This collection of essays explores two traditions of interpreting and
manipulating nature in the early-modern and nineteenth-century Iberian
world: one instrumental and imperial, the other patriotic and national.
Imperial representations laid the ground for the epistemological
transformations of the so-called Scientific Revolutions. The patriotic
narratives lie at the core of the first modern representations of the
racialized body, Humboldtian theories of biodistribution, and views of
the landscape as a historical text representing different layers of
historical memory.