a powerful topos with a life of its own that in turn gave and gives rise to yet more inventions. For Achim, it means suspending the all-embracing teleology of Mexican nationalism embodied in today's National Museum of Anthropology, while at the same time resisting ungrounded claims about knowledge and power recently advanced by Cultural Studies scholars uninterested in the local contingencies of history. The payoff is a more nuanced, historical understanding of what was at stake in the nineteenth century both in intellectual and institutional terms and of what key actors thought and, under the circumstances, tried to do about it. This understanding is basic to any general advance in the history of knowledge.