For late eighteenth-century Central Americans, knowledge was good only insofar as it was useful and useful only insofar as it was true for their specific context. Focused primarily on the Real Sociedad Económica de Amantes de la Patria de Guatemala (the Economic Society) and its mouthpiece, the Gaceta de Guatemala, Sophie Brockmann's insightful and engaging new work delves into the meanings and manifestations of the Audiencia of Guatemala's practical Enlightenment. Throughout, Brockmann elucidates late colonial Central Americans’ dedication to making their landscape prosperous through the development, circulation, and application of locally situated knowledge. Taking up the language of her subjects, she argues that a specifically Guatemalan patriotic space and localist epistemology emerged through the recognition of the region's own peripherality and a determined effort to overcome that peripherality through knowledge in action.

Brockmann's work contributes a much-needed Central American perspective to a robust scholarship that situates the Enlightenment well beyond elite European spaces. Guatemala was a region whose men of letters readily acknowledged that their patria as it stood was no jewel in the Spanish crown. By examining the ways in which Central American actors sought to claim a place in the imperial jewel box, Brockmann highlights her actors’ awareness of the rhetorical tools and practical undertakings that marked the Spanish American Enlightenment. She makes clear that historians’ debates over the relationships between metropolitan and peripheral, and between universal and specific knowledge, were well understood by those we study. With the aim of practicable knowledge, Central Americans judged that straightforward texts based on place-based understandings aimed at useful outputs were generally superior to learned discourse. What good was Linnean taxonomy if it did not help a local official find the potentially lifesaving plant he sought? While there could be more discussion of how Central American actors positioned themselves vis-à-vis their other Spanish American counterparts, Brockmann illuminates a determinedly localistic and aspirational Enlightenment that expands our definition of the term.

The source base Brockmann taps also allows her to demonstrate engagement with this practical Enlightenment that stretched well beyond Guatemala City. Her close reading of the Gaceta provides a corrective to portrayals of closed circuits of government officials, priests, and wealthy merchants in urban spaces. Instead, she demonstrates that the Gaceta served as a catalyst and a vehicle for the creation of new networks that stretched into small towns and rural haciendas. Slow-motion correspondence that took place through the publication made requests for information—the best route along the Pacific coast, the geographic range of a particular antivenom treatment—into projects of collective knowledge-making in which strangers became collaborators. In reverse, the Gaceta and its audience, and those whose activities they oversaw, served as the enactors of the Economic Society's proposals, whether through the planting of cacao groves or the regular clearing of roads. This was a participatory Enlightenment that took a paternalistic but nonetheless broad view of who could contribute to its patriotic project.

That patriotic project relied primarily on an understanding of the landscape, both human and natural, as the font of the region's potential prosperity. Brockmann further demonstrates that this was inevitably a political project as well. Interventions to claim that landscape for local ends did not always map onto imperial ones. The tension between empire and potential nation is at play throughout Brockmann's work. Yet, in orienting her final chapter to the continuities in institutions, projects, and the individuals who undertook them across the divide of Independence, Brockmann emphasizes that Central American autonomy was rarely an explicit aim of the Economic Society. As scholars continue to debate the emergence and role of a creole elite in the making of new Spanish American republics, many will find useful Brockmann's careful explication of how, even without aspirations to independence, Central America's active, practical Enlightenment laid the way.