706041

research-article2017
HOS0010.1177/0073275317706041History of ScienceCandiani

Special Issue: Iberian Science: Reflections and Studies HOS

History of Science
2017, Vol. 55(2) 234–252
Reframing knowledge in © The Author(s) 2017
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environmental expertise
of the Spanish Atlantic

Vera S Candiani
Princeton University, USA

Abstract
Promoting a better understanding of the phenomenon of colonization and its connection
with environmental knowledge and technology, this article proposes a reframing of
research agendas to take into account the municipal character of colonization in the
Hispanic realm and to ask new questions. Questions should address what human–
ecosystem relations, and the ways of knowing and techniques for transforming the
physical realm, can tell us about colonization itself; who the historical agents involved
were, and what these actors knew, learned, and did in their environments. Using the
Basin of Mexico’s drainage and the agency of commoners, this article proposes that
colonization depends on the massive deployment and generation of tacit knowledge
about how to harness matter, energy, and time for the reproduction of human societies;
the quotidian appropriation and reworking of autochthonous knowledge, techniques,
and technology by the colonizing groups; the collaboration of the local populations in
whom these are vested; and the agency of commoners with practical skills, environmental
knowledge, and technological savvy derived from and honed in the realm of material
production. In the Ibero-American realm, these agents were primarily commoners with
skills in agropastoral production and the building trades; race, ethnicity, language, and
gender were secondary conditions.

Keywords
Colonization, environmental expertise, environmental engineering, hydraulic
technology, land, water, soils, architecture and construction, cities, Habsburg rule,
settlement.

Corresponding author:
Vera S Candiani, Dept. of History, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Email: [email protected]
Candiani 235

A mar revuelto, ganancia de pescadores, the saying goes in Spanish: “it’s good fishing
in troubled waters.” Historians of the early modern Iberian Atlantic and in the developing
field of global history have churned up the historiographical waters, chopping and swim-
ming through obstacles that have stood in the way of a better understanding of historical
processes. Reconfiguring thinking across the fields it touches, bringing back a revitalized
economic, political, and social history and the longue durée, this scholarship is asking
new questions about two of the fundamental phenomena of the period: the emergence of
capitalism and the formation of nation-states and empires. Historians of science, mean-
while, have been doing their own reconfiguring to our understanding of the third funda-
mental early modern phenomenon: the revolution in knowledge and knowledge-making
that the emergence of experimental science and the reformulation of universal laws with
motion catalyzed. Collectively, I believe, we are ready to converge upon early modernity
and to go fishing in these waters to produce a comprehensive and integrated understand-
ing of this crucial period.
Or almost ready, since this understanding can only be complete if it also sweeps into
its fold the fourth fundamental phenomenon of the epoch: colonization. This is where
Ibero-Americanist scholarship comes in. We bring to the table excellence in the study of
colonization, which our polyglot economic, social, political, and cultural historians have
been unpacking for generations, shining light back onto the history of capitalism, nation-
states, and empires in the process. Ibero-Americanist scholarship also has a lot to say
about the revolution in knowledge. But to do so, as the articles in this special issue sug-
gest, it has had to struggle against a variety of misconceptions to even gain access to the
debate table. This effort has diverted its energy from creating more autonomous and less
reactive research questions and optics, as well as from engaging directly with coloniza-
tion. This article hopes to do exactly this, and in the process help promote a productive
synthesis of scholarships.
To begin, colonization is not the same as colonialism or imperialism. Colonization is
a transformation of socio-ecosystemic relationships in any given geography that happens
as a result of the intervention by alliances of social groups and classes that were previ-
ously alien to it. In the early modern period, these interventions and the resulting trans-
formations happened on both sides of the ocean and at the same time, their actors forming
empires and nation-states simultaneously. This makes transatlantic and so-called “inter-
nal” colonization creatures of the same dynamic and all-encompassing process of the
period. This definition contrasts with standard, imprecise understandings of colonization
as (a) the expansion of some ethnicities or nations (homogenized as “Spaniards,” “the
English,” and so on) over others (“the indigenous”) and their territories and (b) as coter-
minous with colonialism, understood as that commercial and state drive to control
resources and markets for profit. Colonization did not necessarily lead to an Atlantic
cleavage between “colonies” and “metropoles”; colonialism did. The latter did not pre-
vail in the Hispanic realm until the eighteenth century.1 The confusion between the two
has meant that despite the growing literature about the symbiosis between colonialism

1. Vera S. Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico

City (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014), ch.8.
236 History of Science 55(2)

and Hispanic and European imperial science, we actually know surprisingly little about
colonization itself: who exactly executed it, how did it look on the ground, and why? A
productive convergence of scholars and historians of science, technology, and the envi-
ronment, as well as those of capitalism and colonization, all with their respective tool-
boxes, could take on questions such as these and move forward (or back?) together
toward more integrated, big picture issues. It would also be taking a step toward an
epistemic and cognitive reconciliation of the “two cultures,” if you will.
For all this, we do not need to invent new tools. Repairing existing ones will do. The
utility of the Zilsel thesis comes to mind – that early modern academic thinkers essen-
tially learned the experimental method by observing the tinkerings of common yet
“superior” craftsmen.2 These insights have been developed for various locales, dynam-
ics, and groups of what one could call “organic” experts and craftsmen in the European
continent.3 Beyond Europe, Joseph Needham first used it advantageously to answer his
own big questions about why it was Europe and not China that incubated modern science
during early modernity, given that Chinese civilization had had the advantage in “apply-
ing human natural knowledge to practical human needs.”4 Needham’s great merit was to
have shot Zilsel’s insights out to the global sphere. These two movements have been
pursued recently, but for them to reach full fruition they will have to conceptually tran-
scend the confines of the Old World.
This means three things. It implies rescinding the anachronistic nation-state as the
unit of analysis, following the lead of comparative and global history. This alone could
be “paradigm-shifting,” as Pamela H. Smith put it.5 I agree with Lissa Roberts that the
concepts it has generated (“contact zones,” “transculturation,” “circulation”) are useful.6
But they are still too blunt for grappling with crucial differences among the phenomena
of contact, conquest, colonization, colonialism, and imperialism, and so cannot lead the
comparative and global moves to their fullest impact on how we understand knowledge-
making and usage. Instead, we must be precise about these differences, and neither stop
at crossing the oceans to the “peripheries” as topic, action, or site of studies, nor ignore
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lastly, as Karel Davids has pointed out, the

2. Edgar Zilsel, “The Origin of William Gilbert’s Scientific Method,” Journal of the History
of Ideas 2 (1941): 1–32 and “The Sociological Roots of Science,” American Journal of
Sociology 47 (1942): 544–62.
3. In, for instance, Karl Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance
Venice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Eric Ash, Power, Knowledge,
and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2004); William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and
Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Pamela O. Long,
Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity
to the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
4. Joseph Needham, “Science and Society in East and West,” in The Grand Titration: Science
and Society in East and West (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 190.
5. Pamela H. Smith, “Science on the Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern
Science,” Renaissance Quarterly 62 (2009): 345–75.
6. Lissa Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History: Local Exchanges and Networks of
Circulation,” Itinerario 33 (2009): 9–30.
Candiani 237

current scholarly shift to reconnect techne and science must also converge with how
scholars of the pivotal phenomena that shaped early modernity go about studying it, bor-
rowing from and lending to economic, social, and political historians.7 Given the explo-
sive colonization drives in that period, this means focusing first on an interrogation of
how knowledge worked within this phenomenon.
While my focus here is on colonization and knowledge in the Iberian Atlantic, these
conceptual moves are of course widely applicable. As this article will show, the connec-
tions between processes in the history of technology and science and in colonization
become visible when we put clearly defined social actors, work, and production in “soci-
omaterial environments” at the root of inquiry into both realms – and possibly only then.8
While here I will only explore the connection between colonization and the tinkerings of
common people with practical skills, the link with scientific inquiry and experimentation
is the logical next step.9

Conditions of colonization
Colonization happened everywhere on a necessarily physical, material basis, penetrating
deep into the fiber of everyday life. Telluric environmental knowledge was a crucial
component of physical colonization globally, but so was the sensitivity to it among the
plebeian migrants who became colonists. Who the human groups giving and taking were
and what their priorities were, as well as the relationship between providers and takers,
determine the logic by which knowledge was obtained and used, and what the syntheses
and outcomes looked like.
Spanish colonists did not aim at dislodging Amerindians from their territories and
appropriating their lands, for the simple reason that land without people on it, creating
value through work, was virtually worthless. Indeed, at the very beginning and before the
mid-sixteenth century when the crown stepped in to regulate the behavior of conquerors
and colonists, soldier–settlers and would-be encomenderos had little or no interest in
unpopulated and unsettled places, seeking to keep, not expel, what indigenes lived in
their jurisdictions. During the seventeenth century, indigenes continued to be valuable
assets to the Habsburg monarchy and colonists alike – as laborers, yes; as autonomous
peasant producers of primary goods, also; but, additionally, as sources of know-how in
sometimes intractable terrains and conditions. This is especially evident in places such as
the Basin of Mexico − densely populated by highly complex, pluriethnic populations
formerly subject to polities of different hierarchies and territorial claims. This would
change in the eighteenth century with the new dynasty. The Bourbons shifted away from
this appreciation of telluric (indigenous or creole) technical and scientific knowledge and
expertise. They sought to undo the semi-autonomous status of American possessions in
order to remake them as mere extractive and trade colonies. Then colonization gave way

7. Karel Davids, “Introduction. Bridging Concepts: Connecting and Globalizing History of

Science, History of Technology, and Economic History,” Isis 106 (2015): 835–9.
8. I am empathetic with Lissa Roberts’ proposals in “Producing (in) Europe and Asia, 1750–
1850,” Isis 106 (2015): 857–65.
9. See chapters 3 and 5–7 in Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land (note 1).
238 History of Science 55(2)

to colonialism, and to a marked preference for metropolitan experts and institutions. I

propose that colonization is impossible without four conditions: (1) the massive deploy-
ment and generation of tacit knowledge about how to harness matter, energy, and time
for the reproduction of human societies; (2) the mundane appropriation and reworking of
local knowledge, techniques, and technology by the colonizing groups; (3) the collabora-
tion of the populations in whom these are vested; and, therefore, (4) the agency of com-
moners with practical skills, environmental knowledge, and technological savvy derived
from and honed in the realm of material production. In the Ibero-American realm, a fifth
condition is that these commoners be subjects of the king − Christian and born or natural-
ized into the empire: race, ethnicity, language, and even gender were at best secondary in
this context. Here then is a framework within which to consider not just environmental
expertise and the engineering of landscape, but all areas where knowledge, knowing, and
intervention upon the physical world interacted among themselves and with coloniza-
tion, typically through work. Such connections are exemplified briefly where the areas
just referred to intersect − practical environmental and landscape shaping expertise − and
at the granular level of matter, energy, and time that underpins the everyday in the early
modern Basin of Mexico. But they would be equally visible in the Old World as well, had
we the space here to show how.

A municipal and plebeian framework

In the Ibero-American “empire of towns,” colonization began with the act of conquest or
founding of a city or town and with the constitution of its corporate government, the
cabildo or municipal council. This simultaneous launching and ordering of the material
and the institutional construction of settlement is one of the peculiarities that framed and
directed plebeian know-how about environments and how to harness them. The other is
royal patronage, which contrasts with most other models of European overseas coloniza-
tion during this epoch. When combined, they constitute the framework with and within
which scholars of early modern science, technology, and expertise might help to explain
colonization in the Iberian realm.
Since the beginning of transoceanic exploration until about the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, for the crown, the point of any enterprise was not solely about “gold” and “riches,”
but also about discovery, conquest, and peopling to expand (and then protect) the dynas-
ty’s patrimony consisting of lands and subjects. This was expressed in the royal contracts
(capitulaciones) signed with the captains and financiers of all such expeditions, which
would eventually become quite specific as to the number of towns, the number of
Spaniards to be settled in them, the criteria for choosing sites, and more.10 Once founded,
the newly christened civic entity became the key “instrument of colonization.”11
Such municipal colonization required two important things: assured natural resources
and the right settlers. Experience showed that, barring indigenous hostility, pirate attacks,

10. Francisco Domínguez Compañy, Política de poblamiento de España en América: la fundación

de ciudades (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios de Administración Local, 1984), pp.39–54.
11. Lyle N. McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the New World. 1492–1700 (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp.133–52.
Candiani 239

and natural catastrophes, the key to initial success was a combination of compact, urban
settlements, women, agriculture, and town commons. The crown assured access to land,
water, and biota for its settlers by the institution of mandatory and inalienable municipal
commons (ejidos and dehesas) for pasture and gathering for both Spanish and indige-
nous towns. For these institutions to be effective, expertise on the ground was key.
The ideal colonist was not necessarily a Spaniard; any subject of the king was a poten-
tial settler of new lands. This included Christianized indigenes and free blacks, as well as
people from the various kingdoms of Spain, and it is what explains the diffusion of
agropastoral technologies and other productive technologies from far and wide within the
empire. Municipalities became the mechanism for subjecting all populations and Spaniards
to orderly living, or vida en policía. In the indigenous realm (the república de indios), the
crown made villages, towns, and cities indistinctly into pueblos de indios endowed with
most of the privileges of Hispanic municipalities. Thus, the two main tools used to accul-
turate indigenes to Christian, orderly, monogamous, agricultural lives were the pueblos de
indios (among settled agricultural societies) and the producing missions (among semi-
sedentary cultures). Systematic urbanization and controlled emigration of Iberian men
and women with suitable social extraction and practical métiers would, it was hoped,
assure good and loyal behavior among Spaniards and their dependents. The priority for
the crown became stable urban-centered settlement, be it indigenous or Hispanic, as this
was the means best thought to assure its possession of the wealth of the Indies and the
multiplication of its kingdoms. This is what explains the noted ubiquity of the municipal-
ity as a Hispanic colonizing tool and what makes it the basic unit of the empire.
A Spanish town’s first function as a maker of proper subjects was to begin turning the
members of an expedition from soldiers into settlers. By far the largest contingent within
any expedition, the hueste or gente of would-be soldier–settlers were people who worked
with their hands − agriculturists, herders, horticulturists, property-less workers, artisans,
as well as a good number of landless peasants and urban lumpen elements.12 Unless they
died, assimilated into indigenous groups, or returned to Spain, these folks would gener-
ally become the primeros pobladores, or first settlers.13 It was these commoners, juridi-
cally tied to the territorial units of the towns, who did the hard work of beginning to
transform a foreign landscape into “the embryo of a province or transoceanic region of
the Spanish monarchy.”14 Thereafter, effective and permanent settlement of newly
acquired territories required plebeians with productive expertise − this was the kind of
colonist the crown preferred.
This makes municipality the essential institution on the ground and within it, agropas-
toralists and builders the essential actors in the transformation of landscapes and, as a
result, the primordial perceivers, holders, organizers, and developers of knowledge about

12. Francesco D’Espósito, “La hueste indiana en los protocolos notariales de Sevilla: las primeras
expediciones al Río de la Plata (1534–1552),” Temas Americanistas 29 (2012): 65–81.
13. Gabriel Guarda, “Tres reflexiones en torno a la fundación de la ciudad indiana,” in Francisco
de Solano (ed.) Estudios sobre la ciudad de iberoamericana (Madrid: CSIC, 1983), pp.89–106.
14. José Miranda, Las ideas y las instituciones políticas mexicanas (Mexico City: UNAM, 1978),
p.30; Richard Morse, “Introducción a la historia urbana de hispanoamérica,” in Solano,
Estudios, pp.9–54 (note 13).
240 History of Science 55(2)

the new environments encountered in the New World.15 During the period of Habsburg
rule, the value of both institution and actors for the monarchy was in their ability to mate-
rialize effective occupation, not in their “race.”
The corollary of this is that municipal sovereignty over its own terrain and the hinter-
land, the agency of skilled commoners of all sorts, and the dynastic change must perme-
ate our approach to knowledge if we are to better interrogate the relationship between
colonization and socio-ecosystemic change, and between colonization and scientific
knowledge and technological praxis. What mattered for the monarchy in this early period
was to be able to claim subjects and lands characterized by orderly, civilized, and
Christian life, and whether the human personnel achieving this were European or not was
relevant to other matters but not to the subjection of the territory to the dominion. So,
while important for some analytical aspects, demonyms, race, ethnicity, and even gender
cannot be the primordial analytical gateways for the physical dimensions of coloniza-
tion. Certainly not for technology and landscape engineering, where artifacts are often
tagged as “hybrid” or “mestizo,” while knowledge becomes “European” or “creole.”
Using such descriptors not only treats objects, processes, and people as products of ran-
dom genetic combinations, but also, by so swiftly categorizing it thus, also prematurely
forecloses on deeper understandings of the things in themselves and their relationships to
processes around them.
Instead, we ought to focus on asking: What can these human–ecosystem relations and
the ways of knowing and techniques for transforming the physical realm tell us about
colonization itself? Who were the historical agents involved, defined in terms other than
the simply demonymic or racial (“Spanish,” “indigenous,” and so on)? What and how
did these actors know, learn, and do in their environments?

Simple methods for simple questions

Addressing these questions does not require sophisticated new concepts or methodolo-
gies. To analyze what humans were up to in their environments during the formative
epoch of capitalism and cis- and transatlantic colonization, two concepts are particularly
useful − class and social reproduction, or the access human groups have to the means of
production in the context of their pursuit of their own household or lineage’s subsistence
and propagation of the group as a whole, from one generation to the next. Of all human
groups, agropastoralists (the class of peasants included) have the most direct relationship
with energy, matter, and time.
Each class and group has its peculiar mode of social reproduction − of securing its
own continuity. And all will try to replicate these modes across time and space not
because they are stubborn or retrograde, but because to deviate is to risk time-tested

15. This is not to counter the position of Romano and Van Damme on the role of the city as node
for lettered elite actors in the making of natural knowledge, but to contextualize and scale it
and them properly relative to their actual, specific weight in the necessarily material reali-
ties of colonization. See Antonella Romano and Stéphane Van Damme, “Science and World
Cities: Thinking Urban Knowledge and Science at Large (16th–18th century),” Itinerario 33
(2009): 79–95.
Candiani 241

cultural and cognitive capital for unproven methods. Agropastoralists are no different in
this regard, but what makes them historically distinct from all groups who no longer
enjoy this access or prefer not to use it directly, peasants and all agropastoralists use work
to extract the nourishment, shelter, and resources necessary for their reproduction as
households and groups directly from their environment. They do this independently of
the property regimes framing their access to land, water, biota, energy, and their own
time. All peasant groups ingest and expend energy directly from and upon the environ-
ments containing the calories and the nutrients necessary to life. Like any other group or
species, they tend to protect the materials and social basis of the practices and strategies
of survival and persistence that time proved to them to have been successful and efficient
from other groups vying for (a) the use of the same units of energy, matter, and time or
(b) the greater share of the product of work.
This is what in the Ibero-American realm governed the behavior upon the landscape
of conquerors and indigenous nobles, missionaries and crown officials, indigenous com-
moners, and soldier–settlers, all of it constrained and channeled through the municipal-
ity. It is what makes agropoastoralists and builders (Hispanic or indigenous) the prime
actors in the engineering of landscapes and in the generation and deployment of environ-
mental knowledge.
Not having at their disposal a comprehensive corpus of textually or iconographically
recorded and formalized knowledge about the early modern New World, in the early
days of colonization, all non-American settlers who did not have immediate control of
populations to supply them could only succeed by observation, imitation, and experi-
mentation. The first step was essentially the same method followed by Bernardino de
Sahagún and others to compile the Florentine and other codices: they resorted to inform-
ants.16 This behavior, I propose, continued well into the seventeenth century, especially
when colonists encountered novel conditions. But agropastoralists and builders were
special among settlers because their primary mode of knowing was not formalized textu-
ally or iconographically, but “tacit” − that is, knowledge that is embedded and transmit-
ted in the gestures and sequences of work, and in objects themselves, which we acquire
through observation, imitation, and communication with our fellow humans, much like
a young child apprehends what is to him a new world.17 While fairly common among
anthropologists who have real-time contact with their subjects, for historians observing
tacit knowledge in action is a more complicated proposition. It must be inferred from
action, process, and physical description captured in the material or documentary record,
much like scholars have done for those who transformed landscapes in places like Venice
and the Languedoc.18

16. None of the ethnographic works of early chroniclers circulated during the phase of
colonization.
17. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); Alison
Gopnik et al., The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind (New
York: Harper Perennial, 2001).
18. See Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea (note 3), and Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering:
Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009).
242 History of Science 55(2)

Prime movers and makers: agropastoralists

Knowing about food was key. In the literal first days of a settlement, the need for it and
for drinking water could be dire. Hispanic soldier–settlers could sustain themselves from
indigenous supplies or from victualing merchants in earlier coastal settlements, such as
Santo Domingo in the islands or Cartagena on the mainland. But this was not always
possible due to distance, excessive demand on merchants from too many outfits of dis-
covery and peopling, or the inability or unwillingness of indigenes to provide food. As in
Navidad and Isabela of Hispaniola, Santa María la Antigua of the Darién, or Santa María
del Buen Aire in the Río de la Plata, most cases of extinction of an urban settlement in
the first four decades of American exploration were due to hunger, weakness from insect-
borne disease, and depopulation (by death or abandonment of the site), created by one or
all of these impediments to the satisfaction of the basic needs of the colonists.19
After these nefarious experiences, the crown went from being favorably disposed
to the founding of commercially oriented, feitoria-style beachheads fed from the out-
side or demanding minimal sustenance from indigenes to realizing the need for all
settlements to be self-sustaining and durable. This shift was manifested in evolving
measures and policy statements intended to stabilize possession. The king’s 1573
Nuevas ordenanzas de descubrimiento, población y pacificación de las Indias summed
up this early shift in approach.20
The starting point for all food is soil and water. Soil is neither a pristine nor a passive
element, but something that, like other ecosystems, has been subjected to modification,
conservation, degradation, and formation (including the highly fertile dark earths of the
Amazon) by settled or semi-sedentary populations throughout the world, mainly for agri-
cultural purposes. This is what ethnopedology, a subspecialization within ethnoecology,
investigates. Practices in the Americas concentrate in arid and semi-arid regions, moun-
tain slopes, and lowland tropics and often predate the arrival of Europeans, and either they
or their consequences (such as abundant crop stores) were noted by expeditionaries and
colonists. They include runoff management (dammed or not) to channel sediment-heavy
seasonal waters onto agricultural soils, where they deposit their silt (Zuni and Hopi for
maize agriculture); floodplain deposition (Orinoco and Amazon basin peoples such as the
Kayapó); terracing with duripans and argillic materials (Andean and arid Mesoamerican
slopes); wetland raised beds (Basin of Mexico and among the Zenú of the Mompox,
Colombia), among a vast pluricultural repertoire of indigenous soil-forming and harness-
ing technologies.21

19. Laura María Iglesias Gómez, La Transferencia de tecnología agronómica de España a

América de 1492 a 1598 (Madrid: OEPM, 2000), p.74; Ricardo Piqueras Céspedes, “Episodios
de hambre urbana colonial: las hambrunas de La Isabela (1494), Santa María La Antigua del
Darién (1514) y Santa María del Buen Aire (1536),” Boletín americanista 48 (1998): 211–23.
20. See English translation in Axel I. Mundigo and Dora P. Crouch, “The City Planning Ordinances
of the Laws of the Indies Revisited,” The Town Planning Review 48 (1977): 247–68.
21. J.A. Sandor et al., “The Heritage of Soil Knowledge among the World’s Cultures,” in Benno
P. Warkentin (ed.) Footprints in the Soil: People and Ideas in Soil History (Amsterdam,
Boston: Elsevier, 2006), pp.43–84.
Candiani 243

All these cultures developed a corpus of soil knowledge passed on through practical
orality and at times through grapho-pictorial works. Among those who recorded their
soil science, the Nahua peoples of Mesoamerica, as most other complex Amerindian
civilizations, had highly detailed classifications for types of soils found in their domain
and their productive suitabilities, as documented in the Florentine Codex as well as the
works of Francisco Hernández (Historia Natural de la Nueva España, 1577) and Martín
de la Cruz (Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis, 1552), and of administrative com-
pilations such as the Matrículas de Tributos (indigenous tribute registries).22
Documenting whether and how Hispanic colonists tapped into this knowledge is dif-
ficult, mainly because few if any put pen to paper about their own practices. However,
the cartographic record issued from land surveys and grants, as well as reports by mag-
istrates for the questionnaires of the Relaciones Geográficas, and those of technicians
inspecting sites for public works, for example, reveal that among non-indigenes, the
indigenous categories and nomenclature for soils were used, sometimes in manners that
show familiarization with the substance and the depiction of preconquest knowledge and
recording traditions. Thus, while colonists might not notice, appropriate, and redeploy
into their own economies the entire corpus and practices of indigenes regarding soils, the
latter remained extant within the república de indios and as a result indirectly subsidized
the social reproduction of non-indigenes in the república de españoles. Chinampas, for
example, remained a purely indigenous form of local knowledge, but their produce sus-
tained indigenous as well as Hispanic populations in the Basin of Mexico and was a
reason why the desiccation of its lakes did not target those which sustained this form of
food production.

Builders in and of environments

Within the urban core of the Hispanic municipality, producers were often nucleated in
guilds. Of all the guild occupations, master builders played a key role, as it was they who
erected the central features of the material edifice of the colonizing cities. While most
plebeians built their own homes, workshops, and rural installations themselves, resulting
in the kinds of ‘organic’ vernacular architecture that James Deetz described for Anglo-
America,23 infrastructure such as aqueducts, drainages, public fountains, streets, bridges,
buildings (including the palaces of secular and religious authorities), and so on were the
domain of the licensed architect. With roles that were akin to those filled nowadays sepa-
rately by public health officials, planning commissions, and assessors, early modern
guild architects in the Americas championed the civilizing mission of the Renaissance
city in the hinterland: they investigated and shaped the material conditions for the urban
colonization of the New World.24

22. B.J. Williams, “Aztec Soil Knowledge,” in Warkentin, Footprints, pp.17–42.

23. James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (Garden
City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977).
24. The literature on master builders in the early modern Americas is ample. Salient works
for Mexico include Martha Fernández, Arquitectura y gobierno virreinal: los maestros
mayores de la ciudad de México, siglo XVII (Mexico City: UNAM, 1985); Joaquín Bérchez,
244 History of Science 55(2)

Master architects were instrumental in the management of the hinterland for the good of
the city, making them agents of colonization for their municipalities. They did this in a num-
ber of ways. Through surveying terrains to decide where to place dams, aqueducts, bridges,
and other structures, they gathered information about land, water, property, and production
relations. In building such structures, they effectively placed objects in the hinterland that
were designed to fulfill one or more of three functions: convey hinterland resources to the
city; deflect unwanted things away from it (water, people); or spatially organize or coordi-
nate the movement of goods, energy and people between city and country.
How did these men know how to perform such duties in American settings full of unfa-
miliar materials and seasonal availabilities? Treatises might be one source, and indeed in
important capitals the most prominent master architects did own such works. But while
treatises addressed some of the challenges facing founders of new cities, such as site choice,
layout, and how to ensure the means for the supply of a town’s subsistence by erecting
diverse mechanisms and structures for water extraction and carriage, it is not at all clear
that builders actually used these works as much more than stylistic guides.25 Likewise, the
oft-cited royal ordinances of 1573 came too late to function as much more than compila-
tions of the lessons from urban foundations that had already taken place and survived.26
If textual sources were not their main source for building technology, experiential
learning during many years of apprenticeship with an elder craftsman was. In the City of
Mexico, a mostly practical licensing guild exam culminated in apprenticeships.27 But
along the way and throughout his active career, a builder learned by observing physical
structures built by his predecessors. In New Spain, as in the Andean region, these ancients
happened to be indigenes whose major built works were destroyed during the conquest
and the subsequent recycling of materials for the Hispanic building boom. Nonetheless,
chroniclers did gather this information from indigenous informants, while Hispanic
maestros learned indigenous construction materials and processes from examining extant
pre-Hispanic construction and observing the Indian workers and artisans on their crews.28
In the Basin of Mexico, for instance, the Indian usage of tezontle, a light and porous
reddish rock abundant in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, was adopted by Hispanic
builders. Although not considered a noble stone by Europeans, maestros took note of its
pre-Hispanic use and how their indigenous workers treated it and promptly redeployed
the material into distinctly European shapes such as vaults and arches. In the City of
Mexico, tezontle began to appear more frequently in Hispanic construction after the
earthquake of 1542 demonstrated the risk of using denser and heavier stone on the clay
soils that covered much of the bottom of the basin. Architects learned to carve and place

Arquitectura Mexicana de los siglos XVII y XVIII (Mexico City: Azabache, 1992); and Carlos
Chanfón Olmos (ed.), Historia de la arquitectura y el urbanismo mexicanos (Mexico City:
UNAM, 1997).
25. Susan Verdi Weber, “The Secret Lives of Buildings in Colonial Quito,” Construction History
28 (2013): 21–46.
26. Jorge E. Hardoy, El modelo clásico de la ciudad colonial hispanoamericana (Buenos Aires:
Instituto Torcuato di Tella, 1968), p.40.
27. Bérchez, Arquitectura, pp.40–42 (note 24).
28. Weber, “Secret Lives” (note 25).
Candiani 245

tezontle to decrease the load of the monumental structures of civic and religious coloni-
zation that they built on the none-too-solid ground of the city, all without sacrificing
strength.29 In a lacustrine region where humidity crept up any porous material, it was just
as important that maestros learned to grind tezontle and mix it with lime, wax, or tar to
seal off foundations before building on them.30 Later, they combined these tezontle tech-
niques with other traditional earthwork constructions to reinforce and raise several of the
causeways linking urban centers throughout the lacustrine basin.31
As with tezontle, indigenous constructive know-how, on both a technical and an epis-
temological level, was key for mainly rural occupations.32 Equally crucial was the expe-
riential knowledge of other plebeians whose occupations engaged them directly with
physical landscapes − people who knew local soils, hydrologies, rock, vegetation, fauna,
microclimates, and so on. It is important to note that these forms of expertise were not
only vernacular, but also widespread among the ‘donor’ populations (indigenous or not),
as opposed to being the privileged domain of a few specialists. This made them useful
and ubiquitously available for artificers to synthesize into their métiers. This is nowhere
clearer than in the most complex and extensive environmental engineering project of the
early modern Americas, the desiccation of the Basin of Mexico, to which we will now
turn to illustrate all aspects of this article: municipal colonization and the attendant com-
moner knowledge of agropastoralists and builders.

Integrating commoner expertise under a municipal

umbrella in Mexico
Because the ‘Valley’ of Mexico is high up and lacking a natural drainage, by the time
Hernán Cortés defeated the Mexica in 1521 it had actually long been an enclosed basin of
interconnected lakes whose level rose during the rainy season and fell during the dry
months. For the plant and animal species that lived there, this seasonal flooding was not a
disaster, it was necessary to life itself. So too for the human animal that began settling here
some 11,000 years ago and eventually built powerful city-states along the shores of these
lakes and wetlands. In the fourteenth century, the Mexica gradually rose to hegemony
among peer lordships and built Tenochtitlan in the middle this enclosed system of lakes. In
the center was Lake Texcoco, lowest in elevation. North were Lake Zumpango at about six
meters above Lake Texcoco and Lake Xaltocan at about half that; south were Lakes Chalco
and Xochimilco, both hovering around three meters above the central lake. Runoff from
the surrounding mountains flowed into the lakes and remained there until it evaporated or
was absorbed by the soil. Both the lords of these cities and the commoners in the rural
districts engineered water management systems at every scale to achieve a combination of

29. Bérchez, Arquitectura, p.45 (note 24).

30. Chanfón Olmos, Historia, vol. II, p.271 (note 24).
31. Luis González Obregón, in Junta Directiva del Desagüe del Valle de Mexico, Memoria
histórica, técnica y administrativa de las obras del Desagüe del Valle de México, 1449–1900.
2 vols. (Mexico City: Tipografía de la Oficina Impresora de Estampillas, Palacio Nacional,
1902), vol. I, p.123.
32. For urban indigenous expertise in construction, see Weber, “Secret Lives” (note 25).
246 History of Science 55(2)

goals: maximize food production; segregate brackish waters from fresh ones; import fresh
water where necessary; and ensure communications for governance, movement of goods,
warfare, and diplomacy. Specialized state officials and engineers in the indigenous metro-
poles managed the movement and composition of water in the basin through their dam-
causeways, which served both to connect the major urban centers along the shores of the
lakes and inside the lakes to each other and to segregate one body of water from another
(especially the brackish from the fresh) and the web of smaller dams that radiated out from
Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco that were articulated to the larger structures.
The assumption that “water” and “land” were variable, multifunctional, and not clearly
distinguished from each other impregnated all these works. Indigenes allowed water to
submerge fields in the rainy season, used it to irrigate dry agriculture, encouraged it to
perform its functions in fertility-sustaining ecological processes, and harnessed it to make
the cities navigable. The entire Mexica realm, with its subject towns, was incomprehensi-
ble without its watery landscape. The marshy ecosystems this dynamic created were an
important element in the social reproduction of communities of commoners, which was
based on irrigated and wetland cultivation supplemented by hunting, fishing, and gathering
that counteracted the risk posed by the frequent and huge variations in bio-physical condi-
tions. Indigenous hydraulic devices deployed by the Mexica state or by commoner com-
munities were designed to accommodate or support these dynamics and uses of marshes
and lakes. These devices represented an extraordinary range, but it is important to note that
the know-how flowed from the bottom up, from those with the most immediate contact
with the means of sustenance. Communities of agroproducers were the basis for the vast
irrigation systems of networked canals, covering hectares of land. These communities also
sustained river diversions that opened up alluvial planes to cultivation and the various types
of chinampas that sprang up throughout the lacustrine system and its shores, as well as the
complementary organizational techniques to propagate and capture the bounty in the
marshes and the migratory fowl that descended upon them.
As in all agricultural societies throughout the world, then and now, this kind of engi-
neering required sophisticated knowledge about and techniques to harness not just the
different kinds of waters (flowing, torrential, lacustrine, spring, brackish in different
degrees, vegetated, sediment-bearing, clear, and so on), but also the different qualities of
earths and soils that interacted with them to greater or lesser degrees. Historians often
gloss over who actually possessed which aspects of this environmental knowledge by
sweeping it all into the general category of ‘indigenous’, but it is important to distinguish
between state engineers and agronomists − for lack of better terms − serving Tenochtitlan
or any of the other lordly polities in the basin (Texcoco, especially), and peasant ones.
This is because the collapse of the indigenous states in the face of the Spanish military
conquest removed only one element from the Amerindian environmental engineering
and knowledge landscape − the capacity of these states to command and deploy work
and resources for large-scale projects − even though, as with all realms of knowledge, the
subsequent depopulation by disease and dislocation would also affect the survival of
knowledge per se. But peasant and commoner knowledge survived nonetheless.
The most visible immediate structure that both the crown and its partners on the ground
colonized was the Mexica empire’s capital city, Tenochtitlán-Tlateloco, with its impressive
physical and organizational infrastructure. The hydraulic part of this infrastructure, made
from various meticulously assembled combinations of stone, rubble, earth, and
Candiani 247

plant materials, continued to function after the conquest as it had before, albeit gradually
deteriorating, such that by the mid-sixteenth century, changes in the usage of the soil, plow-
ing, and further deforestation on the surrounding slopes resulted in the silting of the lakes
with each rainy season’s runoff. This gradually reduced the storage capacity of the lakes
and made them overflow with increasing frequency onto what had become the Hispanic
City of Mexico. By 1555, when the first serious taste of muddy floodwaters shocked them
into paying closer attention to the inherited hydraulic infrastructure, Spanish colonists and
rulers alike had already mounted a reliable apparatus for rulership that allowed them to take
on the role earlier played by the Mexica state in engineering the environment. As urban
flooding frequency increased, this is exactly what the colonists did – mobilize the power of
the imperial state, as well as the municipal authority of the City of Mexico, to eliminate the
problem. They would not move their sumptuous imperial city and lose all its built wealth;
they chose instead to remove the water with a massive artificial drainage project targeting
the five lakes. Always having in their long view the ultimate desiccation of all but the
southernmost lakes, for the moment the social elites and city and imperial governmental
bodies in the viceregal capital settled for a more modest drainage design − the Real Desagüe
de Huehuetoca − that sought to deprive Lakes Mexico and Texcoco, the lowest lakes
around the city, of ‘excess’ or undesirable water.33 This is covered in my book, Dreaming
of Dry Land, where I explain more than you ever wanted to know about this project.
It was not the lakes per se, but the tendency of their water to seasonally flood the city,
that presented a problem for the Hispanic urban elites and the crown. As a result, their
conceptualization of the drainage project was simple and remained stable throughout the
colonial era: the sole purpose of the Desagüe was, for royal authorities and city notables
alike, the “security, conservation and perpetuity” of the imperial city.34 This meant that
they sought to protect the wealth (buildings, commercial inventory, and the sources of
rents and therefore income) and the infrastructure of rulership from flood damage. To
them, this translated into partial desiccation. But significant physical, financial, techno-
logical, social, juridical, and political constraints made desiccation too difficult to imple-
ment right away, and so authorities and notables compromised, settling for eliminating
flooding, as opposed to controlling or managing it. This overarching conceptualization,
as well as its short-term compromise, were firmly embedded on the ground thereafter by
the common men who worked on the project in the seventeenth century.

The Desagüe in a nutshell

The chief contributors of floodwater were the Cuautitlan River and the lakes formed in
its sub-basin, where runoff and seasonal rainwater collected (Lakes Zumpango, Xaltocan,

33. Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco, in the southern part of the basin, contributed large amounts
of spring water to the lake system as well, but this freshwater was crucial to the balance of
salinity in the lakes at the lowest elevations, Lakes Mexico and Lake Texcoco, while the
chinampas of this region provided most of the horticultural products consumed in the City of
Mexico.
34. Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México, Actas de cabildo sesiones ordinarias paleografia-
das, vol. 356 A, minutes of September 17, 1607.
248 History of Science 55(2)

and San Cristóbal), all in the northwest quadrant of the basin. The Cuautitlan River origi-
nally discharged toward the large lake that surrounded the city and thus became the pivot
around which the Desagüe turned. The central structures of the Desagüe consisted of a
trench or an unlined canal which channeled water from the Cuautitlan River stored in
Lake Zumpango, which in turn also collected runoff and excess from Lakes San Cristóbal
and Xaltocan, into a tunnel cutting under the encircling mountains; this tunnel trans-
ferred the water to the Tula River on the other side through an exit channel. Together, the
tunnel and channels completed in 1608 were more than 13 kilometers long. This entire
structure was supplemented with a massive 17–25 kilometer-long diversion dam for the
Cuautitlan River, which directed it away from the lowest lakes and toward this structure.
This structure was pivotal, for it was the only thing that stood between the torrentially
swollen river and the city during the rainy season.
The entire system operated as a flush toilet rather than a continual drain. During the
rainy season, the resident wardens of the Desagüe managed the dams and floodgates to
direct water in two directions: what water from the diverted Cuautitlan River could be
safely conveyed away into the Desagüe (canal and tunnel structure) went there; the rest
of it, as well as runoff water in the northwestern quadrant of the basin, was directed into
the chain of lakes formed by Lake Zumpango, Lake Xaltocan, and the newly created
Lake San Cristóbal. The water remained in these reservoirs over the following dry sea-
son. Then, just before the rainy season, the wardens opened the floodgates on Lake
Zumpango’s dam and flushed it, as well as parts of the other two lakes, if necessary, into
the Desagüe. This left the lakebeds ready to receive the new watery onslaught. The fun-
damental flushing functioning did not change until the nineteenth century, basically
because the overall conceptualization implemented by the Desagüe’s seventeenth-cen-
tury artificers remained stable even as the works accrued structures and devices to
improve its functioning and extend its reach.
Alternatively described as a marvel of either creole or Iberian engineering, this ulti-
mately unsuccessful but nonetheless spectacularly inventive, daring, complex, and dif-
ficult project in fact was neither groups’. What defines it is not the nationality or identity
of its technology or its technicians, but the process and logic by which these technicians
tapped into and redeployed all technical and environmental expertise available to them,
especially local agropastoral masteries (of both indigenous peasants and Hispanic culti-
vators) over waterflows, terrains, soils, and vegetation. Despite not being designed to
‘improve’ marshlands and terrains that in the English-speaking world might be consid-
ered ‘wastes’, the Desagüe did favor colonization of the countryside in two ways. First,
as intended, by projecting onto the countryside the priorities of the city, engineering its
Desagüe to end the effects of seasonal fluctuations in the relationship between water and
land, fixing what and where land and water were supposed to be, and draining away
much of the latter. This in itself was a projection of European urban priorities onto the
hinterland and hinterlakes that can only be described as colonization, but it does not
mean at all that urban elites used the Desagüe to colonize their rural and lacustrine envi-
rons by literally occupying them. Rather, their Desagüe allowed them to colonize by
subjecting to their needs and definitions the water, land, and life forms in the region:
lakes that communities managed and alternately used as productive marshy ecosystems
during the wet seasons and as agricultural land in the dry now became reservoirs regu-
lated for the needs of the city.
Candiani 249

Secondly, when these conditions combined − the fixing of definitions of water and
land, the banishment of flooding into the corner of the troublemakers, and the restric-
tions on use − they all militated against the ecological autonomy of the peasantry vis-
à-vis other classes in the countryside and the City of Mexico. They thereby
unintentionally militated in favor of the second form of colonization of the country-
side: the propagation into it of private relations of property and production. As long as
they remained fluid and in communal control, land, water, and the things that were
produced with them could not become distinct, quantifiable elements liable to taking
on an exchange value mobilized through the market. Selling or buying units of land-
water was not possible − one transacted over units of land or units of water. This was
reflected in the measuring systems imported by Europeans, which had no units of
“land-that-becomes-water” or of “water-that-evaporates-leaving-land.” Once divorced
from each other, land and water could become measurable inputs in the commercial
production of crops and goods. In other words, urban aristocrats and representatives of
the crown conceptualized, designed, and deployed their Desagüe onto the landscape
for the sole purpose of protecting built wealth and sources of income, rents. and taxes
in the capital, colonizing interactions among water, land, and people in the countryside
for their benefit in the city. But taking advantage of the Desagüe’s structures and rules,
indigenous and non-indigenous agropastoral entrepreneurs nonetheless colonized
social relations of property, production, and exchange. And all this despite the drain-
age’s failure as a device for flood-prevention in the city itself.
That the drainage existed at all, and was built successfully, was due to savvy com-
moners who were long-time denizens of the Basin of Mexico and had their eyes open
to local environmental knowledges in the city’s hinterland. At the inception of the
project and during its first century of existence, the knowledge about the hydrology,
hydraulic structures, vegetation, soils, locally manifested seasonal fluctuations, his-
tory of water, and land management in the subregion was locally held. The techni-
cians of the city knew this to be the case and were sensitized to the importance of this
knowledge by the mere fact of being long-term denizens of, and employed in, the
basin. It was these men, and not metropolitan experts, who pinpointed the location for
the works and the crucial role played in the entire project by the Cuautitlan River
diversion dam. A detailed look at this structure will have to suffice as an illustration
of the myriad ways in which residents, colonist artificers, and non-metropolitan engi-
neers commanded telluric, usually tacit knowledge for the benefit of their social bet-
ters in the imperial city.

Flows of environmental and materials expertise

The Cuautitlan River was a critical aspect of the Desagüe project: its diverted artificial
course fed into the Desagüe de Huehuetoca instead of pouring onto the City of Mexico.
It had also been critical to the pre-Hispanic rulers of Tenochtitlan. Around 1435, the
Colhua people under Aztec rule changed the course of the Cuautitlan with an earthworks
dam of stakes, grasses, and compacted soil, forcing it to drain into the western portion of
Lake Zumpango to the north. Ten thousand Indians had built this work over a period of
250 History of Science 55(2)

seven years.35 This great effort was justified by the desire of lords to both save the town
of Cuautitlan and increase the agricultural output of the area. During this pre-Hispanic
period, the town of Teoloyuca emerged as a key player in the region, partly because the
longest part of the Cuautitlan diversion earthworks lay in its lands. Apparently, in addi-
tion to the earthworks channeling the river, every year two thousand Teoloyucan Indians
also built another dam with ephemeral materials and techniques. This dam was placed in
the new course of the river during the dry season, when, lacking other sources of water,
the river’s reduced flow was forced into a system of four irrigation ditches fanning out
from the east margin of the river. When the rains arrived, the bulging river swept the dam
away and resumed its northward course.36 Long after the conquest, Teoloyuca still pos-
sessed such keen and season-specific knowledge not just about how to handle the river,
but also about the ideal sorts of earths and grasses to be used in the dams, where to find
them, how to extract and convey them, how to assemble the whole, and when in the year
to do this.
Spanish authorities in the city became aware of this background and local knowledge
as early as 1587. Just as importantly, they learned that among the indigenes this hydraulic
knowledge was not the private domain of a few trained experts but was collectively held,
while clearly Hispanic landholders in the region also knew about it. All of this informa-
tion helped Desagüe authorities decide to continue the Cuautitlan River diversion dam
with grass and earth throughout the entire colonial period, despite the hazardous imper-
manence of these materials. The option was rebuilding it with more durable materials.
Indeed, the Cuautitlan River diversion earthworks were actually in the process of conver-
sion to a stone and mortar structure shortly before 1623, and the designer of the Desagüe,
Enrico Martínez, recommended stonemasonry for the entire length of the dam. Yet from
then on, the Cuautitlan diversion remained an earthwork.37 Why so?
The evidence indicates that colonial authorities chose the less costly structure of
earth and grass mainly because local indigenous knowledge and forms of deployment
of labor made it viable and because adopting it also allowed them to transfer the cost of
labor, materials, and other aspects of the regular maintenance of the structure onto the
district’s Hispanic and Indian neighbors. Savings resulted both from not rebuilding the
dam in mortar and stone and from keeping the design familiar to Indian townships who
could then be compelled to maintain it at their own expense. The men who mediated this
ingenious adaptation of indigenous expertise for the benefit of a Hispanic project were

35. Teresa Rojas Rabiela, “Aspectos tecnológicos de las obras hidráulicas coloniales,” in Teresa
Rojas Rabiela, Rafael A. Strauss K., and José Lameiras (eds.), Nuevas noticias sobre las
obras hidráulicas prehispánicas y coloniales en el valle de México (Mexico City: SEP-INAH,
1974), pp.85–133.
36. A. Rafael and K. Strauss, “El area septentrional del Valle de México: problemas agrohidráu-
licos prehispánicos y coloniales,” in Rabiela et al., Nuevas noticias, pp.152–3 (note 36).
37. Enrico Martínez, Verdadera relación de la obra que se hacía para desaguar esta laguna de
México (1628), in Secretaría de Obras Públicas (ed.) Obras públicas en México. Documentos
para su historia Relaciones del Desagüe del Valle de México, Secretaría de Obras Públicas
Años de 1555–1823, Vol. 3 (Mexico City: 1976), pp.33–4.
Candiani 251

primarily master builders and people with agropastoral enterprises in the northwest
quadrant of the Mexican Basin. Men such as Juan Serrano, a master architect employed
in the Desagüe, who reported on both the indigenous techniques involved in the repair
of the albarrada, or dam, that kept the Cuautitlan in its artificial course toward the tun-
nel and canal, and the seasonal timing and rationale of the works. Serrano called for the
usage of live grasses in this earthen dam. The grasses, which he called by their native
name zacate, were to be extracted from the soggy ground during the rainy season so as
not to break off the roots, because these “little roots are able to grow and bind them-
selves, as they are still green and tender and stamping on them very moderately and
after two days under the sun they become as hard as a wall and with the humidity therein
the grasses sprout and the little roots become entangled.”38
While European builders were familiar with earthworks and the usage of sods, here
the key use of zacate as the bind is an example of re-elaboration of techniques from com-
moner indigenes – zacates are local species, tolerant to salinity and drought, also useful
for pasture. They rely on rhizome reproduction, with stems several meters long that
spread like a mat. In short, they are versatile plants whose specific uses would be most
familiar to a denizen of Mexico.

The end
This overall pattern of colonists and their institutions and know-how enjoying a fair
amount of autonomy from direct intervention by the crown is in fact characteristic of
Habsburg rule, for which long-term stability, and continuity of dominion, revenue, and
income security, were more important than short-term gains and “profitability.” The
Bourbons would change all that, especially from 1762 on, bolstering the power of the
monarchy vis-à-vis all other social sectors and turning the crown’s New World kingdoms
into true colonies through a variety of measures designed to rein in the autonomy of their
elites, recapture American wealth, and ensure markets for Spanish goods. Charles III,
Charles IV, and their ministers touched every aspect of the colonial order and the link
with Spain, from production to trade, administration to taxes, religion to science, urban-
ism to art − and of course, engineering, public works, and nature itself. Key agents of this
shift were military engineers and the new academies founded by the crown. In New
Spain, increasing numbers of metropolitan-trained royal military engineers arrived and
intervened in the Desagüe with proposals to rationalize the works, change its labor prac-
tices, and inject metropolitan expertise, values, and aims into the drainage. So too would
the mathematicians and academic architects of the Real Academia de San Carlos, which
began operating in the City of Mexico in 1786.
All to no avail. When it came to any proposal that threatened either the coerced char-
acter of the labor system or the shifting of a large part of the costs of Desagüe mainte-
nance onto indigenes and Hispanic rural enterprises, the enlightened metropolitan
reforms that sought instrumental and organizational technologies were met with a wall
of opposition and sabotage. Having been the artificers of colonization, neither the urban
elites nor their technicians were particularly willing to be dislodged by colonialism. In

38. Quoted in Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land, p.141 (note 1).

252 History of Science 55(2)

other words, eighteenth-century styled colonialism failed because colonization and the
knowledges it had mobilized had worked. The municipalities and the cultivators, breed-
ers, and builders within them had done their job well.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Author biography
Vera S Candiani, a native of Argentina and graduate of UC Berkeley, Vera S. Candiani teaches
early modern Latin America at Princeton University. Her first book, Dreaming of Dry Land:
Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,
2014), won the Conference for Latin American History’s Elinor Melville Prize for best book in
Latin American environmental history. Her current projects are comparative – one examines the
relationship among commons, peasants and colonization in the early modern French, English and
Spanish Americas; the other, wetland desiccation and enclosure in France, England and Mexico.