To what extend the circulation of scientific knowledge was shaped by the European imperial geopolitics in the late-eighteenth century? Recruited to fulfill tasks increasingly considered essential to the very workings of imperial administrations, scientific practitioners of the time paradoxically seem to make use precisely of this encroachment in state apparatuses to secure some degree of autonomy for their nascent field. Thus, every material form of circulation of scientific information must be ultimately understood as an act of political consequences. Here we present these ideas through the analysis of two concrete scientific artifacts, which can exemplify the circulation of scientific information inside and across empires: two atlases, one terrestrial and one celestial (the latter being a version of Flamsteed’s famous atlas of 1729, by way of intermediate French editions), produced in Portugal at the turn of the nineteenth century. Discarding the simple assumption that such cartographic artifacts might have a “utilitarian” use to Portuguese imperial administration, we aim to insist on their political and communicative nature, grounded on their modes of participation in trans-imperial pathways of circulation of knowledge, people, practices, and models of scientific authority (entangling Britain, France, and the Americas in multiple time scales). We also highlight how the atlases contribute to the affirmation of new patriotic science in Portugal, and explore the markedly didactic vocation of both objects, which also stress the question of the recruitment and reproduction of a new kind of imperial elite.
¿Qué relación podemos establecer entre la geopolítica europea y la circulación del conocimiento científico a fines del siglo XVIII? Reclutados para cumplir con tareas cada vez más esenciales para el funcionamiento de las administraciones imperiales, paradójicamente, los científicos de la época parecen emplear su posición en los aparatos estatales para asegurar cierto grado de autonomía para su floreciente actividad. Por tanto, toda forma material de circulación de información científica debe entenderse como un acto de consecuencias políticas. Aquí presentamos estas ideas a través del análisis de dos artefactos que ejemplifican la circulación de información científica dentro y a través de imperios: dos atlas, uno terrestre y otro celeste (el último es una versión del famoso atlas de Flamsteed de 1729, recibido a través de ediciones en francés), producidos en Portugal a principios del siglo XIX. Descartando la simple suposición de que tales artefactos cartográficos podrían tener un uso “utilitario” para la administración imperial portuguesa, nuestro objetivo es insistir en su naturaleza política y comunicativa, basada en su participación en las vías trans-imperiales de circulación del conocimiento, las personas, las prácticas y los modelos de autoridad científica (vinculando Gran Bretaña, Francia y América en múltiples escalas de tiempo). También destacamos cómo los atlas contribuyen a la afirmación de la nueva ciencia patriótica en Portugal, y exploramos la vocación didáctica de ambos objetos, que también acentúan la cuestión del reclutamiento y reproducción de un nuevo tipo de élite imperial.
Issues of scientific communication have been attracting interest from historians. How do the artefacts materialize geopolitical issues through trans-imperial appropriation of scientific knowledge? Differently from seventeenth-century courtly patronage systems, with an ideal
At any rate, being a scientific practitioners and a clients of powerful patrons, servants of centralized states, or acting with self-orientation meant that they engage must be simultaneously understood as an act of sociopolitical communication. For the specific case of late-Enlightenment Portugal, we aim to explore this idea following two concrete scientific artifacts, which can testify to the extension and density of the circulation of scientific information, and how it entails a large-scale network of communication inside and across empires: two atlases, one terrestrial and one celestial, produced in Portugal against the backdrop of decades-long efforts to reform the economic and administrative bases of the empire in the era of Napoleonic Wars and constitutional projects.
The aim of this article is to figure the process of elaboration of two atlases -one celestial and one terrestrial- in the context of the reconfiguration of diplomatic alliances and intensification of flow of scientific information fostered by the Napoleonic wars, which ultimately led to the transfer of the Portuguese court in Rio de Janeiro in 1808 (
Incepted at the Arco do Cego, the celestial atlas was finally published under the imprint of the Royal Press in 1804. A few of the original engraved copperplates were among the materials dispatched to Rio de Janeiro in 1813 (
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An analysis of documents of the Arco do Cego and the Royal Press allowed us to identify which were the models for the two atlases, to figure out the bricolage practices involved in their production, and the ways their meanings were transformed by the editorial process. This in turn allows us to high light the nationalization of late-Enlightenment scientific culture, under the auspices of the Portuguese crown, which sponsored institutions such as the Lisbon Academy of Sciences (1779), the aforementioned Arco do Cego and Royal Press, the Royal Maritime, Military, and Geographical Society (an institution founded in 1798 in order to promote the revision and publishing of terrestrial and maritime maps and charts), the Royal Navy Observatory (1798), and the Mathematics Faculty at the University of Coimbra (1772), among others. Moreover, the same institutional complex connects the atlases to an overarching program of educational and economic reforms that were in course since the time of the Secretary of State, the Marquis of Pombal, who intended to breed a new professional elite responsible for the administration of the Portuguese empire (
By the turn of the nineteenth century, powerful Portuguese minister D. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho was the main political driving force behind all the initiatives mentioned in the previous paragraph. He was able to secure the unflinching support of the Prince Regent D. Joao and promoted the integration of the institutions by bringing all of them under his formal purview and enlisting their members in his own patronage clientele. For Coutinho, these institutions should also help to project an image of a learned and enlightened Portugal to foreign competitors. In the Statutes of the Royal Navy Observatory, for instance, he had it stated that the director of the Observatory must send reports not only to the Royal Maritime and Geographical Society, but also to other national and foreign scientific societies (
This institution was especially important for Coutinho’s project, modeled as it was on foreign institutions such as the Bureau des Longitudes, created in France in 1795, the Admiralty Hydrographic Service, created in Great Britain in the same year, and the Spanish Hydrographic Directorate, created in 1797 (
While analyzing the composition of the library of a number of these institutions, we could identify the authors and editions that may have served as models for the elaboration of the celestial and terrestrial atlases. The library of the Royal Navy Observatory in Lisbon, for example, had three copies of the celestial atlas of John Flamsteed, with their tables and explanations (
In the private library of D. Rodrigo Sousa Coutinho we also find a French edition of the atlas of Flamsteed, and terrestrial atlases of different nationalities that probably served as an example for the making of the Portuguese terrestrial atlas. Among the models that seem most evident to us, we can quote the atlas that accompanied the work of Abbé Raynal, as well as the indication of an “Atlas de Vaugondy” in the library that belonged to the Arco do Cego. Both can be seen at the library of the Academia dos Guarda Marinha, also (
But the history of the Portuguese reception/transformation of these objects is even more convoluted. The celestial atlas published in 1804, for instance, was an abridged translation (of texts and images) of a French atlas from 1795, edited by astronomers Jérôme Lalande and Pierre Méchain. This French book was, in turn, a revised edition of a former atlas from 1776, prepared by instrument maker Jean Fortin. And Fortin’s version was itself a revision of John Flamsteed’s 1729 posthumous magnum opus. Flamsteed’s atlas was based mainly in his painstaking catalogue of stars visible from London, although it already included a planisphere of the southern skies based on the observations his foe Edmund Halley had made in the island of St. Helena. It was intended as a monument to British astronomy and to the memory of Flamsteed himself, the first Astronomer Royal, both of which converged as it were in the Greenwich Observatory. The subsequent French editions made ever more use of southern observations, especially those originating from Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille’s global network of observers.
In French hands, the atlas became a wholly different object (also in its material presentation), gaining airs of a handbook of practical positional astronomy with an emphasis on the tools needed for multi-sited, widespread observational enterprises. Thus, the French versions testified to the sheer change of scale in the practice of astronomy that took place during the eighteenth century, all the while resolutely claiming a central role to France’s scientific institutions in the shaping of such large-scale projects.
In its turn, the ultimate sources of the charts that comprise the terrestrial atlas cannot be traced as straightforwardly as in the case of the celestial one (as a rule, celestial atlases have always been more “coherent” entities). By a careful historical-cartographic analysis of the charts, though, we show that the atlas is a bricolage of Portuguese reworking of mainly to French atlases produced in the eighteenth century with various purposes.
The terrestrial atlas reveals the self-representation of late-eighteenth century Portuguese territorial aspirations in a global scale, as well as part of the same imperial imagination that animated the production of the celestial counterpart. This is most strikingly evident in the way it depicts Africa and more specifically in the continent’s toponymics, which we study in detail in order to show how Portuguese interests and circuits of information were deployed in the maps, marking their distance from its foreign matrices even as communicating a form of patriotic design into transnational (and trans-imperial) modes of scientific practice.
Discarding the simple assumption that such cartographic artifacts might have any immediate practical utility for Portuguese imperial administration, we insist on their political and communicative nature, grounded on their modes of participation in trans-imperial pathways of circulation of knowledge, people, practices, and models of scientific authority. We also highlight how the atlases contribute to the affirmation of a form of “patriotic science” in Portugal, and explore the markedly propaedeutic vocation of both objects, which points to their being part of a larger (geo)political project committed to the recruitment and reproduction of a new administrative imperial elite (
Either in the case of the terrestrial atlas, or in its celestial counterpart, the intention of their makers was to revise models of astronomical and geographical knowledge disseminated by European atlases, especially in England and France, updating them with more accurate information and mathematical calculations, gathered by Portuguese engineers, mathematicians and astronomers. In other words, Portugal was jumping into a policy of extroversion and national affirmation of its own model of knowledge production.
Books, maps, and atlases are without a doubt among the fundamental cultural objects of the sciences (
The Enlightenment ideal of universality of the sciences, be it either “real” or “perceived,” has also acted powerfully to erase another fundamental scale for understanding the transits changing meanings of scientific objects: the scale of nations.
Once again, books, maps, and atlases appear as the alleged bearers of these gifts. They would just be translated or reproduced, passively adopted by new communities of readers. It is necessary to reiterate the obvious: despite their apparent continuity, they undergo deep transformations in their contents, forms, uses, and meanings. In the transits of scientific objects, particularly in the case of translations and appropriations, historical analysis must attend not to internal comparison between “original” and “version,” but to the new semantics of the objects themselves.
Let us consider, for instance, our celestial atlas. Successively published in London (1729 and 1753), Paris (1776 and 1795), and Lisbon (1804), Flamsteed’s
It is in this French incarnation that the book aroused the interest of the Portuguese cultural-editorial-cultural-political project represented by the Arco do Cego (although the publication only took place in 1804, through the Portuguese Royal Press, after the extinction of Casa do Arco do Cego). Once again, the object was adapted to another cultural and linguistic area, taking on new meanings and functions. Although the title page proudly indicates that it is an edition in which the French atlas is “correct, and augmented,” the fact is that there is no correction in the French astronomical data and part of the content is discarded -the parts that could be employed for the teaching of astronomy. If it was not any more the monument-book that it was in England, nor the technical manual and index of the vertiginous growth of French astronomy represented by the Parisian versions, what does the Portuguese edition stand for?
But one last transit, a final passage, was yet to come, as a consequence of the French invasion and the flight of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro. The
The terrestrial atlas was a project of one of the most remarkable cultural and political institutions of late-Enlightenment Portugal, the Royal Maritime, Military and Geographic Society for the Design, Engraving and Printing of Hydrographic, Geographic and Military Charts, established in 1798 on the initiative of the Minister of the Navy and Overseas, D. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho (
The Royal Maritime Military Society inaugurated a new attitude of the Portuguese crown regarding the restrictions on the dissemination of cartographic knowledge of its overseas conquests. Besides exerting strict control over the dissemination of geographical information in the form of maps, the Society had exclusive rights for the inspection and approval of maritime compasses, which should carry the identity of their manufacturers in order to avoid counterfeiting. Finally, the Society was to publish “the best and most accurate” astronomical tables and celestial charts.
According to the statutes, the geographical, military, and hydrographic charts prepared by members of the Royal Maritime Society, whether large or small, should always use the Portuguese meridian established by the Royal Navy Observatory in Lisbon. In line with the reorganization of Portuguese imperial geography accelerated by the Napoleonic expansion, which was met with projects for the establishment of manufactures on the coast of Malabar and the execution of an “old, useful and never executed project of the meeting of the two coasts of Africa.”
The production of the terrestrial atlas, circumstantially interrupted and never finished, conceived by the cartographers of the Royal Maritime Society and partially engraved at the Arco do Cego workshop, represented an important initiative in the age of constitutional revolutions and territorial reorganization of European empires. Differently from other atlases published in the beginning of the nineteenth century, sponsored by the Portuguese crown in 1814 (as was the case of the
What models may have served as starting points for the making of this atlas? How did the Royal Maritime Society appropriate the insurgent geography of the famous work of Abbé Raynal, made by the maritime hydrographer Rigobert Bonne.
The well-known Atlas of Robert Vaugondy was the main model for the Portuguese, but not exclusive. We have some interesting historical maps from the biblical times and the Roman period: “the first epochs of the world,” Roman Gaul, Ancient Judea… But, the great majority of the maps concern with up-to-date information, reflecting geopolitical knowledge of a world undergoing a rapid transfiguration after the French Revolution. France is represented according to the post-revolutionary model (32 departments) (
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Curiously, the map of Brazil is unfinished, and does not correspond to the entirety of Portuguese America. The incomplete map of Brazil, however, does not correspond to the cartographic knowledge, since at that time, the continental scale map of Brazil had already been made, although it was not accessible to a large majority of the public, but only for diplomats and military officials (
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It seems that the atlas intended to satisfy the expectations of that public due to the greater number of maps of Asia and Europe, which together account 31 from the 51 total. Here we have the numbers: Europe (21 charts), Asia and Middle East (10), Africa (6) and America (only 4).
How to identify the matrix that has being worked. Some maps suggest the use of Raynal/Bonne maps. The fragmentation of Portuguese sovereignty in America was very common for French maps of South America to depict the region of the Río de la Plata and the Amazon region as autonomous geopolitical units (Province of Paraguay and Country of the Amazons). In the map of Africa, the name of d’Anville is mentioned, also.
The lack of more maps of the Americas is intriguing, above all because at that time the Royal Maritime Society had presented to its fellows the most accurate map of Portuguese America to date, called
In fact, the atlas presents only 4 charts to represent the American continent as a whole. There is one map representing the South America north to the Paraguay River, stretching longitudinally from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts. The second one represented Paraguay, Chile, and Strait of Magellan. The third map was devoted to Central America, including the Caribbean, New Spain and New Mexico, again from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And finally, the fourth map, which bears no title, represents the United States and Canada and the strait of Bering. There is also an unfinished map that we can deduce should be dedicated to the Peruvian Coast: it consists of a mute map where we can only see the rivers and some indigenous houses.
But the lack of American maps, or even a Brazilian map, can be attributed to the incompleteness nature of this atlas, whose execution was probably interrupted by the death of the French engraver (André Dupuis) who served in the Royal Maritime Society and was also preparing the
The printing press made the Reverend John Flamsteed always distressed and apprehensive. Despite being nominated as Charles II’s “Astronomical Observer” in 1675, under the age of thirty, and almost immediately elected a member of the newly founded but already influential Royal Society of London, Flamsteed was basically a self-taught, Anglican cleric with strong Puritan tendencies, and a country man.
The king’s order to “rectify” and “perfect” the positions of the stars was an unquestionable absolute for Flamsteed. His catalog of star coordinates was never ready for printing. The possibility of making a mistake, even on the faintest star, terrified him. The documents show it abundantly. Deliver an incomplete catalog to the wolves of the booksellers’ corporation, risk the work of a lifetime to piracy always on the prowl, in London itself or abroad, suffer the threat of a distracted eye, a careless hand of a typographer changing patiently some of the thousands of numbers established, verified, certified -everything was unbearable. That Isaac Newton, then President of the Royal Society, and Edmund Halley confiscated their tables in 1712 and forcibly published a first edition of Flamsteed’s endless catalog, only confirmed his suspicion about the corruption of the scientific world and of booksellers. At his own expense, he bought the 300 copies he managed to find out of the 400 copies print run and burned them without remorse (the others had already been sent by the Royal Society to other European academies and courts, no doubt as a symbol of the power of British science). He recovered his notes and continued to hunt for stars until he died in 1719, while slowly entering into negotiations to finally publish the catalog, accompanied by a celestial atlas that would represent his brightest stars.
It was his widow Margaret and former assistants who finally gave Reverend Flamsteed’s life’s work to the print. First, in 1725, the catalog with almost 3,000 stellar positions, which he had already decided to call
The first London edition is, above all, a posthumous vindication of Flamsteed’s obsessive work against the usurpation of Newton and Halley.
To render the
In 1776, Flamsteed’s atlas became another object in France, in the hands of the manufacturer and dealer of scientific instruments Jean Nicolas Fortin. By that time, Fortin already had the privilege of “mechanical engineer of the King and the royal family, for the globes and spheres,”
Fortin’s 1776 edition strikes first by its reduced size: it is a portable book, less than one-third the size of the English 1729 and 1753 editions. Second, in Fortin’s hand the atlas became much more than a collection of star charts (re-engraved from the original, or made anew, especially in the case of the Southern hemisphere, using data from Lacaille’s global network of observers):
It was this 1795 French edition that arrived in Portugal in the late eighteenth century, in the milieu of Frei Veloso’s Arco do Cego press. Engaged in the translation and adaptation of foreign scientific material, Veloso commissioned the production of the Portuguese version of the celestial atlas to Francisco António Ciera (1763-1814), cartographer and chair of astronomy at the University of Coimbra, and Custódio Gomes Villas Boas (1771-1809), a military engineer, cartographer, and army officer. Both men were members of the Royal Maritime, Military, and Geographical Society, and had been involved in important mapmaking projects, such as the geodetic triangulation of Portugal. They were thus very well positioned to direct the production of the Portuguese version of the already successful French Flamsteed.
It is remarkable, though, that apart from a preface by Veloso eloquently praising the past contributions of the Portuguese to astronomy (and navigation), the edition, finally published by the Royal Press in 1804,
Note how it announces that the Portuguese editors, Ciera and Villas Boas, “revised and corrected” the French version.
Note that the map was simplified in the Portuguese edition, for example, it lost the identification of the constellation Unicorn.
But why would we have written “really” under quotations, as we have just done? Because the claim of the atlas having any kind of Portuguese contribution is by itself the Portuguese element that one must pay attention to, apart from the object itself. It is misleading to believe that Ciera and Villas Boas had to “revise,” “correct,” or in any way include “new” material in order for the Portuguese atlas to be Portuguese -it is precisely the claim that matters. In an age of imperial anxiety brought about by the sweeping transformations that had shaken Portugal in the second half of the eighteenth century, deepened as that anxiety was by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic threat, claiming that Flamsteed’s atlas, by way of the French (or, to be faithful to the Portuguese title, the atlas “assembled by Flamsteed, published by Fortin, corrected and enlarged by Lalande and Méchain”) was also Portuguese is the important point. It is this claim that amounts to an affirmation of Portugal’s integration in international and inter-imperial scientific circuits, and it would have been disingenuous to affirm that only in the case that Ciera and Villas Boas had made changes to the
Rivers of ink have already been used to write about the action of Portuguese enlightened reformism in the “cultural sphere.” In fact, it is undeniable that, since the middle of the eighteenth century, when the Marquis of Pombal’s ministry began, measures to boost the economy and political and administrative reconfiguration (including, particularly, the domestication of the high nobility, or even its substitution by cadres from other social groups) are taken alongside acute practical interventions in domains that rightly belong to the universe of representations, which is typical of culture: the foundation of the Royal College of Noblemen and several royal classes and academies, the great reform of the University of Coimbra, the restructuring of the book censorship system, among many other examples of actions openly aimed at promoting the “lights” in Portugal.
This paper explored the multi-layered story of the transformations that the atlas went through, examining the changes (or lack thereof) in cartographic content, its material characteristics, the nature of paratexts, and the stakes held in it by the Portuguese scientific and technical experts and politicians involved in its production and commercialization. By combining an analysis of the artefacts themselves, along with previous editions or possible models, with archival material pertaining to the whole editorial process undertaken in Portugal, we traced the meanings of the celestial and terrestrial atlases to different actors and institutions, pointing to what sort of (political) communicative acts they were performing. We also investigated the political underpinnings of the range of scales embodied in the objects and in their movements (from single observatory to multiple observers, from one language to another, from “monument” to handbook, from the British to the French to the Portuguese empires and their respective scientific institutions), as well as the distinct modes of engagement of the “national” with the “transnational” and global in a setting of imperial reform and crisis.
By way of conclusion, one of the points we wish to highlight is that the Atlantic revolutions, and later the Napoleonic expansion, enhanced processes of circulation and appropriation of scientific knowledge amongst cartographers, sometimes reinforcing strategic alliances, but also going beyond political boundaries. If the Napoleonic wars ended up facilitating the sharing and interchange of scientific knowledge, the confiscation of a large quantities of geographical information related to colonial administration and commercial interests was also a common practice. At the same time, the inter-imperial and transnational transit of cartographers became more intense. Therefore, our atlases seem to be a direct result of this context where scientific information flowed ever faster, in the context of geopolitical transformations.
For D. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, the European war was beneficial to Portugal and its vast domains: “The nation can fairly doubt whether an absolute peace would have been more advantageous than the war whose dire effects it does not feel, seeing only greater stability in its Government.”
This article is part of the research project REXPUBLICA “A Monarchical Res Publica. The Spanish Monarchy, A Polycentric Imperial Structure of Urban Republics” (PGC2018-095224-B-I00), financed by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness within the ERDF.
On the history and significance of the Arco do Cego press, see, among others,
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Luís André Dupuis’ activity worked as a geographer for Duke Charles de Lorraine (1712-1780), governor of the Austrian Netherlands from 1744 to 1780; and after he actuate as an engineer and engraver at the Hermitage, at the service of Empress Catherine II of Russia (1729-1796). He came from the Russian army to Portugal in 1794, through the intervention of Luís Pinto de Sousa, to replace António José Moreira (ca. 1751-ca. 1794) in the design chair of the Fortification Academy. He participated in several recording works across Europe; see for example Carte chorographique des Pays-Bas autrichiens dédiée à Leurs Majestés impériales et royales par le comte de Ferraris lieutenant-general de leurs armies: gravée par L.A. Dupuis geographe de S.A.R.le duc Charles Alexandre de Lorraine et de Bar en 1777; see also the maps from Europe in the late 18th century, by L. Aubert; Ph. Macquet and Dubisson; engraved by L. A. Dupuis and P. F. Tardieu, 1785 (from the António de Araújo de Azevedo Library), FBNRJ, Archive, Cartography, AT-018-02- 002.
As regards the global and imperial dimensions of Lacaille’s enterprise, see
For a critical history of the overwhelming emphasis put by historians of science on the
For penetrating insights on the nature of “scientific nationalism” and the “nationalization of science,” see the essays in
See, for instance, the edited collection by
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The maps drawn by Rigobert Bonne for Raynal’s
The most extensive study of Flamsteed’s life, with an abundance of transcribed manuscript sources, is
Reprints were issued in London in 1753 and 1781.
As can be seen on the titlepage of Jean Fortin (1776)
Fortin’s edition also included new visual information on the downsized original charts by Flamsteed, in the form of a few nebular objects that had been discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier.
Francisco António Ciera and Custódio Gomes Villas Boas (1804)