The botanical discipline in the Enlightenment expeditions to southern South America in the second half of eighteenth century and its contributions to the Bourbon policies

Abstract

This paper proposes some ideas to explain the role the botanical discipline played in Hispanic Enlightenment expeditions and exploration travels during the second half of the Eighteenth century. The participation of this discipline was related to the development of reform policies inside the Spanish Empire. A major objective of these policies was to improve the exploitation of Hispanic natural resources. Botany offered some tools to discover and describe plants, to categorise them and to investigate their uses. At the same time, botany increased the general knowledge of the natural world. Therefore, this paper tries to show Spanish botanists’ reflections on their discipline and how these ideas guided botanical activities during the Enlightenment expeditions to southern South America.