Postcolonial Social Sciences of Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Spanish American intellectuals believed science could diagnose, treat, and excise an array of “colonial legacies” left in the wake of Spanish monarchical rule. Drawing on New Granada as a case in point, this chapter considers two revealing examples of how Spanish American contributions to emerging social sciences challenged prevailing European and North Atlantic ideas about race well before the late nineteenth century adoption and adaptation of eugenics. The first example emerges from an 1830s land-surveying catechism by noted New Granadan educator and publicist, Lorenzo María Lleras. The catechism sought to ensure equitable land surveys of indigenous communal land holding. The second example spotlights José María Samper’s mid-century invention of comparative political sociology. Spanish American intellectuals like Lleras and Samper ultimately believed that the deployment of sciences in society would produce a new “race” of democratic republicans.