1In the current issue of Ler Historia, Rafael Sagredo Baeza publishes a review of The Invention of Humboldt (Routledge 2023) that resembles the one recently published in Hispanic American Historical Review by Miguel Puig-Samper. I bring up the resemblances because Sagredo Baeza and Puig-Samper have coauthored texts and clearly share a close intellectual perspective. They single out the coeditors, Mark Thurner and I, for calling into question Humboldt’s character and integrity. According to them, we claim that Humboldt deliberately hid his intellectual debts to Hispanic science, a nonsense given that Humboldt repeatedly acknowledged them in his writings. We trade, they argue, in conspiracy theories and present scholarship on Humboldt and Humboldt himself as if he and everyone else afterwards have sought to silence Hispanic contributions. This, they claim, is nonsense because there is a robust historiography on Humboldt’s connections to Iberia in a multitude of disciplines. The editors, they argue, contribute nothing to what was already well known.

2Notwithstanding the reviewers, Turner and I, are not interested in hectoring Humboldt or Humboldtian scholars for their alleged moral failings. We are neither clueless Hispanists nor moral crusaders. Strangely, both reviewers failed to notice that in How to Write the History of the New World (2001) I argued that Humboldt built his reputation by shifting the so-called dispute of the New World away from widespread European critiques of Spanish sources as unreliable and useless. As French and British philosophes invented new conjectural histories of the Americas based entirely on non-written new forms of evidence, creating new historical sciences like geology, historical linguistics, and biodistribution, Humboldt defended Spanish chronicles and indigenous “codices” as sound historical documents upon which to reconstruct the continent’s past. Humboldt made his name by “defending” not just “Spanish” science but also the credibility of the documentation the empire had assembled over two centuries. If I argued this some 23 years ago, how could I then be so clueless today? Clearly, Sagredo Baeza and Puig-Samper have misunderstood the book.

3There are a few things raised in the introduction that do not make it into Sagredo Baeza’s and Puig-Samper’s reviews. First, Humboldt did not plan his visit to Spanish America; his itinerary was controlled by his need to catch up with a French expedition to the Pacific, not America, which he desperately was seeking to join. His intellectual agenda, therefore, did not come from preexisting plans cooked up in castles in Freiburg but from the nature of the problems and documents with which Humboldt’s host intellectual communities in America and Spain had long been grappling: How to interpret Columbus; how to read Aztec codices; the cause of larger hemispheric and continental climate patterns; whether there were riverine connections between the Orinoco and the Amazon; the need to develop Linnean herbaria and classifications of tropical plants; the nature of the continent’s geological and mineralogical volcanic structures; the biodistribution of plants in mountains; the continent’s political economies of slavery and mining; how to create demographic calculations through statistics. These were all subjects that became the corpus of Humboldtian scholarship. The question of the book then is not whether Humboldt ‘acknowledged’ Spanish science. The question is whether his new sciences were shaped ultimately by the trip itself and the intellectual agendas of his hosts.

4Second, the Spanish Empire had in the past created institutional structures to prevent foreign travelers from drawing on local knowledge while casting Spaniards and Americans as ignorant. Half a dozen French Academicians who in the 1730s visited Quito to settle the Cartesian Newtonian debate over gravitation (by measuring an arch of the equator’s meridian to elucidate the earth’s true shape) were chaperoned by Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, a parallel Spanish expedition that created an alternative set of publication. The chaperons had the local pyramids created by the French in Quito, to memorialize French reason, destroyed. The unplanned nature of Humboldt’s visit circumvented this policy of epistemological oversight but did not eliminate the deep suspicion of whether the baron would willingly acknowledge his hosts or cast the empire as the backwaters of reason. The book, then, seeks to explore the deep skepticism with which the traveler and his work were originally received, leading to substantive critiques of his work in the societies he visited.

5Third, Humboldt’s work began to appear precisely when the Spanish empire was coming apart in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion. Local patriots in the Americas helped promote his scholarship as it solved one key epistemological contradiction among his recently-turned-anti-colonial hosts: How to cast Spain as an obscurantist empire while promoting the new nations’ geological and natural bounty as collateral for loans in European courts to equip patriots’ armies and gain diplomatic recognition. The book investigates, therefore, why the original skepticism with which he was greeted turned into adulation within a generation.

6Fourth, Humboldt cited his hosts repeatedly without acknowledging or engaging with key intellectual, archival, and material gifts he received. Many local scholars resented this lack of generosity, and some even publicly denounced him. The book, therefore, traces current debates on the geopolitics of citation back to this period. How geopolitical and epistemology authority is created? Who decides?

7Fifth, Humboldt was an empresario of knowledge and networking who cared deeply about his self-image. He attached his name to certain symbols like the Chimborazo and Columbus, among others. Thus, the book seeks to explore not only the role of print culture and geopolitics in the creation of global epistemological authority, but also the importance of marketing and self-fashioning.

8The essays in The Invention of Humboldt develop different aspects of these five separate insights. They are all ignored by Sagredo Baeza and Puig Samper. Alberto Gómez Gutierrez, for example, does not simply show that José de Caldas co-invented the mapping of biogeography, as the reviewers suggest. Gómez Gutierrez argues that Caldas developed an entirely different system of mapping plant populations, far vaster in scale and empirical accuracy, using the Imbabura rather than the Chimborazo. Humboldt lived with Caldas for six months while the latter was developing his ideas. Humboldt also knew of Caldas’s public and biting critique of Humboldt’s Geography of Plants published in Bogota in 1809. Humboldt never cited or acknowledged Caldas. Caldas’s maps were scattered in the wake of Colombia’s wars of independence after Caldas was shot by a royalist army. His maps got misplaced in archives until a decade ago. Humboldt and fate kept Caldas silent.

9Neil Safier calls attention to Humboldt’s openly biased preference for La Condamine’s works on Quito Inca’s antiquities to the exclusion of even better parallel accounts by Antonio de Ulloa, a thing that is odd given that Kant created his theory of racial classification using primarily Ulloa’s ideas on race. In an empirical tour de force, José Antonio Amaya demonstrates that Humboldt and Bonpland used the writings and botanic images that Mutis gave them as a private gift when visiting Mutis’ home in Bogota in 1803 only to go out of their way to pass this knowledge as theirs in two separate publications, Plantes équinoxiales (1808, 1809) and Monographie des melastomacées (1816, 1823). Irina Podogorny shows that Bonpland flourished as an empresario of American plants by mislabeling and counterfeiting his way through American and European markets. José Enrique Covarrubias shows that Humboldt misrepresented Mexico’s political economy by leaving out alternative texts and statistical traditions available to him while in Mexico.

10Thurner’s and my own essay belong in the same line of analysis. Thurner explores Humboldt’s racial aesthetics. Using Kantian theories of race via skulls, neoclassical Winkelman’s aesthetics, landscapes, and architecture, Humboldt cast the Incas as foreign, civilizing Asians. His ideas were openly disparaged in Lima as the new citizens of Peru struggled to present the Inca as local, not superior racial outsiders. Peruvians were avoiding the rising tide of scientific racism that would ultimately target not only “Indians” but also mestizos as degenerate. My essay is about Humboldt’s intellectual biography of Columbus (also known as Critical History of the Geography of the New World and the Progress of Nautical Astronomy in the 15^th and 16^th Century, published in five volumes in Paris between 1836 and 1839) and how Humboldt drew on the scholarship and vast archives on Columbus produced by Juan Bautista Muñoz (the founder of the archive of the Indies) and Martín Fernández de Navarrete (the founder of Spain’s naval archive). Humboldt manufactured a late medieval-Renaissance Columbus, a hero that was to last two centuries, while ignoring the Spaniards’ very different readings of Columbus. Humboldt used Spain’s vast archival collections to create a scientific biography of himself through a Columbus alter ego.

11It should be clear then that the book is not about whether Humboldt acknowledged Spanish science, but how and why he did it. The vast historiography on Humboldt has not tackled this question. The book in fact originated in the wake of the publication of Andrea Wulf’s blockbuster biography of Humboldt, The Invention of Nature (2015). Wulf does something that contemporaries of Humboldt and Humboldt himself often did, namely, transform the New World into a background for Humboldt intellectual and heroic exploits. She deals extensively with Bolivar as a man who learned revolution from Humboldt to understand Spain as a cruel empire of ecological and human destruction. But Wulf has no interest whatsoever in, say, Caldas as an original thinker from whom Humboldt might have learned a thing or two. In Wulf’s mind, the Spanish New World is there to offer Humboldt dizzying mountain heights, harrowing scenes of cruelty and slavery, and noticeable patterns of human-induced climate change that the hero then transforms into sciences of biodistribution, political economies of freedom, and global theories of earth ecology. The title of our book, The Invention of Humboldt, is therefore a deliberate mockery of this type of colonialist simplification. None of this made it into Sagredo Baeza’s and Puig-Samper’s reviews. Their simplified misreadings have turned our edited collection into a useless cartoon.