ABSTRACT
According to the construction of Spain that emerged in the eighteenth century, the Spanish people were governed by barbaric institutions, engaged in pagan religious practices, and subjected to bloody tyrants. Spain's possession of a vast global empire set it apart from the rest of Europe in a number of important ways, many of which are highlighted in the essays in this volume. The reason was that the British lacked the driving impetus to convert the indigenous population that motivated so much of the Spanish enterprise in America. Related to this, the Spaniards were the first to grapple with the demographic catastrophe that afflicted the Americas during the colonial period. This kind of empirical information gathering, codification, and utilitarianism was pivotal in the development of European science, because, as Harold Cook pointed out, natural history was the empirical science of the early modern period.
