The Invention of Nature

Bolívar once again fled his country – this time to Jamaica from where he tried to drum up international support for his revolution. He wrote to Lord Wellesley, the former British Secretary of State, explaining that the colonists needed help from Britain. ‘The most beautiful half of the earth,’ Bolívar warned, was going to be ‘reduced to a state of desolation’. He was willing to march all the way to the North Pole if he had to, he added – but neither England nor the United States was yet willing to involve themselves in the volatile Spanish colonial affairs.

James Madison, the fourth American President, declared that no US citizen was allowed to enlist in any kind of military expedition against the ‘dominions of Spain’. Former President John Adams thought the prospect of South American democracy a laughable idea – as absurd as establishing democracy ‘among birds, beasts and fishes’. Thomas Jefferson repeated his fears of despotism. How, he asked Humboldt, was a ‘priest-ridden’ society going to establish a republican and free government? Three centuries of Catholic rule, Jefferson insisted, had turned the colonists into ignorant children and ‘enchained their minds’.

From Paris, Humboldt watched anxiously, sending letters to members of the US government in which he asked them to support their southern brethren, and then impatiently complaining when he didn’t receive answers quickly enough. His enquiries should be dealt with as a matter of great urgency, an American general in Paris wrote to Jefferson, because Humboldt’s influence ‘is greater than that of any other man in Europe’.

No one in Europe or North America knew more about South America than Humboldt – he had become the authority on the subject. His books were a treasure trove of information about a continent that until then had been ‘so shamefully unknown’, Jefferson said. There was one publication in particular that attracted attention: Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. Published in four volumes between 1808 and 1811, it had rolled off the printing presses at exactly the moment when the world turned its attention to the independence movements in South America.

Humboldt sent Jefferson the volumes in regular consignments as they were published, and the former President studied them carefully to learn as much as he could about the rebelling colonies. ‘We have little knowledge of them,’ Jefferson told Humboldt, ‘but through you.’ Jefferson and many of his political friends were torn between their wish to see free republics spreading, the risk of officially supporting a potentially unstable regime in South America and the spectre of a great economic competitor rising in the southern hemisphere. It was not so much what the United States wished for them but ‘what is practicable’, Jefferson believed. He hoped that the colonies would not unite as one nation but remain separate countries because as a ‘single mass they would be a very formidable neighbor’.

Jefferson was not alone in gleaning information from Humboldt’s books: Bolívar also studied the volumes because most parts of the continent that he wanted to liberate were unknown to him. In the Political Essay of New Spain Humboldt had doggedly woven together his observations on geography, plants, conflicts of race and Spanish exploits with the environmental consequences of colonial rule and labour conditions in manufacturing, mines and agriculture. He provided information about revenues and military defence, about roads and ports, and he included table upon table of data ranging from silver production in mines to agricultural yields, as well as total amounts of imports and exports to and from the different colonies.

The volumes made several points very clear: colonialism was disastrous for people and the environment; colonial society was based on inequality; the indigenous people were neither barbaric nor savages, and the colonists were as capable of scientific discoveries, art and craftsmanship as the Europeans; and the future of South America was based on subsistence farming and not on monoculture or mining. Though focused on the Viceroyalty of New Spain, Humboldt always compared his data with that from Europe, the United States and the other Spanish colonies in South America. Just as he had looked at plants in the context of a wider world and with a focus on revealing global patterns, he now connected colonialism, slavery and economics. The Political Essay of New Spain was neither a travel narrative nor an evocation of marvellous landscapes, but a handbook of facts, hard data and numbers. It was so detailed and overwhelmingly meticulous that the English translator wrote in the preface to the English edition that the book tended to ‘fatigue the attention of the reader’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Humboldt chose another translator for his later publications.