When Spain sought dominion over vast early modern landscapes—from islands to highlands, deserts to rainforests—it faced a crisis of knowledge. To transform diverse natures into imperial wealth, the court launched the relaciones geográficas, questionnaires designed to impose informational order. Yet local informants proved unruly. They both learned the imperial vernacular and embedded their own agendas within responses, destabilizing Spanish categories. Challenging simplistic binaries of success and failure, this lecture reveals how attempts to govern nature sparked dialectics of authority and resistance, drawing on insights from Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue (Lever, 2025).

Mackenzie Cooley is a historian of nature’s entanglement with power. A scholar of early modern Italy, Spain, and the Spanish Empire, her first book, The Perfection of Nature (2022), reveals how Renaissance breeding shaped ideas of race, human potential, and dominion over animals. She co-edited the books "Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds" (2023) and "Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue" (2025). She leads Historical Pharmacopeias, a digital humanities project mapping the evolution of medical knowledge across cultures. She is an associate professor at Hamilton College, and a 2025 winner of the Dan David Prize.

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.

More info: https://lsa.umich.edu/history/news-events/all-events.detail.html/136094-21877841.html