Science and Independence in Latin America (with Special Reference to New Granada)

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2829689
AutoresThomas F Glick (autor de correspondencia)
Año1991
Volumen71
Número2
Páginas307
Fecha de publicación1991-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2515643
OpenAlexW4246059995
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas28

T H E political and social upheaval that overtook the Spanish colonies in the early nineteenth century coincided with the maturation of a movemiient of renovation and growth in the natural sciences that had been buildinig for a generation or more. The change was manifested in the attempt to revise scientific curricula, replacing scholastic subjects with those more consonant with moldern scientific thouglht, with Newtonian physics at the core. Heightened emphasis upon instruction in the sciences plus the government's encouragement of taxonomic and descriptive research related to the exploitation of the colonies' vast resources legitimized the scientific enterprise among creole intellectuals, who embraced the quest for natural knowledge energetically. The increased interest in science led to the formation of nuclei of scientific activity, the most significant of which emerged in the areas where the Spanish government had invested most heavily-the centers of the three great Botanical Expeditions-Bogota, Lima, and Mexico City. The turn of the century saw the formation of national networks of scientific communication and the lessening of dependence on European centers well under way. In George Basalla's model, these centers occupied an intermediate stage between colonial, dependent science and fully independent national scientific schools.' The movement toward scientific independence further coincided with and was partly subsumed in the striving for political independence, a fact generally appreciated by naturalists of the time. That the former movement was, paradoxically, aborted by the success of the latter should not obscure the dynamics of scientific growth in Latin America at the end of the ancien regime

Government (linguistics) · Independence (probability theory) · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Statistics · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Studies in Science · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy