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Potatoes and the Hispanic Enlightenment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2018

Rebecca Earle
Rebecca Earle*
Affiliation:
University of Warwick, Coventry, EnglandRebecca.Earle@warwick.ac.uk
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Extract

Among the new publications tempting Spanish readers in 1785, alongside a comedy about jealous women, a how-to manual on forensic surgery, and a 600-page translation of the rulings of the Council of Trent, was a modest pamphlet about potatoes. Its author was an expatriate Irishman, Henry (or Enrique) Doyle. Doyle had for some decades resided in Spain, pursuing an undistinguished career in textile manufacturing. He had also drafted several essays on religious themes, with no impact whatsoever on the Spanish reading public. His writings on potatoes, however, were a phenomenal success. The 1785 pamphlet was followed in 1797 by a longer treatise issued with royal approbation at the behest of several important ministers, which was into its fourth edition by 1804. Newspapers and journals hailed Doyle as a patriotic and enlightened contributor to public happiness and seconded his ambition of extending potato cultivation across the length and breadth of Spain.

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Article
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The Americas , Volume 75 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 639 - 660
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Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2018 

Among the new publications tempting Spanish readers in 1785, alongside a comedy about jealous women, a how-to manual on forensic surgery, and a 600-page translation of the rulings of the Council of Trent, was a modest pamphlet about potatoes. Its author was an expatriate Irishman, Henry (or Enrique) Doyle. Doyle had for some decades resided in Spain, pursuing an undistinguished career in textile manufacturing. He had also drafted several essays on religious themes, with no impact whatsoever on the Spanish reading public. His writings on potatoes, however, were a phenomenal success. The 1785 pamphlet was followed in 1797 by a longer treatise issued with royal approbation at the behest of several important ministers, which was into its fourth edition by 1804. Newspapers and journals hailed Doyle as a patriotic and enlightened contributor to public happiness and seconded his ambition of extending potato cultivation across the length and breadth of Spain.Footnote 1

According to Doyle, the potato was a virtual wonder-food. Drawing on his familiarity with Ireland, he informed Iberian readers that the tuber was “healthy and nourishing,” and in northern countries adorned the tables of the rich while also sustaining the poor, “who eat scarcely any other food, and with this diet stay healthy and robust.” It was immensely versatile, as it could be consumed in so many different ways:

… boiled, roasted, fried, in salads, in stews or mixed with other vegetables. Peeled and dressed with salt, garlic, oil and water it is a good, very cheap food for the poor. Eaten with butter they are nourishing and enjoyable. Cooked, peeled, and mixed with sugar, lard and eggs they can be used to make tarts, puddings and other delicate pastries; dissolved in broth or milk, it is a healthy and nourishing food for nursing infants and children.Footnote 2

Doyle expatiated on the potato's many merits, which included not only its culinary qualities, but also its potential as an animal feed, the ease of cultivating it, and its medical ability to correct acrid humours.

Doyle's treatise on the propagation, cultivation, and use of potatoes was not an anomaly. His passionate and verbose celebration of the potato—the 1804 edition ran to some 250 pages—was one of hundreds of works dedicated to the tuber that were published across late eighteenth-century Europe. Agronomists, gentlemen farmers, botanists, priests, philosophers, and other patriotic individuals penned treatises, conducted experiments, sponsored agricultural competitions, disseminated seed potatoes, and in general mounted a sustained pan-European effort to encourage the cultivation and consumption of potatoes. Although many other edible plants, from Siberian buckwheat to wild rice, also attracted interest, the volume, geographic spread, and messianic tone of these potato-texts is remarkable.Footnote 3 What explains such pervasive interest in the new-world potato?

This article examines potato promotion in the eighteenth-century Hispanic world. Spain's potato-celebration extended beyond Europe, uniting enlightened communities across its empire. The potato's advocates in Spain and its colonies considered the vegetable from the perspective of new ideas about the relationship between food, healthy populations, benevolent governance, and the wealth and grandeur of nations. On both sides of the Atlantic, for men such as Doyle, potatoes formed part of a larger complex of enlightened improvements that would lead, ultimately, to a stronger and more wealthy state. These new ideas about the centrality of nourishing food to the practice of governance crisscrossed the empire, helping to establish the potato as a symbol of enlightenment. Such transatlantic conversations were a characteristic feature of the Enlightenment. Indeed, as scholars increasingly argue, the Enlightenment cannot be understood separately from these global conversations, which in many ways were the Enlightenment.

The potato's eighteenth-century Hispanic career also reveals the varied local articulations of enlightened ideas. Although the potato was a popular object of investigation in many parts of Europe and its colonial hinterlands, savants in Spain and the Indies had a unique relationship with the tuber. As they often noted, it was Spaniards who first introduced potatoes to Europe, and who therefore deserved credit for the increase in human well-being that they insisted it would enable. At the same time, the potato in its Spanish American homeland was a low-status food associated with the indigenous population. There, enlightened celebration of Spain's special relationship with the bounteous potato collided with the hierarchical nature of colonial society. Examination of pan-Hispanic potato promotion schemes illuminates both the global reach of enlightened discourse and its intensely local character. The Enlightenment constituted a process of movement and exchange of objects and knowledge, whose meanings changed as they traveled. This essay's aim is thus to explain why, at a certain moment, individuals across the Hispanic world began to celebrate potatoes, and what this tells us about the Enlightenment.Footnote 4

Precious Root

The tuber was the beneficiary of an enormous propaganda campaign in late eighteenth-century Spain, aimed at promoting this “precious root.”Footnote 5 Charles III himself sponsored the publication of Doyle's treatise and in 1784 advised patriotically minded Spaniards to encourage greater use of potatoes. Landlords in various parts of the peninsula followed suit, urging their tenants to plant the tuber.Footnote 6 Even before the monarch threw his weight behind them, potatoes were embraced by the “economic” societies established in increasing numbers in the second half of the eighteenth century in many Spanish cities. These organizations brought together avowedly enlightened members of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy for the purpose of advancing useful knowledge within an explicitly patriotic framework. Agricultural improvements loomed large in their concerns. Alongside their investigations of new fodder crops and superior manures they consistently championed the potato as an excellent source of food for both people and animals.Footnote 7

Economic societies in Madrid, Aragón, and elsewhere employed their standard repertoire of techniques—sponsored competitions, published essays, practical experiments—to encourage potato cultivation and consumption. The Real Sociedad Económica Matritense de Amigos del País, for instance, regularly offered premiums for the farmer who harvested the largest potato crop. The Real Sociedad Económica de Valencia did likewise. The Basque Society also offered prizes and conducted experiments in potato cultivation and the manufacture of potato bread, an object of particular fascination across Europe. They, like their counterparts in other parts of the peninsula, translated an array of agricultural treatises on the potato, because, as they explained in a 1786 report, they had long considered the potato “one of the most important crops that could be introduced to the benefit of the country.” They also arranged for Doyle's pamphlet to be read in public venues, to disseminate his promotional message.Footnote 8 Botanists experimented with new varieties and new methods of cultivation, and publicized their findings in journals and memoirs. The potato, reported Claudio Boutelou, head gardener at the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid, “is without doubt the most valuable item we have received from the New World.” In his view, potatoes, rather than silver, constituted the Americas' greatest contribution to European well-being and prosperity.Footnote 9

This potato-talk resonated across the pages of Spanish newspapers, including the state-sponsored Semanario de agricultura y artes dirigido a los párrocos, which was founded in 1797 with the express purpose of disseminating useful knowledge on all manner of agricultural enterprises.Footnote 10 Its many articles on potatoes explained new methods of cultivation and storage, described how to convert them into animal food, and detailed the tastiest ways of consuming them.Footnote 11 The Semanario's editors calculated the relative productivity of potatoes and wheat, concluding that wheat was more labor-intensive, used more fertilizer, and produced a vastly lower yield.Footnote 12 It published extracts from English and French works on the potato, as well as, naturally, an enthusiastic review of Doyle's treatise.Footnote 13 Interested subscribers were offered seed potatoes gratis so that they could conduct their own experiments.Footnote 14

The Semanario moreover published letters from readers reporting on their successes in growing potatoes and cajoling others to eat them.Footnote 15 Particularly extensive correspondence came from the parish priest of the town of Linares, in Salamanca. Having read about the benefits of using potatoes in place of wheat flour when making bread, he determined to encourage their use among his parishioners and tenants.Footnote 16 As he insisted, society received far greater benefit from such practical schemes to “improve and increase our supply of food,” than from abstract, esoteric knowledge about great men or historical events of past eras.Footnote 17 His first missive prompted letters from other subscribers requesting details, which the priest provided in a series of updates.Footnote 18

The potato's many promoters were quite clear about the reasons for their interest: potatoes ensured a healthy population and so were of vital importance to the state. Doyle was explicit about this associations between potatoes, population, and political economy. As he explained in his 1797 treatise:

As a population grows and multiplies, so it becomes necessary not only to improve the soil and increase the area under cultivation, but also to take advantage of other roots, plants and vegetables suited to the quality of the land and suitable for ordinary people to eat to sustain themselves, in order to keep commerce in balance at moderate prices at all times. Writers agree that the potato supplies this necessary help both because it is abundant and cheap, and also because it is healthful.Footnote 19

Spain's well-being, he concluded, depended not only on the government but also on the “zeal and vigilance of good patriots,” who should therefore promote potato consumption by the poor. All this, he made clear, would rebound to the benefit of the economy overall. After all, he insisted, “expensive food and cheap labour are incompatible.”Footnote 20

Doyle's text provides a clear example of the close associations between food, healthy populations, political economy, and the new models of governance that began to emerge in the late eighteenth century. In particular, enlightened discussion of new foods was inseparable from the ongoing debate over the concept of “population.” Philosophers, économistes, officials, and other members of the republic of letters engaged in a prolonged examination of the relationship between the number of people inhabiting a territory and its wealth. Adam Smith expressed well the close connection between the two when he asserted that “the most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants.”Footnote 21 As Michel Foucault argued some decades ago, these population debates signaled a new approach to the exercise of power.Footnote 22 These new strategies of power linked the management and regulation of populations to the economic and military strength of the state. The strength, size, and productivity of the population thus became increasingly central to new models of governance that viewed the inhabitants of a territory as a resource to be analyzed, developed, and put to use. The state needed to understand, and thereby control, the large forces that shaped “the population.” In other words, “the population” was far more than a miscellaneous collection of individuals inhabiting a territory. It was an essential resource. Good governance entailed knowing how many people inhabited the national territory, their economic (and non-economic) activities, and, especially, whether they were fit, healthy, and able to work.Footnote 23

A healthy and economically active population required an ample supply of nourishing food. For this reason, a nation's strength was closely correlated with its possessing “the greatest possible quantity of foodstuffs,” as the enormously influential economic theorist Jean-François Melon noted in 1736.Footnote 24 A plentiful supply of food not only ensured a healthy and growing population but also lowered the cost of living, and with it the cost of labor. That combination, in turn, would stimulate commerce and industry, another fundamental responsibility of any enlightened monarch. Such concerns were not purely theoretical. Advocates of these new ideas also hoped that by implementing more effective agricultural and commercial structures states could avoid the politically destabilizing effects of food shortages. Famines such as the one that struck Naples in 1764 reverberated across the continent, provoking riots in Madrid, for instance.Footnote 25 Debates about the merits of free trade in grain, the quest for more efficient foods such as the potato, and investigations into innovative agronomic techniques all reflected this new focus on the relationship between governance, food, and population.

The quality of the food supply, for the eighteenth-century science of the state, was thus both a matter of public order and a central component of a larger model of political economy, a model that associated national wealth and greatness with the energy and vigor of the working population. In this way, abundant, healthy food became increasingly central to the exercise of governance. It is this reconceptualization of the relationship between food and the wealth and power of nations that explains why countries from Switzerland to Sweden began to encourage the cultivation of potatoes, and why eighteenth-century philosophes and scientists so assiduously investigated the tuber's many qualities.

A substantial body of scholarship has demonstrated that Spanish officials, scientists, and philosophers closely followed and engaged with these pan-European debates about population, political economy, and the role of efficient agricultural production in fomenting commerce and industry. Spanish writers evaluated the merits of new economic ideas such as those of Adam Smith or the physiocrat François Quesnay. They read French treatises on the potential of innovative agronomic practices to transform commercial agriculture, and they composed their own contributions to these international conversations.Footnote 26 Enlightened Spaniards, moreover, shared the widespread conviction that healthy and economically active subjects were essential to the success of the state. “There is not a single politician,” asserted one, “who does not accept the clear fact that the greatest possible number of law-abiding and hardworking men constitutes the happiness, strength and wealth of any state.” To demonstrate this was easy, he affirmed, since even the dimmest mind could appreciate that agriculture, commerce, and the arts, the bases of all wealth, increased in proportion to the size of the productive population. A vigorous population also allowed a state to resist foreign invasion, he noted, concluding that “I do not believe it is possible to deny this self-evident truth.”Footnote 27 “A state's true resources lie in the happiness and robustness of the body politic, in an extensive and prosperous agriculture, in manufacturing, [and] in merchants,” agreed Francisco Cabarrús, an important trader and the founder of the Banco de San Carlos.Footnote 28

Spanish writers also shared the consensus that any population, however large, was useless if it was not actively engaged in productive labor. In a treatise commissioned by Ferdinand VII on how to energize Spain's economy, Bernardo Ward reiterated that “the most fundamental element of any economic system is ensuring that men are usefully employed.” The labor potential latent in the population was an essential resource, and good governance consisted precisely in unlocking this potential. Failure to do so was, Ward stressed, “the most culpable and damaging omission the State could suffer.”Footnote 29 For him, as for so many other writers, managing the population constituted the core of effective governance.

Spanish promotion of the potato referred directly to these close connections between energetic populations and the wealth and power of the state. Throughout his treatise, Doyle stressed that although the potato was eaten with pleasure by the wealthy, its utility lay fundamentally in its potential as a food for working people. He reiterated that it was highly nourishing, and that potato-eaters were “healthy and robust.” Like many other writers, he cited the hearty Irish peasant as evidence for the potato's healthful, sustaining qualities. Moreover, it was because these peasants consumed potatoes that Ireland was able to export millions of pounds of wheat, to the benefit of landowners and the treasury.Footnote 30 A working population subsisting on potatoes therefore fuelled agricultural and commercial success, at least from the perspective of the state and large landowners. The priest from Linares made a similar point when he suggested that greater cultivation and consumption of potatoes would halt the ruinous expense occasioned by Spain's reliance on wheat imports, which served, he predicted, to enrich neighboring states that would one day use this wealth to attack Spain.Footnote 31 The connections between cheap food and a strong state were also demonstrated by the potato's often praised potential as a food for soldiers. Doyle recommended its use in the munition bread commonly served to recruits, and later editions of his treatise pointedly observed the potato's popularity among regimental soldiers in Madrid.Footnote 32

Further adding to its appeal was the potato's ability to promote lactation in nursing mothers, and to provide a suitable substitute for breast-milk, both qualities that Doyle addressed in his treatise.Footnote 33 Infant feeding and its links to infant mortality were topics of keen interest in many parts of Europe, precisely because a strong and productive population depended on its ability to reproduce itself. Spanish books on the topic proclaimed this association clearly in their very titles: Concrete Causes of Mortality in Foundlings during their Early Years: Remedies for this Serious Evil, and Method for Making them into Useful and Christian Citizens to the Notable Increase to Spain's Population, Strength and Wealth reads the title of one such work, from 1801. Its author, a priest and trustee at Pamplona's general hospital, stated explicitly that recovering these doomed babies for the state would increase the population of soldiers and workers: “How many individuals—which we now lack—would we have for public works! How many laborers! How many honest grenadiers!” Not surprisingly, he endorsed potatoes as a highly suitable food for orphans.Footnote 34

The active promotion of the potato in late eighteenth-century Spain demonstrates well how the health of individual members of the population became linked to the overall health and stability of the state, and its economy. Late eighteenth-century interest in the potato reflects these new models of statecraft, and the increasing focus on building the energetic populations that would allow the state to reap “the benefits of citizens being usefully occupied,” as Charles III put it in 1784.Footnote 35 By promoting potatoes these enlightened bureaucrats, savants and priests both advanced the interests of the Spanish nation, and also demonstrated to other members of the republic of letters their patriotic commitment to public happiness and the common good.

Colonial Potatoes

To what extent did this association between food, population, and the wealth and happiness of nations extend to Spain's colonial possessions? Colonies played a key role in the new models of statecraft that were under construction in Bourbon Spain. Motivated by enlightened debates over the true sources of national wealth and grandeur, statesmen sought to reform Spain's relationship with its New World possessions to better conform to these new ideas. Converting the Indies into a productive source of revenue was a central aim of Bourbon reformers. The loose, inefficient structure of Spain's empire irritated these men, who complained that Britain and the Netherlands were far more effective in utilizing the advantages offered by colonies. Their campaign to modernize agricultural and commercial practices thus embraced both Spain and its American empire.Footnote 36

At the same time, the precise value of colonial spaces within the wealth-population calculus remained unclear. Did an increase in the colonial population translate into an increase in the state's “happiness, strength and wealth” in the same way as would such an increase in Spain itself?Footnote 37 Enlightened statesmen were uncertain. On one hand, under-population in the Indies was regularly identified as an obstacle to economic growth by both peninsular and colonial writers. Animated by such concerns, a newspaper in New Granada announced a prize of 50 pesos for the best essay on how to solve the problem of under-population. As the advertisement for the competition stated, “Without an increase in the population the kingdom will never experience true happiness.”Footnote 38 Reformers in both Spain and the Americas displayed a particular interest in the size, health, and vitality of the creole population. Projects in sanitation or quarantine systems, criticism of ill-chosen wet nurses, and other endeavours consistently sought to build up the fragile bodies of creoles.Footnote 39

Overall, however, advocates of reform on both sides of the Atlantic were most exercised by the “apathy” that supposedly engulfed much of the American population. This, rather than an absolute shortage of people, was identified as the real obstacle to growth. After all, as the Bourbon official Bernardo Ward noted, “When one says that a sovereign's wealth consists in the number of his vassals, one means the number of useful vassals, since a million idle vagabonds and professional beggars, far from being useful, are an impediment to the state, which would be much better off, and wealthier, without them.”Footnote 40 The problem of the Indies, most critics agreed, was not under-population but underemployment. The winning essay to the New Granadan competition explained this clearly. Citing writers such as Ward, it stated that “a kingdom cannot be said to be well populated, even if it is bursting with inhabitants, if the latter are not hardworking and engaged in useful labour.”Footnote 41 The Americas were apparently full of perfectly capable people who were not doing anything productive, and an increase in the American population was thus not a central aim of enlightened projects of reform. As a result, the close associations European philosophers perceived between healthy populations, food supply, and the wealth of nations loosened when placed in a colonial context. If anything, food was said to be excessively abundant, making it all too easy to live a life of idleness and inactivity.Footnote 42 Nourishing foods retained their powerful symbolic charge as an emblem of good governance, but their practical ability to increase the working population was far less relevant there.

Colonial discussion of the potato demonstrates well this cleavage between the practical and the discursive. The vigorous European pro-potato propaganda resonated strongly with the concerns of enlightened savants in Spanish America eager to demonstrate their commitment to the pursuit of useful knowledge and the public good. Creole elites across the Indies lauded the potato as a distinctly American contribution to human happiness, and emphasized Spain's (and their own) commitment to advancing botanical science through the investigation of valuable New-World foodstuffs. Their discussion of the potato helped articulate a colonial vision of paternalist improvement and benevolence. At the same time, colonial potato-boosters engaged in few practical schemes designed to increase potato consumption.

A clear example is provided by the Real Sociedad Económica de Amantes de la Patria de Guatemala, founded in 1796 by members of the landed and merchant elite.Footnote 43 Like its analogues in Spain, the Guatemalan Society was committed to the dissemination of useful knowledge, with improved agricultural techniques featuring largely in its concerns. As the society stressed, its mission was “the perfecting of agriculture and the mechanical arts.” Most of its attention to agriculture was focused on commercial crops; the “decay” of cacao cultivation was a topic of persistent concern, as were efforts to develop the linen industry.Footnote 44 The society also experimented with new fodder crops such as Guinea grass, for which it sought out seeds and published guides to cultivation.Footnote 45 Another concern was the kingdom's food supply. The society's newspaper, the Gazeta de Guatemala, echoed the views of Spanish economic theorists that it was impossible for arts and industry to flourish when food was expensive or scarce. The Gazeta monitored the availability and cost of basic foodstuffs such as maize, and reported on fluctuations in both.Footnote 46

Members of the Guatemalan Society were perfectly familiar with the potato's lofty reputation in Spain. Through its subscription to Spain's principal agricultural journal, the Semanario de agricultura y artes, members were able to follow that paper's regular reports on the potato's merits and its promotion by states and economic societies across Europe.Footnote 47 As a result, the Society was well placed to replicate the enlightened potato talk that featured so prominently in Spanish publications. The Gazeta and the society's annual reports reprinted extracts from the essays of the celebrated Count Rumford, famous for his low-cost potato soup. Likewise, the Gazeta reproduced Spanish recipes for economical potato bread, such as the one popularized by the letter-writing priest from Linares, who believed it would reduce his parishioners' reliance on expensive wheat.Footnote 48 In Guatemala, however, and in contrast to the situation in Spain, potatoes were in short supply. Potato bread and Rumford soup scarcely provided useful alternatives to local staples, which were based on maize. Nor did the society make any other effort to increase potato consumption among Guatemalans, a major aim of analogous European organizations. They sponsored no competitions for the largest potato harvest, disseminated no seed potatoes, and published no pamphlets explaining cultivation techniques “in simple language,” although they adopted all these methods in their efforts to promote Guinea grass and other commercial crops. In lauding potatoes, the society's did not aim, evidently, to address practical concerns about food supply.

Rather, potato-talk was Enlightenment-talk. The Guatemalan Society's enthusiasm for the potato reflected its commitment to an Atlantic conversation about enlightenment—what the historian Jordana Dym calls a “shared Enlightenment agenda.” As scholars have long argued, such conversations to a significant degree were the Enlightenment. When colonists in Guatemala (or philosophers in Prussia) referred to enlightenment they had in mind not only practical schemes for the betterment of mankind, but also a desire to keep up to date with new developments, and the conviction that the exchange of ideas would in itself lead to greater harmony and human happiness. Ilustración was a discursive practice and a state of mind.Footnote 49

Discussion of potatoes thus demonstrated the society's fluency in the language of improvement, public happiness, and good governance. This, of course, was one of the functions that colonial botany served in Spain itself. As the historian Daniela Bleichmar has noted of the novel plants grown in Madrid's botanical garden, “Their value lay in their foreignness, and the botanical garden used them to strengthen its prestige,” quite independently of the success of any particular scheme of agricultural promotion and acclimatization. In Spain and Guatemala, as elsewhere, botanical knowledge was a form of cultural capital.Footnote 50 Recipes for potato bread therefore appeared in the Gazeta de Guatemala alongside up-to-date references to European philosophers, debates over the merits of breastfeeding, public health campaigns, and articles attesting to the need to modernize agricultural practices. In this way the society's members were able to inscribe themselves into the republic of letters, regardless of the practical impact of their endorsement of the potato.

The gulf between the potato's importance as an emblem of Enlightenment and its relevance as a foodstuff is particularly clear in the case of Peru, where Spaniards first encountered the potato in the sixteenth century. The Peruvian analogue of the Guatemalan Society was the Sociedad Académica de Amantes de Lima, founded in 1790 by a group of largely creole intellectuals based in the viceregal capital. Its members enthusiastically embraced the rhetoric of utility, reason, and enlightenment. Their journal, the Mercurio Peruano, published from 1791, returned repeatedly to the need to foment agriculture, commerce, and industry, and displayed a keen awareness of the importance of natural history, in particular, to wealth and improvement. As the botanizing bishop of Trujillo observed in a letter reprinted in the Mercurio, knowledge of natural history and geography was vitally important to governance.Footnote 51 The journal likewise detailed the useful and unusual plants cultivated in Lima's botanical garden and described Spain's numerous state-funded botanical expeditions around the world. “States have always viewed the acquisition of new plants as matters of public interest … Our capital has not been dozing in this regard: we do not lack inquisitive patriots who for the last thirty years have laboured to adorn our fertile country with whatever they can acquire from the vegetable kingdom,” the journal boasted in 1794.Footnote 52

The Peruvian Society lauded Spain's role in introducing the potato to Europe, which in its view helped disprove hostile assertions that Spain's colonization of the Americas had contributed nothing to the advancement of humanity. Philosophes such as Voltaire or the Abbé Raynal might claim that the world had derived no benefit from these colonial endeavours, but for Peru's enlightened savants the potato offered an effective rebuttal.Footnote 53 Viewed from this perspective, the potato was evidence of the contributions of both Peru and Spain to knowledge and participation in the community of enlightened states. Spanish writers made similar claims. The potato alone, insisted the letter-writing priest from Linares in one of his many communications to the Semanario, vindicated all the labors of Spain's under-appreciated conquistadors.Footnote 54 The same point was made by other contributors to the journal, who agreed that through the potato Spaniards had provided nourishing sustenance for an ungrateful world.Footnote 55 These writers were particularly annoyed by the widely held (and enduring) view that potatoes had in fact been brought to Europe by Walter Raleigh. They patiently explained that it was Spaniards to whom the universe was indebted.Footnote 56 (French philosophers were unconvinced by such defences of Spanish colonialism. “How dare you try to balance the scales with the cochineal insect [and] the potato?” complained the Scientific Academy of Lyon.Footnote 57)

At the same time, enlightened Peruvians could not have been less enthusiastic about potatoes when it came to eating them. Europeans first encountered potatoes in the Andes, where they formed an important part of the local diet, alongside maize, quinoa, and a range of vegetables. Settlers quickly associated this unfamiliar tuber with the indigenous population. As one of the earliest European descriptions stated, the potato was “a certain food eaten by Indians.”Footnote 58 Chroniclers and travellers consistently stressed the centrality of potatoes to the indigenous diet, and described in detail both the ways in which potatoes were consumed and the novel methods employed in making chuño, the long-lasting freeze-dried potatoes that formed a staple for the region. These foods, colonial writers agreed, were “the bread of the Indians.”Footnote 59

Potatoes were moreover important within Andean religion, a fact of which colonial writers were well aware. The Jesuit naturalist and theologian José de Acosta, for instance, noted in his 1590 Natural and Moral History that Amerindians venerated certain oddly shaped potatoes, “which they call llallahuas and kiss and worship.” In precolonial times potatoes were often presented as offerings to deities, constituting both a gift and a meal. Catholic investigations into the persistence of “idolatry” revealed that potatoes continued to feature in clandestine religious ceremonies well after the establishment of the colonial state. Such documents record offerings of potatoes, alongside coca leaves, llama fat, guinea pigs, and other objects also strongly associated with the indigenous world. These associations endured in both community memories and ongoing agricultural practices. The Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala described clearly the interconnections between the agricultural cycle, and in particular the planting and harvesting of potatoes and maize, and the religious rituals that once underpinned the Inca state. Other accounts recorded the veneration of the Potato Mother, daughter of the earth goddess Pachamama, and the adventures of Huatya Curi, the mythic “Baked Potato Gleaner.” Multiple sources also described the cyclical connections that linked human bodies to plants and the universe. From both a culinary and a cosmological perspective, the potato belonged to the Amerindian world, a position that it has to some degree maintained.Footnote 60

In the viceroyalty’s hierarchical culture, the association with indigenous people was scarcely an endorsement of the potato's relevance as a food for Europeans or creoles. Indeed, there is some evidence that even before the arrival of Europeans potatoes did not enjoy a particularly high status as a foodstuff.Footnote 61 To be sure, the realities of life in the colonial Andes meant that in practice potatoes penetrated deeply into the foodways of the settler class. The pampered nuns at the convents of Santa Teresa and Santa Catalina in Arequipa regularly consumed potatoes, as their account books reveal. Even chuño, sprinkled with sugar, sometimes found its way onto such tables. The colonial diet was inevitably a compromise between practicality and aspiration, as scholars such as Jeffrey Pilcher have shown.Footnote 62 Nonetheless, for the Mercurio's writers and readers, potatoes were strongly connected to the indigenous world, and therefore to poverty and backwardness. The Mercurio's discussion of the tuber largely reproduced this set of associations. “Paltry” and “miserable” were the words most closely linked to potatoes in its pages.Footnote 63

Worse, some Peruvian writers suspected that potatoes were actually unhealthy. In the thesis that earned him a medical degree from the University of Montpellier, the limeño José Manuel Dávalos attributed the ailments typically afflicting the city's residents to their overuse of local foodstuffs, most notably heavily seasoned pork, manioc, and potatoes. Citing Linnaeus, Dávalos noted that the potato “is a true species of Solanum, and hence it is easy to judge it to be suspect. If used frequently it produces a harmful effect, even in small quantities.”Footnote 64 The Mercurio likewise published warnings about the lethal effects of excessive potato consumption by travelers, especially when accompanied by spicy foods and alcohol. At best, travellers could hope for indigestion, but a fatal dysentery was more likely.Footnote 65 The doctor Hipólito Unanue, one of the founders of the Peruvian society, agreed that these windy roots, eaten by Lima's poor, tended to turn sour in the stomach, and so were best avoided.Footnote 66 Far from promoting potato consumption, Peru's community of patriotic savants discouraged its use.

In reality, potatoes were a significant commercial crop in eighteenth-century Peru. From the earliest days of the colony potatoes had formed part of the tribute demanded of Amerindians, because Spaniards recognized their potential as a commodity. They remained an important item of commerce within the viceroyalty and between neighboring colonies. Grown by indigenous and non-indigenous farmers alike, potatoes were traded up and down the Andes and along the Pacific coast, providing a handsome profit for those able to mount a large-scale trade, as the Mercurio itself documented. Potato prices in the Lima market in fact increased during the years of the paper's publication.Footnote 67 Within the pages of the Mercurio, then, “potato” was at once a profitable commodity, a despised food, and an example of Hispanic enlightenment.

Conclusion

These stories reveal much about the role of food in the eighteenth-century enlightened imagination. The historian Javier Usoz has noted that during the Enlightenment “writing about economics … was the equivalent of writing about politics and governance.”Footnote 68 The same might be said regarding writings about food. The close associations between strong populations, nourishing foods, and enlightened governance meant that elite discussions of diets were rarely concerned solely with practical matters of supply, important though these were. This is particularly clear in the discussions of Spain's role in bringing potatoes to Europe. For enlightened patriots in Spain and the Indies, the dissemination of this valuable root provided concrete evidence that Spain's colonization of the Americas had advanced the well-being of all mankind. From this perspective, the appeal of potatoes lay in their ability to symbolize benevolence, improvement, and public happiness. Praising potatoes was a form of participation in the republic of letters.

As Antonello Gerbi demonstrated half a century ago, Spain's place within this bright circle of enlightened nations was severely questioned by other European philosophers. In the Encyclopédie Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D'Alembert described Spain as a torpid backwater whose inhabitants preferred to loll about drinking chocolate, rather than engage in philosophical inquiry or further the cause of useful knowledge.Footnote 69 “With few exceptions, the image that contemporaries offered is of a country resistant to enlightenment, rooted in superstition and ignorance, subject to the Inquisition, and ruled by the clergy,” notes one study of Spain's image in eighteenth-century France.Footnote 70 Nor were Spain's imperial ventures in the Americas viewed any more positively. Far from following philosophical and scientific developments, creoles spent their days sunk in “barbarous luxury, pleasures of a shameful kind, a stupid superstition, and romantic intrigues,” in the opinion of writers such as the Abbé Raynal.Footnote 71

These barbs stung, in part because Hispanic ilustrados knew them to be unjust. A growing scholarship now demonstrates that the Enlightenment sank deep roots into Spanish political culture. Projects as diverse as the reform of cooking facilities in Madrid poorhouses, the teaching of the new theories of political economy, and the promotion of improved agricultural practices were enthusiastically supported by private individuals, organizations, and the state as positive contributions to science and the public good.Footnote 72 More than 50 scientific expeditions were dispatched around the globe by the Bourbon state, charged with collecting useful knowledge to enrich Spanish industry and promote enlightenment. Wealthy ladies not only hosted tertulias to discuss the latest developments in the arts and sciences, but themselves engaged in experiments and investigations into all manner of topics. The culture of improvement embraced artistic taste, military engineering, public health, popular morals, commercial monopolies, and much more.Footnote 73

Spain's American colonies did not stand aloof from these concerns. Botanical gardens, astronomical observatories, schools of mining, reforms of primary education, campaigns for street lighting, and attempts to ban cockfighting and public drunkenness appeared across the hemisphere. Gentlemen scholars drafted reformist treatises infused with a belief in the power of human reason, while Catholic officials sought to reform religious practice to eliminate folk customs and baroque extravagances. Colonial officials and local philosophers engaged in the delicate balancing act of implementing such enlightened schemes while preserving or indeed reinforcing existing social hierarchies.Footnote 74 The potato vogue in the eighteenth-century Hispanic world forms part of this broader enlightened program. Discussion of the potato and its contribution to human happiness resonated across the Atlantic. Spanish newspapers published articles on the tuber penned by Peruvian naturalists, and Peruvian and Guatemalan newspapers reprinted reports on investigations undertaken in Spain. Information did not flow unidirectionally.

In a recent essay on the global Enlightenment, the historian Sebastian Conrad suggested that scholars should focus less on the origin of ideas and practices, and more on their interconnections. Far from viewing the Enlightenment as a European phenomenon that radiated outward from Paris and London, scholars increasingly frame it as set of global encounters that were articulated locally.Footnote 75 These local articulations were not mere echoes of events in Europe but rather possessed their own dynamics and internal logics. Nor can we separate the Enlightenment's European manifestations from these encounters in other parts of the world. Historians of science have demonstrated that during the eighteenth century extra-European dialogue played a central role in the construction of enlightened European knowledge itself. “Important parts of what has been passed off as European, or Western, science were actually made elsewhere,” the historian Kapil Raj has observed.Footnote 76 For example, the botanical knowledge displayed in Madrid's royal gardens of necessity relied on complex interactions that took place far from Spain between indigenous people, local elites, mobile scientists, and enlightened officials.Footnote 77 From this perspective the Enlightenment is best seen as a multiplicity of complex interactions between Europeans and diverse communities around the world.

The eighteenth-century circulation of potato talk across the Hispanic world forms part of this larger history of the circulation of enlightened knowledge, which in turn points to the traveling nature of the Enlightenment itself. Potatoes resonated differently in Lima, Madrid, and Guatemala, but in all three locations discussion of their merits formed part of a body of ideas whose central themes were the relationships between nutritious food, good governance, and happiness. Living the Enlightenment, the geographer Charles Withers reminds us, was always “a form of local cultural production and consumption,” in which different discourses and practices interacted. Thinking about place, he suggests, helps make sense of the multiple, contested experiences of the Enlightenment.Footnote 78 Examining these potato histories provides one way to concretize our understanding of the simultaneously mobile and localized nature of enlightened projects and imaginaries, as well as the important role that food, and eating, played in them.

Footnotes

It is a pleasure to thank the generous colleagues whose expertise and keen eyes enriched my own investigations. Sophie Brockmann shared her knowledge of eighteenth-century Guatemala. Kathryn Santner told me about, and provided copies of, documents from Arequipa archives, and Dennis Landis helped me with Dávalos's Latin. I am also very grateful to the John Carter Brown Library for fellowship and enormously stimulating environment that together made it possible for me to think about potatoes in Peru. My thanks also extend to the anonymous reviewers for The Americas.

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