Sometime early in the seventeenth century, a native Andean named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1530s –c. 1616) decided to write his own account of the Inca past, together with a fierce denunciation of Spanish colonialism.1 An indigenous interpreter fluent in Quechua and erstwhile collaborator of the Spanish religious authorities, Guaman Poma had participated in the campaigns to “extirpate idolatries” in the Andean highlands.

The interconnections within the natural world as observed by European explorers and armchair cosmographers connected meaningfully in the eighteenth century with the longer history of early modern cosmopolitanism, relying on an evolving understanding of the globe and its peoples in all their particularities and diversity. This chapter examines the tenets of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism through the natural sciences by examining how individual actors, largely based in Europe, explored their world and described its geographies. Working across the disciplines of cartography, natural history, and ethnography, these individuals aspired to be inclusive within a cosmopolitan frame but often struggled to articulate a universal principle about whose knowledge should be included and whose voices should be excluded. These practices became critical sites of cosmopolitan contestation as they underlined a highly ambivalent attitude toward local sources of knowledge while proclaiming Europe’s unequivocal ability to describe and depict nature and space with a particularly vehement denigration of the tropical regions of the globe and their inhabitants.

While the conventional understanding within many Latin American historiographical traditions is that science went hand in hand with political liberation from the metropole, this chapter seeks to elucidate the ways in which the public sphere in both Spanish America and Brazil cultivated very different narratives and historiographies. In Spanish America, the republican public sphere aggressively set out to erase all connections between Spain, monarchy, and empire. Science became antithetical with the Spanish empire. The erase was deliberate and painstaking, a careful process of both forgetting and ignoring. By the time national historiographies emerged, the idea of revolution, republic patriotism, and science as casually connected became inextricably linked. In Brazil, there was a different process of forgetting. Science, empire, and monarchy never became disconnected and antithetical in the same fashion, dependent as science was on monarchical institutions that had arrived with the Portuguese royal family in 1808 Brazil. Yet the meaning of science did take a strange turn as science became, in print, the handmaiden of industry in a society that continued to witness a significant expansion of plantation slavery and the slave trade well into the nineteenth century.