Botany in Transit. Local Knowledge, Scientific Authority, and Chilean Plants in the Hispanic World, 1773-1813

This dissertation explores the circulation of Chilean plants and related botanical knowledge across the Hispanic world, broadly conceived, between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By bringing into dialogue the Royal Botanical Expedition to Peru and Chile (1777-1788) and the Jesuit exile networks, it traces the movement of plants and their associated knowledge between imperial and diasporic contexts, from the Province of Chile to the Iberian and Italian Peninsulas. In doing so, it shows how different actors mobilised Chilean plants to advance competing projects of economic utility, therapeutic value, and scientific authority. Adopting perspectives from the history of science and knowledge and engaging with elements of global history, within the framework of plant humanities, the research combines the analysis of manuscript, printed, and material sources in Spanish, Italian, French, and Latin, from archives and botanical collections in Madrid, Seville, and Bologna. Colonial administrative records, natural history treatises, correspondence, periodicals, remittance lists, botanical garden catalogues, herbaria, and illustrations are read together to trace both the epistemic and material circulations of Chilean flora. Following paths from Madrid to Concepción and Bologna, the research identifies the utilitarian and economic criteria by which plants were assessed within a broader horizon of expectations and potential value. In this way, it opens a – necessarily mediated – window onto the contours of local and Indigenous plant knowledge in late colonial Chile. Finally, the thesis argues that the exiled Jesuit community in Bologna, and particularly the Creole naturalist Juan Ignacio Molina, played a crucial role in the introduction, reinterpretation, and circulation of Chilean plants and remedies in the Italian Peninsula during the early nineteenth century, through the exploration of specific cases such as arguenita (Calceolaria spp.), cachanlahuen (Centaurium cachanlahuen), and, above all, culén (Otholobium glandulosum). Across these contexts, different forms of first-hand experience — birthplace, direct observation, knowledge of Indigenous languages, memory, and bodily experimentation — were mobilised to claim scientific authority over Chilean nature. Thus, the dissertation portrays Hispanic Enlightenment botany as a composite and negotiated field, marked by competing perspectives, divergent methodologies, and epistemic conflicts produced at the intersection of metropolitan institutions and agents, Creole Jesuit tradition, and local and Indigenous knowledge and practices