Land and Territory

This chapter explains that the arrival of lithography in the 1820s made it possible to illustrate printed matter with beautiful scenic engravings. It analyses the evocations of distinctive natural phenomena that constituted a rare element of continuity between the creole patriotism of the late eighteenth century and the post-independence debates about the future. It also discusses how utility and utopianism were enfolded into investigations of the biblical and secular paradise of American nature. The chapter cites how Bello's famous Ode to Tropical Agriculture summoned its audience to live out the freedom won by independence through working the soil, exhorting them not to let the prodigious bounty of tropical fruits lure them into sterile idleness. It mentions that the Argentine anthem mapped out the battlegrounds where liberty had been won, and the Chilean anthem celebrated the clarity of the sky, the tranquillity of the sea, and the majesty of the mountains.

Conclusion

This chapter draws several conclusions about the history of knowledge through a survey of landscapes of knowledge in Spanish America over the hundred years or so after independence. It discusses the recognition of knowledge that matters as much as the production or distribution in analysing outcomes of past and present struggles to extend access to knowledge. It also clarifies how certain ways of knowing are deemed worthy of being received as knowledge and who decides what counts as knowledge, even before it is subject to validation. The chapter emphasizes that a nation-state can be revealingly interpreted as a community of shared knowledge, providing a more flexible and more grounded analytical framework of an imagined community. It stresses that the knowledge order of a society will affect its capacity to achieve integration, constitutional legitimacy, and political participation.

Infrastructure

This chapter recounts the Latin American countries that welcomed foreign innovation and expertise for technically demanding infrastructure projects. It mentions how the American continent's first railways were built by Spanish American engineers under contract to the respective states, contrary to the common belief that British or US American companies always led the way. It also focuses on the visibility and intensity of public concern about the relationship between science and sovereignty in late nineteenth-century Latin America. The chapter reviews the overlooked history of resistance in Latin American countries on handing over infrastructure projects to private companies, especially if they were foreign owned. It disputes conceptions of the role of the state and provides further evidence for the argument that free-market liberals did not have their own way in nineteenth-century Latin America.

Public Libraries, Modern Nations

This chapter mentions the Liberators that took time out from their military campaigns to attend to the creation of major public libraries during the wars of independence between 1808 and 1826. It describes the libraries as one of the first institutions to be founded that were located close to the centre of political power in the cities. It also discusses individuals of varied political views that saw libraries as both symbol and source of universal enlightenment, noting General José de San Martín, who declared libraries to be more powerful than armies for protecting the embryonic political communities. The chapter refers to Simón Bolívar, who instigated a public library in Caracas in 1814 and intervened to ensure that Lima's library was restored in 1823 and 1824. It elaborates how libraries fulfilled a central role in social self definition as touchstones of what was meant by lo público and lo nacional.