Wandering books in the global Enlightenment: The life of an eighteenth-century library that crisscrossed the Atlantic

ABSTRACT

This study examines the “life” of an eighteenth-century private library that migrated from Spain to New Spain in 1765 and returned, greatly reduced, back to Europe in 1772. The collection’s owner was José de Gálvez (1720–1787), a reformist Spanish statesman and recently appointed royal inspector of the Mexican viceroyalty. Standing at the crossroads of book history, the history of reading, and political history, this piece examines the library and its books from both a material and intellectual perspective. It relies on “Thing Theory,” a methodological approach that opens avenues for further research on human-object relations in the Atlantic world. Examining the interplay between the owner, his ideas, his biography, and his book collection, this study expands book history’s geographies and proposes a new narrative about the global dimensions of the Enlightenment.

KEYWORDS:

• Book history
• eighteenth-century private libraries
• José de Gálvez
• New Spain
• Thing Theory
• global Enlightenment

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the organizers and all participants in the international symposium, Charting the Future (Madrid, 2023), for the first round of valuable comments I received for this piece. From this group, Emily Berquist Soule and Rocio G. Davis’ enthusiasm for my work and words of encouragement proved invaluable. This study also benefited greatly from the insightful commentary of the anonymous reviewers and from detailed readings and suggestions by Zachary Brittsan, Olga Gonzalez-Silen, and Benjamin Szmodis. Finally, those who devoted hours of their time to help me create the Gálvez library catalog deserve my full recognition: Rachel Engl, Mariana Uribe, Casey Kies, Daniel Ramos Matos, and Rubén Lorenzo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A commodities approach dominates explorations of Atlantic human-object relations. For Spanish America, see Topik, Marichal, and Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine, and Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures; for the broader Atlantic world with an emphasis in luxury commodities, see Anderson, Mahogany, and Warsh, American Baroque. A new variation, also related to luxury objects but with an emphasis on gifts, is Araujo’s The Gift.

2 In this study, when I refer to books as “volumes,” I mean their physical manifestation, that is, an object made of bound pages protected by covers. I call books “titles” in their intellectual sense of being a specific work or written production. As such, one individual title could consist of several volumes. For example, Gálvez owned a political economy book named Le Detail de la France. Authored by Jansenist Pierre le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert, and published without the author’s name in 1707, this title had two volumes, that is, materially speaking, it was two books.

3 I accept the point suggested by Patrícia Martins Marcos in this volume that the use of term “Lusophone world,” and, in my case, the “Spanish world” perpetuates Euro-centric narratives.

4 I am thinking of Cristina Gómez Álvarez (cited here) and other scholars from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), especially those at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas. Pedro Rueda’s work at the Universidad de Barcelona and Irene Vallejo’s magnificent book-length essay, El infinito en un junco (2019), also belong in this conversation.

5 In 2011, Penry celebrated the historiographical appearance of book history in an American context. For more, see “Book History Comes West.” New developments in the field, including feminist and digital approaches, are typically framed in British and other European contexts, for example, Levy, “Do Women Have a Book History?” and Orr, “From Methods to Conclusions.”

6 There are even regional Enlightenments, as discussed in Mee and Wilkes, “Transpennine Enlightenment.”

7 For the discussion on nationalist Enlightenments vs. the Enlightenment in singular, see Edelstein, The Enlightenment. Edelstein dismisses views on Catholicism as problematic, noting that most of the French philosophes did not abandon Catholicism. Yet, he never mentions Spain or Spanish America among his examples. For strong defenses of the Enlightenment and the vibrancy of the eighteenth-century intellectual world in Spain and Spanish America, see Cañizares, How to Write the History; Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform; and Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial.

8 I am currently writing Gálvez’s biography, Minister, Madman, Mastermind. Another recent work is Castejón, Réformer l’empire espagnole. The classical book on the visita general is Priestley, José de Gálvez.

9 On the Bourbon Reforms see Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform, and Kuethe and Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World.

10 For example, John Lynch calls Gálvez “[a] bigot in the age of Enlightenment” in Bourbon Spain, 350.

11 Baird, “Introduction: Peregrine Things,” 1–16. For the historiography on the “rèvolution de la consomation (birth of a society of consumers),” see Meiss, La culture matérielle, 75–78.

12 Baird, “Introduction: Peregrine Things,” 12–13, and Blackwell, The Secret Life of Things. For narratives centered on animals as main characters in eighteenth-century Spain, see Bonilla Cerezo and Luján Atienza, “La Perromachia de Pisón,” 193–218.

13 Heidegger, “The Thing,” 165–186; Appadurai, The Social Life of Things; and Brown, “Thing Theory,” 1–22. For an exploration of the recent developments in this theory, see Antczak, Islands of Salt, 31–49. Baird and Ionescu’s Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory is an example of how this analytical lens is gaining ground in history, literature, and cultural studies.

14 While a “thing that ‘things’” sounds somewhat absurd in English, Heidegger capitalizes on the flexibility of the German language when he analyses a thing such as a jug. He writes: “Der Krug ist der Krug als ein Ding. Wie aber west das Ding? Das Ding dingt. Das Dingen versammelt. (The jug is the jug as a thing. But how does the thing presence? The thing things. Thinging gathers.)”; Heiddeger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (1936–1953), 175, and “The Thing,” 174. In German, there are nouns such as Verdinglichung (reification, objectification, making into a thing) or Entdinglichung (non-reification, to un-thing something). Thanks to Dorothea Fischer-Hornung for suggesting this interpretation.

15 Brown, “Thing Theory,” 3–4.

16 Antczak, Islands of Salt, 34–35.

17 For Gómez Álvarez, the book has a dual character as it is both a cultural object and a commodity; Navegar con libros, 20. See also Pettegree and der Weduwen, The Library, 9.

18 Merrian-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.

19 Robert Chartier found that having at least one printed book was within the reach of the popular classes since the sixteenth century; cited in Meiss, La culture matérielle, 270. Thus, we have the now famous sixteenth-century miller, Menocchio, who referenced at least eleven books in his Inquisition trial; Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. For the French servants, see Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette, 163. For the Indigenous elite, see Martínez Ávalos, Caciques metzcos.

20 Tracing its origins to the early seventeenth century in Troyes, France, the Bibliothèque bleue was a collection of books printed on cheap paper, bounded in small brochure-like volumes, with gray-blue paper covers. Most of the works, which were peddled door to door, pertained to chivalry, picaresque fiction, religion, cooking, and civility; Meiss, La culture matérielle, 56–57. Meiss also explains how the printing press lowered the costs of books and “stabilized” editions (269). On the privilege of owning a library, see Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment.

21 Antczak, Islands of Salt, 34, and Ian Hodder, Entanglement, cited in ibid., 36.

22 Pettegree and der Weduwen, The Library, 6–8.

23 For the first, brief study of the 1765 Gálvez library, see Rodas de Coss, introduction to México en el siglo XVIII, lxxi–lxxvii.

24 Zepeda Cortés, Minister, Madman, Mastermind.

25 Inventory of José de Gálvez’s wealth, credits, and jewelry, 20 April 1765, Archivo Histórico de Protocolos de Madrid, vol. 16179, fols. 62r–96v (hereafter “Inventory”).

26 Undated petition in “Inventory,” fol. 63 (my emphasis).

27 An incunable or incunabulum is a book printed before 1501. An Aldine is a book published by Aldus Manutius or his family in sixteenth-century Venice. Gálvez’s private library can be considered large, but some of his contemporaries, also state bureaucrats, owned larger personal book collections. Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes, Count of Campomanes (1723–1802), owned 4,995 volumes, but scholars speculate he had up to 6,000 at one point. Or consider Pablo de Olavide (1725–1803), a Peruvian functionary in Spain who, in 1768, received 2,400 volumes in a single shipment from France. An obscure functionary appointed governor of the provinces of Sonora and Sinaloa, Mateo Sastre, registered 109 cajones of books in Cadiz for his transatlantic trip (which would amount to a maximum of 4,800 volumes). In Soubeyroux, “La biblioteca de Campomanes;” Defourneaux, Pablo de Olavide, 42; and Gómez Álvarez, Navegar con libros, 39. I explain the concept of cajones and their size below.

28 The recently printed book was Fiesta con que el Exc.mo Sr. Marques de Ossun ... celebra el feliz matrimonio del Serenissimo Príncipe de Asturias don Carlos y la Serenissima Princesa de Parma doña Luisa (1765). Gálvez knew the Marqués de Ossun, the French ambassador in Madrid, very well.

29 Since I am not including multi-year editions and some texts with unknown printing dates, the numbers do not square in this instance.

30 Wilkinson, introduction to A Maturing Market, 2.

31 An example of one of the inventory’s entries is “Escobar. De ratiot.” In the modernized catalog it became: Francisco Muñoz de Escobar, De Ratiociniis Administratorvm, Et Compvtationibvs Variis Aliis, Tractatus praegnantissimus (1603), an influential seventeenth-century treatise on accounting. The misspelling of authors’ names is also quite common in the inventory, and at least ten items in the list resisted identification.

32 A study of Gálvez’s 1780s library is Solano, “Reformismo y cultura intelectual.” For the original document, see “Yndice de los Libros q.e contiene la Biblioteca del Excelentísimo Señor Don Josef de Gálvez y Gallardo,” prepared by Ramón de Oromí, 1781, Biblioteca Nacional de España, mss. 2262.

33 Gálvez and Campomanes were friends and ran parallel careers, first as attorneys at the Royal Councils and, for a few months in 1764–1765, working at the Council of Castile. Campomanes sent one of his books as a present to Benjamin Franklin; Campomanes to Franklin, 24 May 1787, American Philosophical Society, Benjamin Franklin Papers, Mss. B. F85, XXXV, 68.

34 Gómez Álvarez, Navegar con libros, 56. Contraband was also a surprisingly common way to acquire books.

35 Recognition of the power of the written word, respect for letrados (lawyers), and a strong juridical culture, even among the Indigenous population, are the signs of a literate culture in New Spain, according to Gonzalbo Aizpuru’s Historia de la educación, 341. Soriano has shown how the popular classes in eighteenth-century Venezuela created spaces for a “basic, improvised, austere education,” and these public spaces made literacy accessible for all, Tides of Revolution, 43–46.

36 Gómez Álvarez, Navegar con libros, 37.

37 The president of the Casa de Contratación of Cádiz acknowledged that he would do all that was necessary to place the visita team, including “their clothing and equipaje (luggage)” on the ships taking the new governor of Cuba to Havana; see Presidente de la Contratación to Julián de Arriaga (Minister of the Indies), Cadiz, 2 April 1765, Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI), Mexico, leg. 1245. According to Gómez Álvarez, book shippers paid two types of customs taxes for crossing the Atlantic: The “His Majesty” tax covered all merchandise and the volume of space it occupied on the ship. A separate Almirantazgo tax supplemented the income of the admiral. Had Gálvez been required to pay taxes in full for his books, he would have gone bankrupt. The tax for foreign editions, of which he had many, was twenty pesos per “media carga” (compared to two reales and eight maravedíes assessed for volumes printed in Spain); Gómez Álvarez, Navegar con libros, 19 and 19n13.

38 The Mexico City-Veracruz road was the most important in colonial Mexico as it connected the viceroyalty’s capital with its main port. The distance was 80 leagues (about 336 kilometers) and, in the late eighteenth century, required approximately 22 days to traverse it in good weather. The rainy season usually extended the journey to 31 days. Mules were the most common means to transport cargo. Gálvez’s books must have made the trip on the backs of these animals or in carts drawn by mules. For the road conditions, see Florescano, “El camino México-Veracruz.” Perhaps the trip overland was not as dramatic for Gálvez’s books as it was for the volumes of Simón Bolívar, who brought “a portable minilibrary” on his military campaigns during the South American wars of Independence; see Bushnell, introduction to El Libertador, xlvii. Another distinguished peripatetic book collection was the postmortem library of Erasmus; see Pettegree and der Weduwen, The Library, 99–100.

39 Gálvez to Arriaga, Mexico City, 8 April 1768, AGI, Mexico, leg. 1246.

40 Antczak, Islands of Salt, 36.

41 The large in-folio volumes were more common for university texts and required a lectern to be read, while the more portable formats, in-quarto and in-octavo, were for humanistic themes; Meiss, La culture matérielle, 269.

42 Gómez Álvarez, Navegar con libros, 92. 26 percent of the 4,995 volumes in the library of Campomanes were about law; see Soubeyroux, “La biblioteca de Campomanes,” 999.

43 Graham, Caetana Says No, xxi. Premo also makes this case in The Enlightenment on Trial.

44 Within the ten best-selling titles in Mexico during this period, Gómez Álvarez counted eight with religious topics. Only Hevia Bolaños’s Curia (number 6) and Cervantes’s Don Quixote (number 10) emphasized secular themes; Navegar con libros, 94.

45 For a study of Gálvez’s first tract, see Zepeda Cortés, Minister, Madman, Mastermind, and Navarro García, La política americana. My references to this treatise will come from its printed edition in Navarro García’s book (125–163, hereafter “Discurso”). Gálvez’s crowning achievement in terms of trade came later, in 1778, with the Reglamento de Comercio Libre, a Spanish Empire-wide liberalization of commerce.

46 In her analysis of the more than 2,000-volume private library of Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón (1737–1797), the appointed Bishop of Trujillo, Peru, Berquist Soule stresses the idea that books served as “practical guidebooks” to achieve the ends of functionaries; see The Bishop’s Utopia, 19–39.

47 On the alcabala reform in New Spain, see Priestley, José de Gálvez.

48 I have written elsewhere about Gálvez’s thought being sprinkled with eighteenth-century notions of classical republicanism (or civic humanism, as it is also known in literature); see Zepeda Cortés, Minister, Madman, Mastermind. For a practical induction to the civic humanist paradigm on the Anglo-American context, see Matthews, introduction to Virtue, Corruption, and Self-Interest, 13–54; for a more French-centric interpretation and references, see Edelstein, The Enlightenment, 55, and Verhaart, Classical Learning, 120–198. Edelstein points out that the term “classical republicanism” is deceiving, as it was not “classical” but “an early-modern reconstruction of ancient polities,” and it was not perforce “‘republican’ to the extent that it was compatible with monarchic rule” (55).

49 For Rollin, I rely heavily on Verhaart, Classical Learning. He mentions that Histoire romaine was a hit among French revolutionaries, too (183). Quintilian was one the four classical authors that accompanied Gálvez in his trip to Mexico. The others were Aesop, Julius Caesar, and Ptolemy. On the French philosophes’ dependence on consulting classical texts, see Edelstein, The Enlightenment, 43.

50 Warnick, “Chales Rollin’s Traité,” 48. Rollin’s Traité, together with Gálvez’s copy of Abbé de Vallemont’s Les élemens de l’histoire (1702) allowed him to reflect on the uses and methods of history – another intellectual preoccupation of his times; see Witschi-Bernz, “Main Trends in Historical-Method Literature,” 51–90.

51 Gómez Álvarez, Navegar con libros, 97 and 113. Soriano has detected similar trends in Caracas’s private libraries but with a more radical trend toward secularization in the later period. She has that books on religion fell from a dominant 53.6 percent of all books in the 1770s to 26.22 percent between 1800 and 1809; Soriano, Tides of Revolution, 33.

52 Meiss, La culture matérielle, 271. Meiss argues that in the quartier de la place Maubert, in 1770s Paris, 64 percent of the books in private libraries of more than 200 titles had a religious content (271).

53 Wade, The Intellectual Origins, 46.

54 Gómez Álvarez, Navegar con libros, 96.

55 Ahnert, The Moral Culture and Verhaart, Classical Learning, 180.

56 Juan Manuel Viniegra, “Sobre don José de Gálvez en 1774,” Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Estado, leg. 2845, n. 10 (hereafter cited as “Viniegra’s account”), fol. 79. On Gálvez’s mental illness, see Zepeda Cortés, Minister, Madman, Mastermind, and Bernabeu, “La venganza de Sancho Panza.”

57 As the Andean region was better represented in Galvéz’s Americana collection, it is possible that New Spain might not have been the original object of his personal interests or political ambitions in the Americas.

58 Other themes in “Discurso” that stayed with him and eventually became policies when his reformist career progressed were numerous, including: the creation of state-monopolies on certain strategic commodities; revisions in the current legislative American body – the Recopilación de Indias – and in the policies of appointment to Spanish American offices; the expansion of mining with changes in this sector’s exploitative labor practices; and, finally, the supremacy of the crown over the interests of the church in the Americas (what is known as regalism); Zepeda Cortés, Minister, Madman, Mastermind.

59 Gálvez to Viceroy Marqués de Cruillas, Xalapa, 13 November 1765, Huntington Library, Gálvez papers, box 1, 45.

60 Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform, 89–91.

61 García’s Origen edition owned by Gálvez had been prepared by González Barcia (see below); Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History, 158.

62 As Huddleston explains, García and the Jesuit, Acosta, offered competitive notions on the Amerindian origin’s theme, see Origins of the American Indians. Gálvez knew the work of Acosta; his Madrid library held a copy of De temporibus novissimus (1590), a book of sermons and the Apocalypse. He could also have read about Acosta’s arguments on the origins of Indigenous peoples by reading his copy of Torquemada’s Monarquía Indiana (mentioned below) which, according to Brading, “drew liberally” on Acosta’s Historia natural; see Brading, The First America, 278.

63 On López de Gomara’s influence and hagiographical style toward Cortés, see Restall, Seven Myths.

64 On González Barcia, see Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History, 155, and Brading, The First America, 382.

65 In his study of the library of Mexican nineteenth-century statesman Lucas Alamán, Van Young reminds us that “substantial overlap and duplication” of titles was a common feature in personal book collections; see A Life Together, 667–670.

66 Viniegra’s account, fols. 73v–74r; Brading, Merchants and Miners, 30.

67 The royal order is printed in Torre Revello, El libro, la imprenta y el periodismo, clxxxix–cxc.

68 On Boturini, see Brading, The First America, 381–386, and Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History, 133–155. Brading explains that Vico’s “age of men” was a time where humanity reached its greatest potential through learning, whereas Boturini’s last age was one of moral decline presided over by the Aztecs (384–385).

69 Zepeda Cortés, Minister, Madman, Mastermind.

70 Ibid.; Priestley, José de Gálvez, 6; Brading, The First America, 250–251; Álvarez de Toledo, Politics and Reform. In 1767, Spanish officials justified the expulsion case by citing the Society’s persecution of Palafox as an example of the subversive character of the order. Charles III promoted the canonization of Palafox in Rome and supported a lavish edition of his complete works.

71 Mornet, “Les enseignements des bibliothèques.” For praise of this work, see Herr, “Histoire Littéraire;” Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette, 162–165; and Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment, 23.

72 Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History, 198–199.

73 Gálvez chose not to pack his copy of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (1580). According to Wade, this work “exercised … a strong influence over three of the world’s great philosophers – Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal [… Providing] the foundations of their philosophies;” Wade, The Intellectual Origins, 94–95.

74 Ibid., 46.

75 The Inquisition added Locke’s Essay to its Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1734–1737, therefore, Gálvez had to apply for a license to read it.

76 Edelstein, The Enlightenment, 57–58. This author makes the point that the French philosophes sometimes used natural law to defend absolutism.

77 Wade, The Intellectual Origins, 278.

78 Edelstein, The Enlightenment, 53–54.

79 Wade, The Intellectual Origins, 381–383.

80 Montesquieu had published his books under a pseudonym (Lettres) and anonymously (L’esprit). Doing so may have eased their transatlantic passage, as both books had been banned by the Inquisition in 1751 and 1762, respectively. In a 1949 study of sixteenth-century books transported from Spain to New Spain, however, Irving Leonard established that prohibited books circulated widely in Spanish America; see Gómez Álvarez, Navegando con libros, 20.

81 Cited in Brading, The First America, 468. Original in Montesquieu, L’espirit des loix, 2:80.

82 “I have often seen Gálvez, minister of the Indies, burst into violent passion at the rare mention of [Raynal]” – these are the words of French ambassador Bourgoing referring to Gálvez’s views on the Abbé Raynal’s best-seller, Histoire philosophique... des... deux Indes (1770), cited in Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History, 181. Raynal lashed out at the Spanish conquistadors, painting them as greedy, cruel, and ignorant, referring to Cortés as an “assassin covered in innocent blood.” Raynal also insulted Americans when he described Tenochtitlan as a “multitude of rustic huts” and the Spanish Americans as “immersed in vice” with “a stupid superstition” that deformed their character. Beyond Gálvez, Creole historians like Francisco Xavier Clavijero disliked Raynal; see Brading, The First America, 441–446 and 450–452.

83 Vardi, The Physiocrats.

84 Zepeda Cortés, Minister, Madman, Mastermind.

85 On regalism as an ideology see Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance and Reform. For Gálvez as a regalist, see Zepeda Cortés, Minister, Madman, Mastermind.

86 Arvizu y Galarraga, “El pensamiento regalista.” The crown had rights such as appointing ecclesiastical posts and bishops swore fidelity to the Spanish king.

87 Molas Ribalta, ed. Mayans y Jover, 39, and Tedesco, “Diezmo Indiano,” 121–127.

88 These three titles suffered church and state prohibitions at some point. In 1688, Frasso’s De Regio entered the Inquisition’s Index, but, conveniently, prohibition did not extend to Spain. The Church also prohibited Bargeton’s Ne repugate in 1751, just a year after its publication. In 1763, the Spanish crown decided that Manifesto should not be reprinted because Hontalba had included information from sensitive government reports; see Shackleton, Censure and Censorship; Delpiano, Church and Censorship, 67; and Torre Revello, “Prohibiciones y licencias,” 35–36.

89 The 1703 edition of Les admirables secrets had the following publishing house: “Chez le Dispensateur des Secrets.”

90 Gálvez may have briefly expanded his book collection by acquiring part of the library of Francisco Xavier de Gamboa, a Creole judge of the Mexico City Audiencia; Malagón-Barceló, “La obra escrita de Lorenzana,” 444n15.

91 Zepeda Cortés, Minister, Madman, Mastermind.

92 Petition of Gálvez to King, Madrid, 5 August 1772, AGI, Mexico, leg. 1246. As visitor-general, Gálvez’s enjoyed a salary of 12,000 pesos fuertes (the American silver peso). Even if the cost of living in the Americas was higher, the number was not too “moderate” if we compare it to the annual income (50,000 reales de vellón or of 2,500 pesos) he earned as member of the Council of the Indies in Madrid. His crushing 30,000-peso debt was in pesos fuertes; Zepeda Cortés, Minister, Madman, Mastermind.

93 Arriaga had been Visitor Gálvez’s boss and disliked him deeply. Ironically, Gálvez succeeded Arriaga in the office of Minister of the Indies. For “expenses,” Arriaga used the word “dispendio.” Dispendio translates as “waste” (excessive and unnecessary expenditures), but it could also mean “excessive use of resources,” which I think is what Arriaga meant. Arriaga to Croix, San Ildefonso, 18 August 1772, AGI, Mexico, leg. 1246.

94 Croix to Arriaga, Madrid, 21 August 1772, AGI, Mexico, leg. 1246.

95 Ibid.; Gálvez argued that he had had “pérdidas totales [total loss of property]” in New Spain; see Gálvez to Arriaga, Madrid, 5 August 1772, AGI, Mexico, leg. 1246.

96 In March 2023, in a private conversation with Gálvez expert Philippe Castejón, the scholar suggested that José Antonio de Areche, then fiscal (attorney) of both civil and criminal affairs of the Mexico City Audiencia, bought Gálvez’s books. If this happened, the sale of the library would not have been a case that permitted the broader circulation of ideas. Instead, the transaction would have represented “bibliophile endogamy,” as Areche and Gálvez shared similar professional and bureaucratic careers. In fact, colonial minister Gálvez appointed Areche as visitor-general of Peru in 1776.

97 Words borrowed from Antczak’s Islands of Salt, 34 and 36.

98 Rodas de Coss’s numbers are slightly lower: 37 returned titles and 5 repurchased; see his introduction to México en el siglo XVIII, lxx-lxxi.

99 Solano, “Reformismo y cultura intelectual.”

100 Beyond the Americas but also in the realm of literature, it is notable that Gálvez sold his copy of Don Quixote but repurchased three more editions, including one with illustrations produced in France. Interestingly, he did return with the complete works of Quevedo.

101 Yang, Performing China, 19–20 and 65–67, and Davis, “China, the Confucian ideal,” 538.

102 Confucius, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, 89.

103 Antoine François Prévost (1697–1763) had started the project by translating an original English travelogue collection edited by John Green (A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, 1745–1747) but the abbé purportedly reorganized it and then compiled more travel accounts, which led him to curate a total of fifteenth volumes. Another colleague succeeded the abbé to produce a twentieth and final volume, fatefully published in 1789.

104 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, “Histoire générale des voyages.” I am also relying on Albertan-Coppola, “Les images dans l’Histoire;” Eche, “Images of the Exotic;” and Wade, The Intellectual Origins, 361.

105 Cover of volume 1, Prévost, Histoire générale des voïages.

106 The demand for illustrated books grew in the eighteenth century, even though that implied a higher price tag; Eche, “Images of the Exotic,” 271–272.

107 On Clavijero and the Templo Mayor, see Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History, 237–240.

108 Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette, 162. His sentence was inspired by Mornet’s wording in “Les enseignements,” 452.

109 In her The Enlightenment on Trial, Premo extends these roots all the way down into the popular classes of Spain and Spanish America to include women, Indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans and their descendants.

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María Bárbara Zepeda Cortés

María Bárbara Zepeda Cortés (PhD. in History, UC San Diego) is an associate professor of History at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. Her research and teaching interests focus primarily on politics in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the eighteenth-century Iberian Atlantic world. She is the author of Cambios y adaptaciones del nacionalismo puertorriqueño (2015), a study of Puerto Rican nationalist movements from 1868 to 1952. She is currently working on her second book manuscript, Minister, Madman, Mastermind (forthcoming, Yale University Press): the biography of eighteenth-century Spanish statesman José de Gálvez (1720–1787). The Gálvez project has earned her prestigious awards including a Huntington Library long-term research fellowship (2016–2017) and an Institute for Advanced Study year-long membership (2023–2024). In 2024–2025 she will also be a long-term fellow at the John Carter Brown Library to work on a new project on the private libraries of eighteenth-century Spanish and Spanish American statesmen.