The Spanish “discovery” and conquest of the Americas hold a fundamental place in the development of Western philosophy. Debates in sixteenth-century Spain about human rights, sovereignty, empire, and just war informed the way these concepts developed in the centuries that followed Columbus’s landfall on the island of Guanahaní in 1492. Mauro José Caraccioli’s Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire adds a fascinating missing piece to this intellectual history, further solidifying the place that Latin America, its history, and its nature has in the story of Western political theory.

“The central claim of this book,” writes the author, “is that the Spanish natural historians of the sixteenth century created a new genre of inquiry in their representations of the New World’s natural environment” (p. 15). Caraccioli skillfully redirects the reader to view, for those who are familiar with this period, well-known figures through a different lens. Although Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernardino de Sahagún, Francisco Hernández, and José de Acosta are not, as the author points out, part of the typical political theory canon, each offers key insights into the relationship between nature, science, and empire that suggest they should be if we want to gain a deeper understanding of the origins of modernity and the meta-histories of the European Enlightenment.

The book opens by framing the study in terms of natural history as a genre of writing. It then develops across five chapters that revisit influential sixteenth-century writers and their participation in the genre of natural history. The theory-rich chapter 1 stakes out the main intellectual contribution of the book, as Caraccioli uses the earlier mentioned thinkers to develop “a typology of constitutive narratives” about New World nature (p. 15). Three frames are identified: the narrative of conquest, demonology as anthropology, and naturalist dissonance frames. Each “represents a different style of empirical inquiry, a set of theoretical presuppositions, and a range of political effects” used by sixteenth-century Spanish natural historians, while also simultaneously demarcating three chronological phases in the genre of sixteenth-century natural history that are then explored in the subsequent substantive chapters (pp. 22–23).

Chapter 2 examines the narrative of conquest frame through the writings of Oviedo and Las Casas, arguing that these thinkers transform the conquest narrative into a naturalist epic. In chapter 3, Sahagún’s writings are explored through the demonology as anthropology frame to showcase how the missionary’s role in the spiritual conversion of native peoples was indebted to the way humanity, nature, the divine, and the demonic were intertwined. The naturalist dissonance frame is taken up in chapters 4 and 5, which engage the naturalist writings of Hernández and Acosta, respectively. A critical reading of Hernández’s study of botany illustrates how, when faced with the novelty of nature in the New World, his creation of new modes of classification challenged inherited Eurocentric systems of knowledge and, in doing so, the empire’s scientific authorities as well. This story elucidates the broader “normative conflicts within early modern scientific thought” (p. 86). Acosta’s writings underscore further challenges of doing natural history at the behest of the Catholic Spanish empire, where the political and theological demands of empire were in tension with observation-based science. A novel reading of Acosta’s writings on natural history reveals a “distinctly modernist concept of judgement” based on philosophical observation that sought to bridge the religious and the rational (p. 104).

Writing the New World is accessibly written and theoretically novel in its focus; it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the imperial thinkers studied and enlarges the scope of Western political theory. Without giving in to hagiography or demonizing the thinkers studied for their part in the Spanish colonial project, Caraccioli succeeds in inviting readers “into the wonder and intellectual ethos that characterized agents of empire in the sixteenth century” (p. 142). Although the book does a masterful job of rereading these sixteenth-century Spanish writers as natural historians to excavate the roots of Enlightenment scientific thought, one avenue not explored is how these narratives fit into the way the Enlightenment itself portrayed the relationship between nature and the New World two centuries later. For example, the New World was an important part of the French Enlightenment imaginary, as the likes of canonical thinkers such as Voltaire, Raynal, and Rousseau—not to mention all but forgotten but once important figures such as Buffon and Cornelious de Pauw—turned to the nature of the New World to inform their philosophies. Among the sources of knowledge that informed their thought were conquest narratives penned by Spanish historians, but also the works of Oviedo, Las Casas, and Acosta.

Nature held a prime space in these French Enlightenment thinkers’ philosophies. One might even go as far as to suggest that some among them were also writing within the genre of natural history. The role of nature in Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (Buffon), Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (Voltaire), and Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (De Pauw) clearly evokes the literary act of writing the New World in ways that parallel Caraccioli’s historical excavation. Buffon proffered the thesis that the New World was a geographic space inferior to Old World Europe, with such natural inferiority implicitly exerting an influence on the development of native peoples. Voltaire and De Pauw would come to competing conclusions based on this supposedly “scientific” observation.

In the concluding pages, Caraccioli describes his work as intending to make “a contribution to the crafting of alternative Enlightenment narratives, capable of helping us think in other words and worldviews” (p. 139). The Enlightenment writers just mentioned did just that in the eighteenth century, as they carved out multiple narratives of the Enlightenment, some of which we contemporaries have inherited, others of which have been banished to dusty libraries. However, unlike their sixteenth-century sources, they did not travel to the New World. They did not have the visceral experience of being in nature while writing and discovering it. Rather, they built on inherited tropes and narratives; that is, the New World as already written.

Notwithstanding its focus on the sixteenth century, Writing the New World coaxes the reader to explore this important intellectual debt owed to an influential cast of Spanish writers; it leads the reader to consider more carefully the space that nature and the New World hold in the development of political theory. To pick up on the theme of wonder that permeates Writing the New World, contemporary political theorists may wonder, with earnest curiosity piqued, how eighteenth-century readers read the published Spanish sources, the extent to which the three framing narratives identified by Caraccioli guided their reading and writing, what the absence of some sources in their literary world (Sahagún, for example) means for the story that Caraccioli tells, and indeed what narrative frames they themselves invented and imposed when writing their own version of the New World. The same inquisitive pursuit could inform new investigations of other Enlightenments, such as the Scottish and German, where the New World also permeated philosophical developments.

Ultimately, pursuing these and indeed other uncharted stories that recover “the spirit of inquiry that drove sixteenth-century natural historians” (p. 140) serves to underscore the significant contribution made by Writing the New World. Caraccioli’s meticulously researched account establishes why these Spanish writers should be read alongside the likes of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Alexander von Humboldt: they “hold an equally indispensable place at the crucible of modern science” as an overlooked chapter in the history of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment (p. 34). This book revives and relocates the place of Spain and the Americas within the canon of Western political thought.