In this abridged translation of his 2009 Imperium und Empirie, Arndt Brendecke makes his indispensable discussion of science and empire in the early modern Hispanic world available to readers of English. At the heart of this book are the efforts undertaken by Juan de Ovando, president of the Council of Indies from 1571 to 1575, to collect geographical, historical, demographic, legal, and economic information about Spain's overseas possessions in a sustained, systematic, and comprehensive manner. Ovando's project is often understood as an early example of the rationalization of knowledge by the emerging nation-state. Brendecke historicizes Ovando's project, deeply and meticulously, and in so doing disabuses us of any precipitous rush to judgement about its supposed modernity.

According to Brendecke, the challenge posed by distance to the art of governance was not primarily that it slowed communication, but that it introduced an irresolvable structural problem. In order to exercise justice, a ruler had to be well informed, but in order to be well informed of events that unfolded far away, he had to rely on intermediaries. Those intermediaries, however, often had interests of their own, which they attempted to advance through biased reporting, thereby manipulating rather than informing the king. Brendecke teases this dilemma out of a wealth of historical documentation, proving himself a master at identifying structural issues in the patterns presented by a mass of detail. In the first two chapters, he identifies the origins of the dilemma in the efforts of the medieval papacy to assert its authority over the Latin church and pinpoints the Inquisition and its practices of investigation and reporting as the attempted solution. It is this juridical history, and not some account of medieval philosophy or science, that provides the necessary background for Brendecke's argument about empire and empiricism in the Spanish empire.

When Brendecke turns to Spain in chapters 3 to 5, he crystallizes the dilemmas of governance at a distance into a lucid theoretical model, the “vigilant triangle.” According to this model, the king, the ultimate source of distributive justice, receives reports from his faraway subjects at the base of the triangle. Those subjects attempt to influence the king's decision-making by providing reports of local affairs, which include denunciations of the claims made by other subjects. In this way, the principle of protected denunciation pioneered by the Inquisition served to counteract the inherent bias of the reports, assuring that the king could learn the truth of what was happening far away and make informed decisions. But while this was the principle governing the system, the reality was quite different. Individual actors on the periphery could establish monopolies over the flow of information by placing themselves in gatekeeper positions or choosing to collude rather than compete with their fellow colonials. In this way, king and council remained blind to the truth, and effective power devolved to decision-makers on the periphery.

In chapters 6 through 8, Brendecke frames Ovando's project as an attempt to solve the epistemic dilemma of the metropolis. Ovando attempts to establish procedures that would cause local knowledge to flow to the center, where it could be stored, updated, and consulted in all sorts of decision-making. By this point, the project does not look like the radically modernizing effort of an emerging imperial state that many a scholar would like it to be, but like the desperate effort of a beleaguered metropolis to wrest power away from local authorities who had effectively monopolized it.

The final point is clear: Ovando understood the epistemic challenges of government at a distance, but the Spanish monarchy simply did not have the resources to meet the challenges. The effects of Ovando's reforms were at best performative. They insisted on the right of the king to know in order to rule, and required colonial subjects to inform, but never really managed to cure the king or his council of their effective blindness. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between knowledge production and governance in the early modern period.