This lecture on the sixteenth-century Spanish historian Fernando González de Oviedo’s seminal work General and Natural History of the Indies sheds new light on the centrality of Spanish and Portuguese scientific inquiry in the history of science in the Americas as well as in the rival European transatlantic and transpacific empires of the early colonial period.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is a historian of colonial Latin America, Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History, and Director of the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford 2001); Puritan Conquistadors (Stanford 2006); and Nature, Empire, and Nation (Stanford 2007). He is editor or co-editor of many volumes such as Entangled Empires: Anglo-Iberian Atlantic Worlds 1500-1830; The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000, 2nd edition (with Erik Seeman); and The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (with Jim Sidbury and Matt Childs).

Sponsored by: Hispanic Studies Department, Dean of the Faculty, Thompson Library, History Department, and the Antonio Márquez Fund.