Cuando América entró en la “disputa del Nuevo Mundo”: la escritura de la historia y la formación de las disciplinas a través del Atlántico (1770-1810)

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the plural practices of history writing taking shape in a broad space between Europe and America – spanning from Edinburgh to Mexico City or Princeton, and through the Pontifical States in Italy –, in a period of major changes: 1770s-1810s. It takes the “dispute on the New World” between the Presbyterian reverend William Robertson, one of the leading historians of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Mexican Jesuit Francis Javier Clavijero, exiled to Bologna, as case study. This debate is deeply entangled with the controversy about the “science of man” and the concurrent formation of anthropology, which counts, among its major American champions, the Presbyterian Principal of the University of New Jersey, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Benjamin Smith Barton, who studied Medicine in Edinburgh and then taught Natural History, Botany and Medicine at the College of Philadelphia. It is within such a transatlantic and trans-imperial interactions, negotiations and competitions that Clavijero’s History, as well as Smith’s and Barton’s essays, have to be placed.

Keywords

• history writing
• enlightenment
• “dispute on the New World”
• sciences of man
• transatlantic and trans-imperial interactions