This collection of fifteen essays is the first book published in English to provide a thorough survey of the practices of science in the Spanish and Portuguese empires from 1500 to 1800. In previous years, attention in what the editors rightly assess to be a burgeoning field has centred more on the birth of new disciplines like botany in Italian universities, the circulation of information in scientific circles like the Royal Society of London, and the work of collectors of cabinets of natural curiosities emanating from central Europe. What about imperial science, and specifically Iberian imperial science? We already have a number of useful texts highlighting Dutch imperial science and that of imperial Britain, but the Iberian empires came earlier and were in many ways larger-scale imperial undertakings. Here, indeed, does there appear to be a lacuna, at least in the English language. Filling it, we are also moved on from sterile debates, in Portugal at least, regarding experiencialismo – the nature of ‘experience’, distinguishing ‘scientific experience’ from the supposedly pre- or non-scientific ‘lived’ experience of the senses.

This will undoubtedly become an important book. The introduction has been strongly argued by a suitably eminent godfather of the topic, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, author of Nature, Empire and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (2006), who encourages us to engage with ‘mental worlds still largely uncharted’ (p. 5) and overshadowed by Anglo-Saxon prejudice regarding the nature of Iberian imperialism, traditionally summed up in the classroom as for ‘glory, gold and God’. Why is scientific impulse left out of the equation? Indeed, traditionally the eighteenth century has been seen as a black spot in Iberian history, an age in which Portugal was teased as the ‘Kaffir of Europe’ for its backwardness and slowness to embrace the Enlightenment. This, the contributors here argue, was far from true. Indeed, rather than rock the unsteady boat of political absolutism with the new ideas of French political economy, scientific discussion was a self-validating haven where the various ‘scientific’ societies established in various parts of the Americas and modelled on Iberia's example could meet without fear or suspicion of repression on the part of the political authorities. There are questions, however, that need to be answered. Why did so few eighteenth-century Iberian scientific expeditions ever see the results of their findings published? Some manuscripts, such as that of the Malaspina expedition, 1789–1794, have only recently been published (London: Hakluyt Society, 2004). Part of the answer lies with court intriguers jealous of outsiders’ successes, but also with the impoverishment of Spain and waves of political upheaval. It is a fact that many collections of natural artefacts brought back from the colonies were dispersed, or captured by invading French armies and carted off to Paris. This is the conclusion of Joel Simon's valuable and underappreciated work – see, for example, Scientific Expeditions in the Portuguese Overseas Territories (1783–1808) and the Role of Lisbon in the Intellectual–Scientific Community of the Late Eighteenth Century (1983) – which might have been cited in Chapter 13.

In this volume, we are introduced to the Pacific pilot–cosmographer Pedro Fernándes de Quirós, and his scheme to build a new Jerusalem in the forests of New Guinea; a vigorous debate between scientists and theologians over the nature of the 1680 comet above Mexico City; the ultimately religious roots of Juan Nieremberg's natural history of American wonders; an eighteenth-century Brazilian physician, José Rodrigues Abreu, and his work on the ‘imaginary geography’ of gold discoveries in Minas Gerais, on what gold was in the cosmos and on where it should be found; a study of one of the first and most valuable literary–scientific periodical publications to come to light in the Spanish Americas, the Mexican Gazeta de Literatura; vastly overlooked botanical texts like Manuel Godinho de Erédia's Suma de árvores e plantas da Índia and the 6,700 folio illustrations of plants produced in the wake of the José Celestino Mutis expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada in the last decades of the eighteenth century; and discussions surrounding difficult pregnancies in colonial Guatemala between 1660 and 1730. The contributions are structured in four parts, beginning with two historiographical presentations of imperial science in a Portuguese and a Spanish context. Part II engages with the new sciences coming to the fore in this period and the philosophy underlying them: cosmography, natural history and empiricism. Part III is principally a set of stories of science and scientists in local contexts that are in turn related to the global empires of which they are constituent parts, while Part IV relates to the kind of work already produced in Paula Findlen and Pamela Smith's collection Merchants & Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe (2002), namely an intersection of commerce, curiosities and the circulation of knowledge.

As David Goodman remarks in the first chapter, ‘science’ comes in all shapes and sizes. While he tries to distinguish between science, medicine and technology, in the Iberian languages ciencia can mean economics, knowledge, history and juridical theory. The scientific enterprise itself can get a bit lost in these cultural translations. Some scholars, such as António de Oliveira Marques in his work on the kinds of observation undertaken by fifteenth-century explorers, have made more room for simple curiosity as a motivation and a description of human activity; in their enthusiasm to blaze new historiographical trails, historians of science, however, can elevate the commonplace to heights which they do not necessarily deserve. Thus, for example, I find celebration in Chapter 12 of P. Fernández de Quirós's ‘apparatus’ by which water was extracted from seawater a little overblown: it was simply an elementary form of distillation with a ship's brazier. Unlike say, some of the groundbreaking work going on contemporaneously on many fronts – in astronomy, say, or medicine – ‘inventions’ such as these are pedestrian and, although indicative of a certain ‘mental world’, are not especially deserving of our attentions.