Book Review: Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire, by Mauro José Caraccioli

• Date: 01 June 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211052600
• Author: Katherine A. Gordy
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

544 Political Theory 50(3)

are examples of how thought-provoking her book is. I look forward to her

future work.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,

authorship, and/or publication of this article: this work is part of research undertaken

in the project “Supersession of Historical Injustice and Changed Circumstances,”

funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under research grant P 30084.

Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire, by

Mauro José Caraccioli, University of Florida Press, 2021, 194 pp.

Reviewed by: Katherine A. Gordy, Department of Political Science, San Francisco

State University, CA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211052600

Writing the New World calls on political theorists to read the writing on

nature of sixteenth-century Spanish thinkers for their contributions to our

understanding of modernity and the study of natural history and in order to

understand the complex workings of empire, where nature was not just for

domination but also a source of knowledge and wonder. Sixteenth-century

natural history, in particular, argues Caraccioli, “was a contentious field of

narrative inquiry, and should be read today as a distinct genre of early mod-

ern political thinking” (3). Its development challenges the view that scien-

tific knowledge advanced as it distanced itself from spirituality.

The book focuses on well-known thinkers like Dominican friar and histo-

rian Bartolomé de Las Casas, “official royal chronicler” Gonzalo Fernández

de Oviedo, and Franciscan friar and “ethnographer” Bernardino de Sahagún,

as well as lesser-known figures such as the “imperial doctor” Francisco

Hernández de Toledo and the Jesuit historian José de Acosta. Caraccioli

shows how these figures were not simply agents of a violent Spanish imperial

project but also precarious and complicated intellectuals who saw their work

as contributing to a new world view not entirely reducible to the policies and

actions of the Spanish state, and who risked “life, limb and reputation to

defend an emerging style of inquiry that was ethnographic and empirical in

scope, as much as it exegetical and demonological” (4). While their encoun-

ters with, and accounts of, nature were attempts to domesticate and control at

the service of empire, Caraccioli argues it is wrong to reduce their intellectual

production to that alone, as most of political theory’s focus on liberalism and