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Autumn

2019

Botanizing in the Borderlands

Published
2019-09-19

Abstract

In the 1790s, Spanish naturalists traveled the Spanish Americas to bring European medical knowledge and to seek out useful and commodifiable indigenous resources. The story of one such naturalist, Ignacio de León y Pérez, dispatched to the borderlands between Spanish garrisons and Apache territory, demonstrates the limits of Enlightenment science in the furthest reaches of empire.