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Paper short abstract:

I explore the domination-based theory of natural and societal history of the early modern Spanish historian Jerónimo Román y Zamora. I argue that his historical typology is influenced by a misunderstanding of non-Western forms of interacting and relating with the environment.

Paper long abstract:

The early modern period saw the emergence of novel intellectual manners for Iberian historians intended to integrate the histories of human societies and their immediate natural environments, especially as European societies commenced to interact with the Americas. However, most scholarship on the early modern Iberian intellectual treatment of this relationship has often solely focused on the works of few scholars like Bartolomé De las Casas and has ignored other original contemporaneous scholars and the relationships between said scholars and other non-Western forms of knowledge which began to permeate the Iberian intellectual world. In this paper, I analyze one such scholar’s conceptualization of the relationship between the natural environment and human development by focusing on the early modern work Repúblicas del Mundo written by the Spanish historian Jerónimo Román y Zamora. I highlight that Román’s discussion on the relationship between the natural environment and the development of human societies implies a direct correlation between the domination of nature by men and the overall moral and civilizational advancement of a society. Furthermore, I how this domination-based historical typology is constituted by misunderstood non-Western manners of relating with the environment consumed by the Iberian intellectual world during its encounter with Indigenous societies in the Americas. I conclude by underscoring how early modern European historical intellectual frameworks of conceptualizing the relationship between the natural environment and human societies, some of which continue to echo in today’s world, were created as a result of the intermingling of Western and non-Western environmental views during early modernity.